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Unheard Voices of WANA

PragerU: The most persecuted population in the world are Christians

Prager U is correct.

SUBSCRIBERS: 0

Ok, jokes aside, this is a serious topic, I hope you watch till the end.

Last month CPGB-ML released this reactionary article, it’s been a common trend of their online presence and really stinks, but then I also remind myself I am in a left that is no longer respectful of these vulgar, outdated gestures, and the left of today truly is a very progressive bunch. We fight for the rights of gendered minorities, stand with people at the forefront of racial oppression, far outside simply the economic realms. They say that oppressions align, and when you look at the left of today, you really see that.

But as time goes on, there can be a tendency for our viewpoints to become clouded with a prevailing dogma.

This is a video about one of them.

This is West Asia [or “the Middle East”] and North Africa, a region collectively termed WANA or MENA, it is home to many different ethnicities that are not of Arab Origin. Some you know, some you don’t. Within here are numerous ethno-religious minorities. Assyrian Christians, Coptic Christians, Yazidis, Mandaeans, just to name a few.

2 years ago, Caabu did a study to find out the nature of racial profiling in the UK. Only 1% of respondents listed the Middle East as being linked with Christianity.

Image:https://i.imgur.com/JHYsKPj.png

Source:https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/racial-profiling-british-people-muslims-arabs-support-security-anti-terrorism-attacks-survey-caabu-a7966666.html

The on the ground reality is that millions of Christians live and breathe in the Crescent, it is after all the birthplace of the Yahweh religion.

Contrary to the very bland, pastiche Christianity that tends to fill the Western temples, Christianity in the WANA is distinctive in being very diverse. To the followers, the faith is particularly sacred and, in many times, a physical part of their identity, in a similar way to how Irish Catholicism in the north might be.

Images to use:

http://www.just-images.com/media/k2/items/cache/768cfd00cdf8b0455e0493699392583d_XL.jpg?t=-62169984000

There are maybe somewhere around 16 million Christians in West Asia, a number that has been gradually decreasing throughout the 20thcentury, and largely this is due to a considerable amount of persecution and repression, including genocide, and within all this, they have very little access to representation.

Source:https://harpers.org/archive/2018/12/the-vanishing-christians-in-iraq-syria-egypt/

Which to PragerU’s credit, they’re right, when we’re talking about religious minorities, Christians are one of the most highly persecuted. But I know that these people are being insincere here. Dennis and his entourage represent, or at least promote, is what could only be described as the white man’s Christianity, the collective Western tradition of Imperial, Crusading, Nation conquering religion of Manifest Destiny and Got Miht Us [what is this? Couldn’t find anything on google]. Malcolm X was not wrong when hecalled Christianity a white man’s religion - that was all he could see at the time. And all of these people’s religious conceptions would appear highly unorthodox if they were to ever go and visit these groups.

Yet how often is it that you see right-wing commentators and outlets picking up on Christian oppression in the global south to regurgitate their hatred and vitriol and encourage further discrimination against Muslims in the west [Show following tweets]:

https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/953302360637493248

https://twitter.com/KTHopkins/status/1058426287948218368

https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/993593881341059072

Just a quick search on Breitbart, and you’ll see how many times they’ve covered the plight of Assyrians and Copts alike [show screenshots]:

https://i.imgur.com/VM3DnAg.png

https://i.imgur.com/CMi3eyo.png

And when right-wingers do resort to the lowest of the low of arguments (whataboutism) in order to get their points across, the Left responds in a very appropriate and effective manner… (gurning)

“What about the crusades?”

I can’t be the only one thinking this…

There’s a contradiction here that we need to talk about.

On the one hand, we’re advocates of intersectionality and dynamics of oppression, looking out for the nuances of thought and removing ourselves from binary choices and assumptions. But on the other, we can’t help getting away from very Euro-centric conceptions of various topics. In other words, we do choose binaries here.

Christian = Oppressor

Muslim =  Victim

Many Western leftists tend to look at religion through this lens. They incorrectly view Christianity as a global oppressor, completely overlooking the many cases where this isn’t the case and thus ignoring many groups who are severely marginalized, particularly when it comes to some indigenous groups like Assyrians and Copts.

When discourse gets going, it picks up like a steamroller. And after a while, we forget about the fact that we’re just regurgitating a dogma.

For us, “Islamophobia is racism” might be fine to say, because we realize that in Western society, Islam is heavily racialized and so those that may “look Muslim” are also targeted. But often, expressing this to a WANA Christian can rightly come off as reductionist, especially when that’s the few times they’re given attention here in the West. Add this onto the fact that when WANA Christians want to speak up about their oppression, they’re often accused of being racist themselves, along with other accusations of bad faith.

how the criticism and mentioning of muslim persecution towards christians [?] is all seen as islamophobia = racism which to them is fine but to us its scrutiny - the wording of the first line

Just as Islam has largely been racialized in the west, the same formula applies to Muslim majority nations regarding how Christianity is viewed. When attacks are caused in the west by Islamists, Muslims in the area are rightly quite terrified and anxious about upcoming reprisals that might be made against them. We do not, however, see why an attack from a White Supremacist against Muslims would also result in a similar effect to Christians in the East. Even though Religion might not even be uttered in these atrocities, Anti-West rhetoric has been heating up over the last 70 years, and with it the false assumption that Christianity is intrinsically Western. The result has been the demonization of WANA Christians as 5thcolumns to western Imperialism.

The effects of the Left’s lack of vigour can be observed. quite harshly.

Assyrian Christians are one of those ethno religious minorities indigenous to the region and have faced over a century of persecution and genocide.

Many of us know about the Armenian genocide of 1915 by the Ottomans – which is still denied by Turkey today, and still not recognized in the UK and US . But what many of us don’t know is that at least 300,000 Assyrians were also victims, alongside the Armenians.

·         Images:https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/images/large/5ff06342-7a14-4ce6-89d2-c59a04deb676.jpg

A book that discusses the 1915 Assyrian genocide in detail is Year of the Swordby Joseph Yacoub:https://global.oup.com/academic/covers/pop-up/9780190633462

In 1933, in the village of Simele in Iraq, after waves of anti-Assyrian propaganda, the Iraqi Army slaughtered 6,000 Assyrians and decimated over 60 villages.

Image: https://i0.wp.com/www.nationalreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/simele-massacre-survivors.jpg?resize=789%2C460&ssl=1

Sources:

https://medium.com/@DeadmanMax/the-simele-massacre-in-iraq-a-legacy-of-trauma-and-british-neglect-ae21d96afe4d

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/simele-massacre-1933-assyrian-victims-still-seek-justice/

Both the atrocities of 1915 and the Simele Massacre in 1933 is what prompted Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to later coin the word ‘genocide’.

Image of Lemkin:https://www.ushmm.org/m/img/2453436-700x468.jpg

After the assassination of Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul al-Karim Qasim (KASIM) in 1963, the following decades saw the rise of Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party in Iraq, and what came with it was a new wave of violent anti-Communism. Many communists were killed and imprisoned, effectively culling the Iraqi Communist Party – of which a sizable percentage at the time were Assyrian.  In fact, the party’s first secretary was an Assyrian named Yusuf Salman Yusuf, who was found hung over a decade prior, on 14thFebruary 1949.

Image of Qasim:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abd_al-Karim_Qasim

Image of Yusuf:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusuf_Salman_Yusuf

Source:https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/alexander-a/2008/xx/iraqcp.html

With this, and general increasing repression towards their identity, thousands of Assyrians fled the country between the 60s and 70s.

The most recent mass exodus was from the Iraq War. In 2003, there were around 1.5 million Assyrian Christians in Iraq. That number is now less than 275,000. It was only five years ago [2014] that IS committed a genocide. Christian homes were marked with the Arabic letter “N” [show image] for Nazarene, to denote Christians, followers of Jesus of Nazareth.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/for-christians-symbol-of-mideast-oppression-becomes-source-of-solidarity/

The population of Assyrians is now between 2 - 4 million, with most of them in the diaspora. There are half a million across Europe, Australia and Canada, and around 400,000 in the US.

https://unpo.org/members/7859

The lack of vigour in the west to understand their plight and the plight of other minorities can be felt severely.

A large portion of the diaspora in the US were supportive of Donald Trump during the 2016 election, a politician who appears to be completely against their interests, the very group that would be the first on the pecking order of deportation. And in due course, that is what the reality has been for them, now after putting in their pledge to live and work, they are now thrown asunder and betrayed by whom they thought they could trust.

Yet just as the opportunity might arise for a show of solidarity, left wingers from across the spectrum were largely silent, and many liberals even said they deserved to get deported, effectively defending their genocide. Did anyone even think about asking their story?

[show initial tweet, and responses to it]

https://twitter.com/VivianHYee/status/882599546244747264

and the comments here:

[show article, then the comments]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/06/27/detroit-judge-halts-deportations-of-more-than-1400-iraqi-nationals-nationwide/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.46e259345883#comments

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/09/michigans-iraqi-chaldean-community-is-fighting-to-protect-dozens-of-people-from-deportation.html

We [western leftists and liberals] further egg on this anti-Christian backlash in the way we discuss these topics via previously mentioned binaries. For instance, take a look at the travel ban. Eventually, it hurt everyone in the region, regardless of its initial intent to target Muslims. Liberals, instead of taking on a general anti-xenophobic stance, instead increased anti-Christian sentiment by mocking the insertment of preferences towards Christians (which again, never materialized). Take a look at the way that John Oliver and Stephen Colbert discussed the travel ban, for example. And while trying to mock Republican politicians, Colbert inadvertently mocked Syriac patriarchs and made off-handed comments about them and their language.

“While his administrationhas reducedMuslim refugee arrivals 93 percent compared to the final months of the Obama administration, it has still slashed Christian refugees 64 percent. He has also cut Syrian Christian refugee arrivals by 94 percent and those from Iraq by 99 percent. He has admitted just 20 Syrian Christians in all of Fiscal Year 2018.”

Source:https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-has-cut-christian-refugees-64-muslim-refugees-93

Source 2:https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/08/13/trump-admits-only-23-christian-refugees-from-mideast-in-2018/#175295838dd7

The right has been the stickler when it comes to appropriating leftist talking points, as I’ve spoken about numerous times. The EU used to be a more conservative tradition, opposed by many factions of the left including Tony Benn, but after sections of the Right-Wing discourse took it by their shoulders all the left could seem to do was go “No, EU good” in response. The EU is an undemocratic monolithic entity that controls large hegemony over the continent. This is what the left has always been against, and how we seem to have been shuffled into the Pro-EU corner to own the Right is baffling, how dare we allow them to take charge of the narrative.

Many on twitter were stunned a while back with the revelation that Alt-right youtuber Braving Ruin, formerly EdgySphinx, was of Egyptian descent, in other words he’s not white, in a movement almost entirely made up of White Nationalists this seems like a baffling contradiction. It’s not.

He’s a Copt. Another Christian minority native to Egypt that have been increasingly targeted in recent years <quickly show various screenshots of articles from NPR and others about this to prove the point>.

In November 2018, seven Copts were killed by gunmen and 19 more were wounded. “All but one of those killed were members of the same family, according to a list of the victims’ names released by the Coptic Orthodox church, which said among the dead were a boy and a girl, age 15 and 12 respectively.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/03/egypt-attack-gunmen-kill-coptic-christians-bus-ambush

It was from Braving Ruin’s own testimony that we find what led him towards the right was very much so a conflict of his knowledge.

Because for all we try and ignore the issue, these groups are dying. There isn’t that convenient option for the displaced, vulnerable diaspora, coming to a place where they no longer fear being lynched. For them, when they arrive to see a Left whose only regurgitated knowledge has been Eurocentric, they gravitate towards the side that is saying “The Left hate Christianity”. While this might sound silly to you, these minorities don’t have that privilege. And when the right-wing are the only ones talking about their issues, with mostly silence or dismissal from the left, what more would you expect?

We’re not even presenting faux dramatizations of anger. We’re completely turning our back to their voices in favour of pleasing narratives.

One of those narratives that has sprung up in recent years been the conflict in Northern Syria.  There can be a good case made for Kurdish autonomy, and this is in part something that has galvanised support from Leftists in the West towards the issue. Yet it ignores that there are serious issues with the new governments and hegemonies that have taken root, going far beyond US funding.

You may have seen the images below of protests breaking out in Northern Syria against the school closures. (Show Images)

PYD authorities ordered the closure of Assyrian schools that refused to teach the DFNS-Rojava curriculum on August 7th, 2018. Members of the Assyrian security force, Sutoro, opened fire to disperse the crowds, but were overwhelmed. (Show Video)

https://www.assyrianpolicy.org/news/assyrians-in-syria-protest-pyd-s-closure-of-schools-in-qamishli

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOS5VKckUpA

Western leftists, rather than question the establishment, instead drew attention to the flags that they were holding. Those are Syrian government flags yes, but it does not mean they are fanatical supporters. In the essence of oppression, anti-Imperialism requires the use of certain representatives as a rallying cry, which is the very reason why Assad still has so much support.

https://www.assyrianpolicy.org/news/kurdish-self-administration-in-syria-release-assyrian-journalist-souleman-yusph

http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Christian-journalist,-betrayed-by-the-indifference-of-the-West-over-Syria-45312.html

Despite the oft claimed assertion of the progressive and inclusive constitution, we should know by now that on paper does not always mean in practice, actual reports from the ground level by Assyrians are skeptical to a high degree. The school protests have come after a series of attempts to impose an aggressive series of actions largely targeted at minority groups, including seizure and occupation of property, forced reparation payments, and all manner of targeting and assaults.

On paper, the MFS (Syriac Military Council) are allied with the PYD. But were you aware that the council is mostly made up of Arabs and Kurds, not Assyrians? And that the groups claimed to have been showcased as examples of Syriac-Kurdish unity are in fact on the fringes of Assyrian opinion?

In a similar situation, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq have forcibly removed mayors and are occupying Assyrian towns. Assyrians have protested consistently, to, again, little coverage or outrage on an international level.

Image:https://www.worldwatchmonitor.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Assyrians-outside-the-Kurdisch-Regional-Government-office-in-Stockholm-protest-against-the-removal-of-the-Assyrian-mayor-of-Alqosh-north-Iraq-e1501247282519.jpg

Source:

http://www.aina.org/reports/erasingassyrians.pdf

We can talk romantically about the Kurds. But why should their self-determination come at the expense of Assyrians?

As Westerners we have this privilege, we can pick what we like from the orient, but ignore the darker sides of the conflict. Anti-Imperialism is a no brainer, but there can be a tendency amongst some leftists to end up ignoring how imperialism often affects the most vulnerable – indigenous and minority groups. It’s not “too complicated” to talk about this. There’s also the case of generally just needing to listen women and minorities without an immediate assumption they all have an alternative, reactionary agenda. They do have a voice, big and small, and the least we could do is respect that in line with our standards.

And we may also want to even look at our standards in how we might engage with folks who have not regretted their participation in butchery vs the coverage of the Yazidis who who have faced a very recent genocide.

There was recent discussion surrounding a British ISIS bride who was extensively interviewed by a variety of Western outlets, portraying her as a victim. Yet she had no regrets for what she did to communities ISIS subjugated via violence. Western narcissism gave this ISIS bride more coverage than to victims of genocide like Yazidis, who recently protested outside the White House [show tweet]. Again, the only coverage given to them was except from far-right outlets [show breitbart article].

https://twitter.com/Free_Yezidi/status/1106623531939438597

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2019/03/19/trump-admin-yazidi-protest-outside-white-house-youre-not-forgotten/

I don’t make this video with the intention of bringing about more hatred towards Muslims, yet I can’t help but feel disheartened that this is even assumed. There arenuances we need to start to come to terms with, that will include understanding the different power and privilege dynamics outside of the West, and how that might affect the mindset of the diaspora. Some leftists say this is too complicated to discuss, but it never stopped you before.

You must be able to breach the topic of understanding both Western Islamophobia, and Islamism in the Middle East, without caving into a Western reactionary narrative or allowing right-wingers to continue to fill up the void in these discussions, which they already have done so quite successfully.

So, it’s time we as leftists take back these narratives and rectify our ignorance on the situation instead of continuing to allow the right-wing to dominate this. It’s simply not right to ignore this problem because “conservatives already talk about it”, when we know their intentions are not for the betterment of all, especially when it comes to the oppressed. We cannot grow as a movement when we are pushing so many people away.

So how can we help? The first thing would be to remove Eurocentric understandings of race and religion from our mind, to realize how dynamics work in the global south. And as with everything else, keep up with what’s going on in the region, discuss these issues with your friends, family, comrades. Use your platform to raise awareness. Reach out to and listen to these people and don’t speak over them or use them as props for ideological or partisan fighting.

It may feel good to say, “Jesus was a brown Jewish socialist from the Middle East!” as a “gotcha” to the Conservatives, but we know they don’t really care about that, and more to the point what are you doing for the Christians of the region right now?

Organize with them, declare statements of solidarity, make this a part of your activism. Let them know you’re there for them when they need it. These are marginalized, oppressed people with real, pressing concerns, and deserve more than token appreciation.

The left has brought about, in recent times, a grand spectrum of inclusivity to more oppressed groups. If it wishes to continue this line, then we must start strengthening ourselves and asking the difficult questions. There need not be any slander of groups here. 1 can be split into 2, and we must break away from our Eurocentric understanding of global geo-politics in all aspects if we are to build ourselves and our credibility to the larger world.

Like I said, its never stopped you before.

[badmousestuff-blog]

CPGB-ML Bib

Primary (CPGB-ML) sources

May 2018

Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) [@CPGBML]. Twitter post. May 12, 2018.https://twitter.com/CPGBML/status/995333882781331456

First usage of the term "identity politics" in a tweet.

June 2018

Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) [@CPGBML]. Twitter post. June 4, 2018.https://twitter.com/CPGBML/status/1003674649241284615

Response to the Red Fightback article.

December 2018

Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). "Identity Politics Are Anti-Marxian and a Harmful Diversion from the Class Struggle." Motion passed at the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), Birmingham, England, September 2018. Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), December 7, 2018.https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/07/news/identity-politics-are-anti-marxian-and-a-harmful-diversion-from-the-class-struggle/

"Challenges Facing Communists in Britain Today." December 14, 2018.Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/14/news/challenges-facing-communists-britain-today/

See specifically the section "Identity Politics on the Rise."

MC. "Identity Politics v. Class Politics." December 17, 2018.Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist). https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/17/news/letter-identity-politics-v-class-politics/

March 2019

"The Reactionary Nighmare of 'Gender Fluidity'." Speech presented at the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), Birmingham, England, September 2018. Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), March 23, 2019.https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/03/23/news/the-reactionary-nightmare-of-gender-fluidity/

April 2019

"Why Gay Rights Is Not a Class Issue." Excerpt from speech presented at the 8th Congress of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), Birmingham, England, September 2018. Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), April 20, 2019.https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/04/20/news/why-gay-rights-is-not-a-class-issue/

[badmousestuff-blog]

M’s Report

Why should Leftists Reject CPGB-ML’s transphobia:

“Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”

This quote from the Manifesto demonstrates a trend that shows up time and again in Bourgeois society - the simplification and homogenization of social identities as a whole.  While communists primarily focus on the Class identities as described above, it would be foolish to avoid other identities.  Even Marx and Engels engaged in this, as Engels discussed the family and how it has changed over time.  Likewise in the Manifesto Marx says this:

“The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.”

Here Marx discusses how the bourgeoisie has centralized the state, considerably compared to old feudal Europe. The state itself has become simplified, as local provincial laws and systems of government are homogenized into one nation-state.

Just as bourgeoisie society homogenizes and simplifies class and the state, it can likewise be seen that bourgeoisie society homogenizes other areas of identity.  National Identity, Race, Gender, Sex, Ethnicity, and other identities are frequently scrubbed away into singular new identities, in order to categorize, control, influence, and antagonize the masses.  Just as the multitude of classes has been simplified into “Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”, other identities have been simplified.  

When national identities are simplified, it is called Cultural Homogenization, and ever since the French Revolution, Bourgeoisie nationalism has sought to eliminate the regional differences and diversity within the “nations” that nationalists claim to love so much.  Any deviation from the perceived norm or perceived national “culture” is punished, and cultural uniqueness from local religions, to language, and in some cases even cuisine, is homogenized.  Either destroyed or barely integrated, if tokenly, into the larger national culture. By homogenizing the national culture, the bourgeois gain a number of advantages.  First they build national solidarity, making it seem like there is a common national interest shared by the bourgeois and proletarians.  Second, it pits different nations against each other, this is partially a result of the previously described advantage. Proletarians are lead to believe that not only do they share a national interest with the bourgeoisie of their nation, but also that other nations are out to destroy their own nation.  By focusing the proletarians’ fear and hatred towards other nations, the bourgeois prevent the proletarians fear and hatred from being directed towards them.  Finally, by homogenizing and antagonizing groups that don’t fit into the perceived national identity or culture, the bourgeois create yet another group for the proletarians to direct their anger towards that is not the bourgeois.  While gender identity, sexuality, sex, and race can also be applied to the last category of “not fitting into perceived national identity”, the bourgeois frequently use these identities to create additional divides among the national proletariate.

One example of this is that under bourgoise society, sex has been equated to gender identity. This subsequently leads to the erasing intersex and transgender people.  In an attempt to categorize and simplify sex into a binary, and then subsequently equaiting one’s gender identity to their sex assigned at birth, bourgoise society has lead to the oppression of these nonconforming individuals.  When these individuals become impossible to classify or fit into their predetermined boxes, Bourgeois society demonizes them in an attempt to get them to conform. The bourgeois elites will convince the rest of the proletarians that these individuals are dangerous, weird, or abnormal, once again creating a new target and scapegoat for the proletarians’ outrage.  When these non conforming individuals fight back, and eventually win popular support and some rights however, the bourgeois only give token support.  The bourgeois attempt to once again assimilate, homogenize, and neuter the movement’s radical potential, while continuing to demonize the most radical or “different” members of the community.  The bourgeois will drape themselves in the colors of LGBT and show off wealthy, safe, and conforming members of the community, all the while ignoring or even continuing to demonize those that don’t fit into their “acceptable” minority. These patterns are seen in more than just the LGBT community however, and other minorities also face similar conditions.

There have been a number of Assigned Gender Non Conforming individuals throughout history.  However, the transgender and intersex identities were never formed until the height of Industrialization and Bourgoise society in the west.  In earlier times, it was often a lot easier to live as a gender non conforming individual, and many societies even included unique identities or a “third gender” for such individuals.  It is bourgeois society that seeks to destroy these unique identities in an attempt to maintain control over society.  These identities are less a modern creation by the bourgeoisie, and more a way to push back against the oppression caused by the Bourgeoisie.

The Bourgeois social project is not interested in diversity, it is interested in simplicity, control, and maintaining their power and wealth.  In short, all opression under bourgoise society is material.  By falling for their propaganda and bigotry by opposing not only Transgender individuals, but identity Politics wholesale; the CPGB-ML fails to recognize how the Bourgeois have maintained their control over society. It is not enough to say that “we are all proletarians” to build solidarity through that.  There are multiple identities that the bourgeoisie use to oppress others, and their concerns must be addressed by any party that believes themselves to be communist.  When a communist party cannot see how bourgeois homogenization, and oppression of minorities are all tied together into a greater picture that all materially benefits the bourgeois, reveal their true colors.  As of now, the CPGB-ML cannot recognize that it’s transphobia and rejection of idpol comes not from a marxist understanding and interpretation of history, society, and oppression, but instead comes from a bourgeois and liberal mindset.  If it continues down this material and ideological failing it will not only fail to become relevant, but it is likely that their ideology will continue to fester into something much worse.  Our job as communists must be to embrace and protect the diversity that bourgeois society so desperately wants to destroy.

(quotes from Communist Manifesto)

(some thoughts influenced by this article https://oxfordre.com/internationalstudies/abstract/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.001.0001/acrefore-9780190846626-e-139)

General Response/Thoughts/critiques on each of CPGB-ML’s articles:

While most of the articles aren't written super well (and I don’t have much room to complain about that, especially since a lot of their “articles” are just speech transcripts), and some do feel just super biter for no reason, the bigger issue comes down to what seems to be a sub par understanding of marxism.  They also frequently fall into the trap of class reductionism.

CPGB-ML’s Declaration of opposition to “Identity Politics”

●     Very little meat here, just a general declaration, however it should be noted that they fail to mention that they oppose discrimination on grounds of Gender Identity, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or other areas of potential discrimination.

●     Uses the right wing dog whistle of “LGBT Ideology”

●     Fails to distinguish Marxist Identity Politics from Liberal Identity Politics

Why gay rights is not a class issue

●     Fails to recognize the material benefit (and thus why LGBT issues are also class issues) the Ruling class gets from the oppression of LGBT individuals (as I tried to explain above)

●     Fails to show solidarity with LGBT individuals in their struggles and oppression, weekly says that “there is no need to persecute them”, as if that made the persecution under liberalism acceptable or at least not something to fight against

●     Again uses the right wing dog whistle of “LGBT Ideology”

●     Effectively claim that there is no persecution of LGBT individuals in the west today

●     Makes the absurd claim that “tomboys” or other Cis gender non conforming individuals are being pushed into being trans - another right wing dog whistle

●     Fails to recognize false consiousness and how Cis/Straight Working class individuals can be indocrinated into Bourgoise ideas and hatred of minorities by saying that this mindset “I’m sorry but a man’s a man and a woman’s a woman and you’re not going to be able to mess me around.” is one of the working class instead of being imposed on them by the bourgoise

●     This quote also equates gender to sex and is basically the CPGB-ML saying that they also equate gender to sex

●     Clear example “class reductionist” mindset, says that LGBT will benefit from the revolution but is unwilling to combat existing prejudice against LGBT individuals

●     “We can honestly say that under socialism there will be no ‘LGBT rights’ because everybody will have full rights; end of story.��� - more class reductionism

●     Article literally states that “Silencing debate doesn’t vanquish existing prejudice, it simply creates fresh hostility” yet the entire article is trying to silence voices from marginalized folks (primarily LGBT) outside of just class analysis

●     Uses rightwing talking point/dog whistle of “everyone you disagree with is a fascist”

●     Paints the image of a “man that looks 100% like a man, but “identifies” as a woman” - a common right wing stereotype and bigotted view of transgender women, and follows this image up with further “transwomen are a danger to young cis women” transphobic nonsense. - This is also a modern continuation of the “Gay people are dangerous to children” right wing homophobic argument

The reactionary nightmare of ‘gender fluidity’

●     Marx didn’t discuss gender and LGBT issues, not because they did not exist as an issue, but because LGBT issues were not mainstream at all, it really wasn't until the 1900s where these issues came to light as much in culture, and even then more on the fringes.  You can’t really blame Marx for not discussing an issue that basically was unknown at the time

●     Again equates sex with gender identity literally says that they are synonyms

●     Attacking academics in the united states, a common right wing tactic

●     Author effectively does the right wing “why won’t you debate me” move, despite basically denying the existence of trans people

●     The idea that trans people don’t exist, and that sex and the gender binary are the complete truth is more “idealistic” and denying material reality.  There are Intersex people after all, and countless cultures throughout history have had more genders than the traditional two.

●     Still fails to show solidarity with oppressed individuals along lines other than “race, sex, or sexual proclivity”

●     No one is saying that trans issues are more important than other issues

●     Saying you’re against unjust discrimination for all workers is not actually being inclusive, its ignoring other ways that bourgoise society oppress individuals

●     Speech jumps around everywhere, has no cohesion, and just ends by saying that “we are not transphobic” but completely fails to prove that point.  Meanwhile the article frequently erase or claims that trans people don’t exist or that its not an issue.

●     Ignoring identity politics, and not engaging in intersectional politics with other oppressed groups is more divisive than engaging in idpol.  This mindset actively turns away potential allies and comrades.

The only thing that unites us is class

●     Oh this is the article where the writer is complaining about not being denied a PhD

●     Look, I don't know how it works in Britain.  But here in the conservative state of Utah, in the already very conservative and right wing USA, I NEVER got any shit or poor grades for focusing on or using marxist and materialist theories.  I suspect that the author was just flat out wrong, poorly supported their thoughts, or just didn’t defend their thesis well. Seriously, I HIGHLY doubt that any academic institution would deny someone a PhD for the sole reason of looking at disability through a marxist/class lense.  Marxism has been and always will be an important academic lense for many parts of academia.  I suspect that the author is just bitter and unable to self critique their own work and understanding of class, and is looking for someone to blame.

●     Also goes on to full on claim that trans rights and the trans movement is bourgeois and idealistic which is just so very wrong as explored in earlier sections.

●     Claims that they don’t patronize, yet patronizes transgender individuals by saying that what we feel and know about ourselves are “bourgeois illusions”

●     Over all super trash article that I really didn’t bother to re-read because it just comes across as super bitter and petty

Challenges facing communists in Britain today

●     More strawmanning of Identity Politics (even liberal Idpol tbh) through ridiculous equations.  No one is saying that “feeling disabled” actually makes someone disabled, stop strawmanning.

●     Once again, says but fails to support the idea that Identity Politics divides the working class

●     It is also telling that the CPGB-ML supported the right wing Brexit Party in the most recent elections, purely because they are pro brexit.  This reeks of Red-Brown “beefsteak” coalitions.

Letter: Identity politics v class politics

●     “Real oppression is homelessness, hunger, destitution, war, poverty, police brutality, anti-trade-union laws, etc. While we talk about identities, are we seriously challenging this oppression?” - If you weren't so busy strawmanning identity politics, you would realize that most marginalized identities face a lot of these same problems, and that their identities frequently make it worse.  Working class people of color frequently fight america’s imperialist wars (in addition to very poor whites) as a way to escape their current conditions.  LGBT people are frequently more likely to experience homelessness because of an unsupportive family situation.  Etc. While capitalism certainly makes these issues WORSE, providing a trans woman who was kicked out of their house by an unsupportive family a place to live, DOESN’T fix the underlying issue of an unsupportive family and a society that is inherently hostile to them.  This is why Identity politics is important

●     Identity politics, and especially intersectional politics, doesn’t divide the working class.  As I've said before.  Ignoring the very real issues faced by people who are marginalized along lines beyond just class alienates them from your movement, and divides the working class. A working class movement that wants the support of the ENTIRE working class, and not just the most privileged, MUST engage in intersectionality and devote some time and energy into fighting the injustices beyond that of the most privileged working class.  As was stated in this article, the bourgeois attempts to divide the working class.  This is why there are people who are oppressed beyond just their class, all oppression serves a material benefit to the bourgeoisie.  Failing to recognize this and saying we must only focus on class is playing right into their hands.

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Ann’s report

Companion to “A Marxist-Leninist case against the CPGB-ML’s reactionary stances on gender identity” and “The Reactionary Nightmare of the CPGB-ML”

The Use of the Term “Identity Politics”

In recent years criticism of “Identity Politics” has been everywhere, from Social Reactionaries decrying over-sensitivity to hate crimes to even Leftists critiquing corporate Pink and Rainbow washing. So, what is “identity Politics”? Nothing, in no real way is it anything useful for discourse or thinking upon. Literally? It is the politics of identity. As you can see, it’s rather vague and open ended. And that freedom has turned the term into a catch all against whatever the particular speaker dislikes socially, or, more distressingly it has become a dog whistle against Progressive ideas.

As we had seen with Emerican Johnson’s video “LIBERALS” in which he tried to create a dichotomy between Liberal “Identity Politics” and Revolutionary “Intersectionality”. This attempt only created confusion in the audience to the point where Emerican had to make a segment of his follow up video to explain his point further. Due to this confusion associated the term I would suggest to avoid it’s use altogether or to use modifiers.

“If The Bourgeois Can Give It To You It’s Not Revolutionary!”

A frequent criticism of all types of Identity Politics on the Left that should be at least be thought about, if not refuted in the final video is this odd purity politic that states “If a thing can be given by your oppressors then, regardless of the reason it is bad for the movement and should be opposed.” This Idealistic view of revolutionary strategy betrays their social reaction. These leftists frequently complain about queer folk or POC trying to advance their struggle but almost never speak of unionization efforts or the fight for 15. Their acceptance of some “Reformism” shows how dishonest their argument is. Looking at this whole picture we can see how these Leftists view the Working Class, they see an idealized white cis-male worker with serous and nonfrivolous concerns, whereas they see PoC and/or Queer workers as non-existent or non-relevant.

I would recommend addressing in the video, but this argument doesn’t (at least to my memory) get used by the CPGB-ML.

The Gender Binary is Pseudoscience

This is more my own personal interpretation of gender in regards to Evolutionary Theory but, I still think that you would gain something from thinking about this. A half of TERF Theory and more common Transphobia is predicated on this spiritual/biological binary of Male and Female.The binaric gender model has been used by the Western World as the basis of gender theory since before Capitalism, but would not be ratified to what we understand it now until Capitalism, but, importantly long before our modern understanding of biology and evolution and that’s where the first problem lies. If we were to take Transphobes at their word and say that there is only two sexes now, that does not mean it has always been that way nor that it always will. Evolutionary Theory shows us how all things are subject to change, even sex.

Of course, there are nottwo genders or sexes, Non-Binary and Intersexed people exist and have existed, but this Idealistic version of gender has annihilated them from history and the public conscious. The strict Gender Binary that the CPGB-ML hold does not just say trans people can not be their gender because of some ideal bio-truth, but also that NB and Intersex people can not exist.

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Caela’s Report

The Reactionary Nightmare of the CPGB-ML

Prelude: A Flawed Declaration

MOTION 8: “Identity politics are anti-Marxian and a harmful diversion from the class struggle”

Motion 8, passed by the CPGB-ML, is thoroughly anti-materialist and profoundly reactionary. In this, the party dogwhistles at “LGBT ideology” being harmful to the working class, who are nebulously defined. This motion says nothing but declares loudly a lack of solidarity with struggles of gender and sexuality, alienating not only those oppressed on those grounds but those who are allied with them. The party seems unconcerned with allying with those masses concerned with the wellbeing of LGBT people, instead using the language of conservatism (“identity politics”) to signal this message:

There Are No Gays In The USSR!

“Why gay rights is not a class issue”

If we are to believe the party, the question of gay rights is not only “not a class question”, but also solvable by the communist revolution in itself. When class antagonism ends, the line goes, then LGBT people will be liberated by proxy. These two statements, however, carry an internal contradiction: if LGBT people are not an oppressed class, as people of colour and women are, then the antagonism towards them will not be resolved by revolution. If they are an oppressed class, then the CPGB-ML is failing in its duty to support all classes oppressed by capitalism, and is thus not only failing tactically but theoretically.

However, this contradiction is not resolved with self-criticism, or improvement of the party line, but through dismissal and ignorance – the worst failure of any communist party. Instead, the party chides LGBT people, and the activists supporting their rights, not merely as reactionaries (as they continue to go on later), but are contrasted against the ultimately nebulous term “ordinary people” - the framing of this implying that abnormality and difference is in itself harmful – consciously or not, the party has taken the conservative line of ignorance and repulsion. This does nothing to improve the lives of LGBT people, many of whom are working class precisely because they are discriminated against by capitalists, many, especially trans people, taking up sex work as the only available option. To stand in solidarity with all oppressed classes means to stand for LGBT rights and liberation, and if one ignores the problem it does not go away. “There are no invalids in the USSR!” means nothing to those disabled people specifically oppressed by bad, exclusionary and anti-materialist policy.

The Root of Left Reaction: The Worker as Biotruth

“The reactionary nightmare of ‘gender fluidity’”

Here we find the largest flaw in CPGB-ML’s ideology, in fact, the one from which myriad other flaws originate – the worker, “ordinary”, is not allowed to be corrupted by the outsider, the abnormal. This takes the class status of the worker and turns it into a crude biopolitics, in which the body of the worker, not their status, is at the forefront. In that sense, though they take some token stand against racism, their assertion that “class is the primary struggle” (said directly to a person of colour asking about racial oppression) makes sense. To the CPGB-ML, all oppression consists of class oppression, and everything else is a corruption, a “harmful distraction.” There is a preference for immediate physicality over psychology – which is why, in part, the party denounces trans people.

In this article, the party demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding of the material conditons not only of LGBT people, but all those who are not oppressed strictly along economic lines. There is a preference given to immediate physicality – the worker’s arm over the worker’s mind. Ultimately, the line on which the CPGB-ML stand is “the worker”, those who are producing in some capacity. Placing the ability to work at the forefront of one’s politics, especially in an age where so many cannot work, is a privilege only the able-bodied can afford. A Communist revolution, without a plan for those most marginalised by capital and thus the least likely to work, is doomed to fail. A politics that does not take into account the mental health of the masses is a rejection of materialism and thus counter- revolutionary in one of its core ideas. Disregarding the importance of mental health, the article states:

There is even a movement termed ‘ableism’ or ‘trans-ableism’. There exist people who say: “I look as if I’ve got two arms and two legs, but actually in reality, I feel like I was born disabled.”

The writer simply cannot comprehend that there exist invisible disabilities, and things that prevent work that aren’t removed limbs. To the party, the worker is thus conceived as machinery – something whose value lies in working at peak efficiency. This is capitalist logic and should be stamped out of any revolutionary theory, instead valuing people inherently as members of a communist society.

On gender, the writer of this article uses vague truisms to point to what may seem like intuitive answers – however, in simplifying the argument so much, it becomes easy to rebut. Geometry and biology are entirely seperate fields, let alone geometry and psychology – the attempt to say “why can’t a circle self-identify as a square” falls flat, because a circle is not an organism. Thus, the question of “is there a material reality” is a thinly-veiled attempt to get the reader to agree to their conception of reality, and what is material. The hammer does not operate without an arm to drive it, and the arm does not operate without a mind to will it. Creating a staw opponent who argues that “there is no material reality” is a fundamental failure in understanding anything outside of the writer’s experience. In that sense, the writer, and by proxy the party, places the individual conception of reality above the masses – they are not following the research, not conducting their own, and thus relying solely on prejudice. Again, this returns to the hand and the mind – both need each other, and the party disregards one, failing to see an entire side of the process. The article proceeds not dialectically, but via assertion – though the writer brags about being an adherent to the dialectical process, they do not practice it. Similarly, just as the party states their anti-racism, their members cannot avoid white chauvinism and pushing people of colour away from the party. For example, this excerpt:

It’s very useful not to trust muslims or not to trust Pakistanis or not to trust Afro-Americans, or “I don’t really like that Nigerian who lives next door to me, they’re a bit different aren’t they?” Well, if people rub along with each other, they get over that don’t they?

The writer goes on to assert that race itself is a construction of the bourgoisie, and should thus be disregarded in revolutionary movements for a unified class line. However, if one were to conceive of capital itself in the same way, then the logic becomes apparently flawed; constructions of the bourgeoisie need to be acknowledged and worked through, not discarded on the altar of progress. Every time a movement fails to acknowledge this, it fails the masses.

Thus, onto gender, a construction of the modern era. Countless examples of non-binary genders have existed in pre- modern societies, especially outside of Europe and its empire; I need not list them here, but examples include Two- Spirit people of First Nations descent, the Waria of Indonesia, the Hirja of India, etc. - all of these conceptions arose independently of one another, long before capital established itself. If we are searching for material reality, the gender binary seems to fly in the face of it – it arises as the Other of the dominant class (men). Gender is a historically contingent category, and is a process of becoming (as Simone de Beauvoir describes) a gender, rather than being born it. Even the sex binary is fundamentally flawed and ideological, as intersex people are routinely violated at birth to enforce it. This binary is purely in the realm of ideas, and as such is anti-materialist. To embrace gender divergence, even gender fluidity, as the title of the article states but does not elaborate on, aligns perfectly with a historically materialist conception of history. The writer accuses trans people of being purely idealist – I have demonstrated that it is in fact the opposite – enforcing the gender and sex binaries are firmly anti-materialist. The division of the working class is not in the removal of these binaries, they are those binaries.

So, I ask, when you routinely ask why women and people of colour do not come to your side, and when you’re constantly accused of queerphobia, do you not perform the self-criticism necessary to grow, and realise that your policies are alienating the masses? Why do you meet the idea of the number of trans people being ten percent, not with engagement, but with rejection and incredulity, inventing some narrative that trans people are telling gay people that they are trans?

There are two answers to this question: one, that your party is ignorant of the facts, and has not done the research necessary to engage with this issue, and has regardless written an article and held a party congress on the issue. The other option is that your party holds a resentment to queer people (thinly veiled over with empty statements of acceptance) many of whom are working-class specifically by modes of capitalist oppression. Both of these solutions render the CPGB-ML unable to represent the masses, and thus unfit to call itself a party of the proletariat.

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CPGB-ML Final Report

A Marxist-Leninist case against the CPGB-ML’s reactionary stances on gender identity

I would like to note that the CPGB-ML is hardly worth writing an entire article about alone.  Were it simply an outlier case, this party would merit no investigation.  However, while they certainly epitomize the worst reactionary elements within the Left on the issue of LGBT+ rights, the fact is that echoes of this sentiment can be found across the Left in a variety of flavors and intensities.  It speaks to an unwillingness to employ the actual theory underlying Marxism, and instead relies on vacuous notions of gender, race, and so on that are treated as self-evident, eternal truths that are not engaged with historically, if indeed they are engaged with in any scientific capacity whatsoever.  This approach fails whole swathes of the working class in its failure to meaningfully engage with their conditions beyond pure, abstract class struggle.

If we are to criticize the CPGB-ML on their stances as Marxist-Leninists ourselves, it necessarily must be done through the lens of dialectical materialism, as it is foundational to ML theory and practice.  We cannot simply declare their opposition to identity politics to be “reactionary” without justification; baseless dismissal and name-calling is pointless sectarianism.  In the same light, we cannot hide behind identity politics just because it is being attacked in a reactionary fashion.  Instead, we must demonstrate the need to introduce the class element back into our discussion and action regarding identity rather than rejecting all ideas about identity wholesale, so that these disparate movements can be directed at the true source of their oppression and not accept meager concessions by bourgeois society.

However, I must admit that this argument will be somewhat simplistic, though somewhat lengthy; partly for ease of explanation, and additionally for the purpose of meeting time constraints.  Some details may be glossed over in the course of putting forth this argument.  While I believe it to be sufficiently strong as a counter-argument to the vague arguments of the CPGB-ML et al., under no circumstances should it be seen as an authoritative end to the discussion, nor should it be treated as a source in and of itself.  Rather, it should be seen as (a) an attempt to provide a summary of the various ideas it draws upon, (b) a more complete argument for LGBT+ struggles from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, rather than several disconnected articles touching on the subject, and (c) an effort to do away with the dismissive chauvinism that has occasionally characterized discussion among Marxists upon this very issue.

I will provide references to the sources at the end of this document.  Given the non-academic nature of this document, I have elected not to adhere strictly to formatting with respect to in-line citations and references, and will simply append references to the source material that most directly informs this argument at the end of this document.

PART ONE—The case for LGBT+ issues as class issues

If we are to form our critique, it is necessary to determine the function of gender roles (specifically binary gender roles, or simply ‘the gender binary’) within capitalist society.  To that end, we would clearly do well to discern how gender roles came to be in the first place.  While this piece will not exhaustively cover the historical progression of these roles, it is necessary to at least put forth a rudimentary explanation of their formation and evolution.  From there, we can examine their role in capitalism, the important connection it has to LGBT+ struggles, and the intersection between normative gender roles and other systems of capitalist oppression.  With this, we can avoid the vulgar materialism and often outright metaphysical idealism of the CPGB-ML without resorting to faulty assertions of our own.

I. Sex and gender are both constructs

The naive suggestion often put forth is that these roles are a logical consequence of natural sexual differentiation, but this is simply not the case.  While there may be a case to be made for biology playing a part in the beginning of gendered division of labor, biology alone does not determine nor explain why women occupy a subordinate position in capitalist society, or indeed any class society where women occupy such a position.  This is not to mention the vague ways in which ‘biology’ is often appealed to when putting forth such claims about the oppression of women.  It is not ‘self-evident’ or ‘common sense’ that the division of labor between men and women (and indeed, even the mere existence of those two categories) is natural; even if it were, it is undialectical.  Nothing is “just so,” it is a product of what comes before, and gives rise to what comes after.

Biology itself, as mentioned, is also vaguely defined, so much so as to be useless.  If by biology we mean “genetics,” then the two assumed categories of XY men and XX women are insufficient to explain the other chromosomal configurations which produce perfectly valid people who are still considered men and women.  If we instead mean to refer to, say, menstruation and pregnancy as necessary identifiers of womanhood, then sterile women and women who do not menstruate could not count; yet, we still consider them to be women.  If, again, we mean gonads, then there are people with both sets, or gonads that do not match what is expected by their secondary sex characteristics.  For every biological definition anyone has put forth, one can find plenty of examples of people for who that definition is inconclusive.  These indistinct definitions leave these people having to defend their identity; if biological differences were so clear, these defenses would not be necessary.  Furthermore, biological definitions of sex are not consistent—what is implied physically by ‘woman’ or ‘man’ is not consistent between people or between periods in history.  The notion of sex, like gender, is a product of its time.

The notion of fundamental sexual difference, that is, biology determining society and morality, is not even very old in the first place.  It is a relatively new idea.  The two-sex model was predated by the Galenic one-sex model, asserting women as an ‘inversion’ of men, lacking ‘vital heat’.  That is to say, women were defined by their lack.  There was an inherent essence of ‘manhood’ that defined men positively, as possessing an innate characteristic which made them men; it would not be until the advent of the two-sex model that “science” would come to regard women and men as biological categories.  Notably, these categories purported to explain the dominant social phenomena regarding men and women (sexism, to be blunt) as a natural consequence of biology.  In short, the notion of ‘biology’ was used to justify existing systems.

This is, as many Marxist-Leninists (and even non-communists, to be fair) understand, the role of the intellectual class as they are employed by the ruling class in any class society; the legitimization of the existing system through science, religion, philosophy, and so on.  While any given intellectual may not do this, the ruling class always rewards those who work in this way.  Ideas which uphold the system upon which the ruling class justifies their existence and maintains their supremacy are rewarded and propagated; ideas which contradict these are suppressed if they are discovered, else they are left to eke out a minimal acceptance in society at large.  Intellectual output is not totally neutral, and often has this incentive from above to support the system.  This output also has a large role in generating the “common sense” of the day; that is, common sense is simply the default, shaped at least in part by the ruling class, in absence of personal experience which contradicts it.  This is how one should look at the biological determinist perspective; the science does not support it, and the idea did not even come around until fairly recently in human history.

II. Division of gender is division of labor

Anthropological studies strongly contradict the notion that labor had always been divided in a gendered way.  That is, it disputes Engels’ notion that procuring the necessities of life (read: productive labor) was the role of the man, and that this had simply always been the case.  Instead, productive and reproductive labor was more equally spread among all members of early human societies.  The family as we know it had not even begun to materialize, as mating was only very loosely restricted at the time.  Monogamy was nowhere close.  In this sense, women taking on more of the reproductive labor makes some sense, as it was impossible to know for certain who one’s father was—but it was certain who the mother was.  However, this does not imply that reproductive labor was always relegated to the women; as stated above, anthropological studies demonstrate that labor was much more equally divided in early humanity’s development.

Even as recently as feudal Europe, women had not yet been forced fully into their current subservient role.  While the old matriarchal system of lineage had or was giving way to patriarchal lineage, women still had some degree of autonomy with regards to their access and ownership, limited as it may have been, to the means of subsistence and production.  Men had gained the right to pass property down to their own children, but he did not own it in the sense we think of today.  In other words, men had changed how property was passed down, but not fundamentally how property was owned, which was still collectively, by the family.  He could not yet leverage this state of things into a totally dominant class position.

‘Traditional’ gender roles as we understand them had not yet crystallized at the time when the rising bourgeois classes in feudal society were, crudely speaking, privatizing all the land and means of production.  They were transforming common property into private property, into capital; in doing so, they were depriving the peasantry of access to this property and relegating them to wage labor.  This was a marked difference from the old system, by which a family (not to be confused with the modern “nuclear” conception of the family) could reasonably accumulate additional wealth in their usage of this common property.  The upcoming bourgeois classes sought to appropriate this property, and the surplus that was generated through labor done on “their” property would also be appropriated.

Obviously, this upset the peasantry.

This is not to say that feudal society was egalitarian in any sense of the word.  What is important here is to see the transition from early man’s communal, roughly egalitarian distribution of productive and reproductive labor, to today’s gendered roles dividing “masculine” productive labor from “feminine” reproductive labor.  This transition necessarily implies a transformation at some point from the unity of production and reproduction to the division of production and reproduction.  Thus, gender roles cannot possibly extend back indefinitely in humanity’s past.

The crystallization of the basis for this distinction happened generally during the period of primitive accumulation mentioned above.  The peasantry, now stripped of the commons they had been accustomed to, resisted this change, and the rising bourgeois classes had to divide the peasantry against itself.  The creeping changes towards patriarchal systems of lineage and inheritance had given men leverage over women, but not yet total control.  Backed up by religious institutions, sweeping attacks against women’s control over their reproductive capabilities were made.  This coincides with the witch hunts of the 15-1600s and it was through this process that reproductive labor was divested from productive labor in its entirety.

The bourgeois classes, which were emerging out of the feudal society of the time, needed laborers to work on their property.  While before, as mentioned, families would keep the surplus wealth produced by their labor, now the bourgeois classes would appropriate that surplus.  Only productive labor, labor which would now generate surplus value for the bourgeois classes would be of any value to them.  Reproductive labor—child rearing, housekeeping, etc—produces no surplus value, and as such is worthless to capital.  However, reproductive labor is obviously not something you can do away with as a society.  This task had to be assigned to someone, and women were the gender created by class society that would be responsible for this “worthless” reproductive labor.

This is obviously not to say that women were created by capitalism.  However, the gender—the set of expectations, their role—was crystallized in this transition phase.  The role of reproductive labor was to now support the man’s productive labor; productive labor, in turn, was now in service of the bourgeois classes and their desire to accumulate wealth.  By turning women and men against one another, whether through accusations of witchcraft or other diabolic practices, the rising bourgeois was able to defuse the resistance by dividing productive labor, which it valued, from reproductive labor, which it found worthless, and privileging men with the “right” to earn subsistence from “their” property.  Women, on the other hand, were made dependent on the earnings of men, and were not compensated for the very real work they were doing.  They were reduced to supporting the working men.

In other words, men became the “breadwinners”, while women became the “housekeepers”.

III. The function of the divide within capitalism

In the previous section, I briefly laid out the evolution of gender roles.  While a crude approximation, it lays out the idea that the unity of production and reproduction gave way to the separation of the two, and that women were saddled with the latter, along with some general reasons for the selection of women for this role.  Additionally, it is possible to begin to see gendered oppression in capitalism as not just an unfortunate remnant of a darker time, but as a foundational contradiction within capitalism.  Sexism is not a vestige, it is a feature.

It is one thing to see the gender binary as inherent to capitalism, but what is its function?  In the last section, I laid out the basic antagonism.  In order to retain control over the means of production, and therefore economic supremacy, it was necessary to pacify the large majority of the population by turning them against one another.  By state-sanctioned violence against women, women were forced into the economically subordinate position of unpaid reproductive labor in support of men’s productive labor.  This set men into the economically privileged position, effectively ‘bribing’ them into complicity with the bourgeoisie.

Antagonisms such as this one are how bourgeois society keeps workers fighting each other instead of challenging the capitalist system; by effectively “layering” exploitation, some parts of the working class benefit from the worse exploitation of the people below them, creating an economic incentive to defend the status quo.  This arrangement is then legitimized by religion, science, and other parts of the societal superstructure to provide an additional social incentive to maintain one’s designated position in society.  Without antagonisms like these, (race is the another major antagonism among the working class) the working class would quickly ascertain the nature of their collective exploitation and turn against the bourgeoisie.

Additionally, as stated before, capitalism only values certain kinds of labor.  Only labor that can increase the value of existing capital is valued by the bourgeoisie.  Labor which only maintains itself, that is, reproductive labor, has no direct value to capital.  Reproductive labor itself can be thought of in two major ways: the daily “maintenance” of existing labor, that is, ensuring the continued capacity of existing laborers to perform labor; and the generational replacement of laborers by way of child-birth.  This labor is necessary for the continued existence of the working class that capital requires, but it is reduced to ‘natural’ work that merits no direct compensation, and it is women as a whole who are expected to perform this labor.

However, this supporting labor does have a cost.  The economic unit of capitalism is not the individual, after all; it is the family as a whole.  Man, wife, and children all require basic subsistence, at a minimum, in order to reproduce the labor power that is valuable to the capitalists.  The wage the traditional bread-winning working man receives must therefore also pay for the continued subsistence of his entire family.  This was not always the case; early industrialization replaced costly men with cheap women and children.  This system could not last, however; the long hours and dangerous conditions threatened the reproduction of labor power by pulling women and children out of the family home and killing them off at an alarming rate.

This exploitation was an attack on the entire class as a whole, but labor-aristocratic leadership convinced many men that their jobs were instead being threatened by the employment of the traditionally subservient women and children of the family unit, rather than the attack by capitalism upon the working class as a whole.  The aforementioned family wage rectified this problem in a way that was suitable to capitalism; the man was put back in his ‘rightful’ place as head of the family, and the wages he earned were now sufficient to ensure that women could return to domestic servitude without worry.  This element of sexism, as that sense of being ‘master of the house’ can be thought of as the replacement for property that would have ensured his control in previous modes of production.

In this way, women’s societal role as the gender responsible for the reproductive labor can be made more specific; it is her role to perform this duty within the family as a unit.  This is where the specific distinction between the role of women and men under capitalism can be brought to light; as stated before, she bears the responsibility of reproducing labor power.  This reproduction of labor power, while indeed being labor itself, is not labor that produces value, and therefore cannot produce surplus value.  Her labor is not governed by this law of value because it must be done regardless of the current demand for labor power, as this labor is necessary for survival.

She is, therefore, not exploited by capital in the strictest sense.  She does produce use-value in the home, but her labor is removed from direct participation in value production (what I have called ‘productive labor’) with regards to capital.  It is in this way that her assigned role is an oppressive one—she is reliant on her husband’s direct participation with value production to acquire the means of subsistence from him.  Obviously, women do perform wage labor in capitalism, often for poor wages or only in part-time employment, but she is saddled with the burden of providing domestic, reproductive labor in addition to the wage labor she performs.  It is the notion that her immediate priority is domestic labor, rather than wage labor, that capitalism takes advantage of in these circumstances.

In addition to this, women’s societal obligation to perform domestic labor, often at the expense of productive wage labor, serves another function within capitalism: its need for unemployment.  Unemployment serves not only to ensure a “reserve” supply of labor power in times of crisis, it also serves to create competition between workers, which gives a strong incentive to workers to accept poorer wages and conditions lest they be replaced by someone else who will.

While this does not cover the function extensively, it is sufficient to see the basics upon which the entire sexist system of oppression is formed.  Of note is that capitalism needs to maintain this system so as to suppress the idea that it is society’s responsibility to provide this service rather than women; however, it is also constantly subjecting the family unit to upheaval. It both requires the family as a unit, but wants no part in sustaining it economically; it needs women to take up the burden of sustaining work rather than make demands of the bourgeoisie to provide these services to her and her family.

The fundamental contradiction, as with all others in any class society, must be papered over with ideology that masks the contradiction so as to prevent consciousness within the exploited class(es) of people.  Gender roles, in this sense, are that ideology that sustains the family as a unit which is necessary for the exploitation by capital, and the ideology that exploits women by chaining them to the drudgery of domestic labor.

IV. How LGBT+ people cross the divide

Once you accept the formation of gender roles as constructs beneficial to capitalism, and understand their basic function within it, it is possible to demonstrate the connection of LGBT+ persons to this construct.  Specifically, LGBT+ persons, in some way or another, directly challenge either the gender roles inherent to capitalism, or the normative sexuality it imposes.

Gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and any other persons with non-heteronormative sexualities confront this by defying the traditional gender roles within their relationships.  (They may also defy these roles individually, but this is the more notable point of defiance for our purposes.)  For instance, a relationship between two men necessitates that at least one of them defies the traditional role of producer.  In a relationship between two women, similarly, at least one of them must defy the traditional role of homemaker.  This challenges the necessity of gender roles; if this couple can do well enough for themselves while rejecting the heteronormative gender roles that define the concept of the modern family, how necessary are these roles?  This is a direct blow to the ideology which props up the gendered division of labor by demonstrating that these roles are, effectively optional, which weakens the superstructure that sustains these gender roles against the interests of proletarians (and the proletariat as a whole, for that matter).

Transgender individuals defy gender roles in a similar way, but on the individual level; they reject the role specifically assigned to them.  In their rejection of their assigned gender, they reject the role thrust upon them corresponding to that gender; either the role of producer or the role of reproducer.  Assigned-male-at-birth trans people are damaging to the patriarchal system by rejecting this ‘manly’ role, which throws the dividing line into question.  Similarly, assigned-female-at-birth trans people damage this by ‘usurping’ (which I mean here in the driest possible sense) the role of men in patriarchy.  Non-binary trans folk pose an additional challenge to gender roles; they cannot even be reconciled with the gender binary.  All trans people therefore challenge the ideology surrounding gender roles by discarding their assigned gender role, in part or in whole, and some even discard the notion of gender altogether.

Additionally, asexual individuals challenge gender roles by refusing in some way to participate in the generational reproductive cycle; they do not form relationships and sustain families (and therefore produce future labor power) in the way that the capitalist system requires.  They also reject the ‘compulsory’ nature of normative sexuality, demonstrating that the desire to rear children and/or even the desire for sex at all is not universal.

The common thread that ties all LGBT+ people together is their collective challenge to normative gender roles and sexuality that capitalism relies upon.  While individual LGBT+ people may not challenge these significantly, or only bits of one or the other, collectively, LGBT+ people throw the necessity of these systems and all their associated baggage (appearance, behavior, etc) into question.  This poses a threat to capitalism, which relies upon these systems (among other systems of oppression like racial oppression) to sustain itself.  The most important takeaway is that the source of LGBT+ oppression is the same source as women’s oppression.  These struggles only appear to be disconnected when the class element and systemic analysis of capitalism is omitted.

PART TWO—Rebuttal to the CPGB-ML

With this, the connection between the LGBT+ struggle and the class struggle as a whole is established.  While not an exhaustive proof, the link is clear enough between the two, and we can move on to tackling the CPGB-ML, and by extension, those that hold similar views.  Additionally, while the link between the class struggle and LGBT+ struggle has been established, LGBT+ oppression and its sources have ramifications beyond simple class issues; they intersect with imperialism, racism, and other struggles that must also be vigorously opposed by any communist person or party.

-Considering the previous, in what ways is the CPGB-ML et al deficient in their stances on trans rights/idpol? (fetish of the average worker and class reductionism, rejection of grassroots in favor of broad appeal, failure to apply dialectics in favor of vulgar materialism/idealism, simple strategic failure to ally with oppressed peoples,  etc)

-Conclude: What is the role of both communists and the LGBT community on this front?

I. Marxism is not vulgar materialism

The most notable of the failures of the CPGB-ML is their dismissal of not only identity politics, but of the theory they profess to hold so dear.  They make many references to material reality, materialism, and even make occasional mention of dialectics, but make no effort to utilize dialectics (or even materialism in some cases) in their analysis of LGBT+ issues.  Indeed, analysis of any kind, when it is done, is done in only the crudest possible fashion, without actually engaging with the history of LGBT+ struggles.  No effort is made to engage with the established research nor to perform research of their own; they simply assert that what is commonly accepted as ‘reality’ itself serves the function of a materialist analysis.  But of course, we are not materialists, we are dialectical materialists—our understanding of what is material must be mediated through history.  Without engaging with the history at all, can you arrive at anything other than idealistic, and therefore deficient understandings?  Lewis Hodder writes,

“Members of the party have praised ‘realism’, assuming that reference to what is ‘real’, ie material, fulfils the function of negation and of dialectical materialism itself. Yet, this does not come up against anything that exists but merely seeks to replicate it and keep things as they are; in assuming that it has established a natural history, it looks at the end product of the development of material conditions within capitalism and seeks to maintain it on the pretence of fighting idealism and supposes that it has established a positivist science out of dialectical materialism.”

In essence, the party has reduced Marxism to vulgar materialism.  Assumptions are not grounded in research, they do not perform any of their own.  They do not contemplate and expose the contradictions withing LGBT+ struggles, there are simply assumed to be none of note.  Marxist theory alone does not provide answers to these questions; it is only a tool for analysis.  Without researching the contradictions of capitalism, Marx himself would have never been able to write Capital; it was only through reckoning with the development of capitalism through the lens of dialectical materialism that he was able to discern its workings and offer an insightful analysis of it.

For example, in “The reactionary nightmare of gender fluidity,” the speaker for the CPGB-ML says,

“Are ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ synonyms? Well they are synonyms, but a certain group of academics in the seventies in the United States decided that they weren’t synonyms. They were going to use ‘gender’ in their own way; they were going to use ‘gender’ to mean the social construct of behaviour surrounding what was expected of the biological differentiation among human beings (men and women).

But biological differentiation between male and female is a real thing. It doesn’t just exist in humanity, it exists in many species throughout the natural world.”

This is not a slip-up or simple glossing over of facts; this is a naked assertion that sex is ‘biological differentiation’, whatever that is supposed to mean, without justification.  Furthermore, is there any reason we ought not to differentiate between biology and behavior?  That this is ridiculous to them insists they hold that sex and gender are unified, that is, that biology and gender (along with all the expected behaviors that entails) are inextricably linked.  A cursory search of the existing research, or even the relevant historical science, would reveal that this is not only untrue, but a relatively new concept, as I demonstrated near the beginning of this piece.

The CPGB-ML cannot move past this “common sense” understanding of sexuality and gender.  The belief that men and women are immutable biological categories, that their expected behaviors are direct products of the differences between these categories; these are simply elevated to principle.  However, we cannot simply assert that this is true; we must, as has been repeatedly stated, engage with the material through theory.  They dismiss the research off-hand as the product of some bourgeois academics, and conduct none of their own.  That this is pure arrogant idealism is not merely an insult being slung at the party: they openly reject the notion of even considering the distinction between sex and gender.

As Marxists, we cannot dismiss things out of hand and make assertions in place of hard research and study.  Having read Marx alone does not empower us to speak on specific issues; again, Marxism is simply a lens through which to examine material reality and construct a coherent narrative.  Without doing that examination, you cannot hope to arrive at a useful, much less accurate understanding of reality.  The CPGB-ML makes this clear; by refusing to engage in this careful analysis, they end up siding with evangelicals in their conception of LGBT+ people!  Though we get the benefit of a through-gritted-teeth acknowledgment, they refuse to stand with us; we are to be contented with “equal rights” as a natural consequence of socialism.  One need only to refer to Cuba or the Soviet Union to understand how “natural” LGBT+ rights are under socialism.  These rights must be actively campaigned for by challenging the institutions that withhold them, and the CPGB-ML flatly refuses to do so.

II. The obsession with the ‘average worker’

There is also a very class reductionist element at play within the party.  Several articles devote no small amount of time dismissing issues of identity in favor of a broad-base appeal to the working class as a whole.  Only strictly class issues are given much attention, as it is asserted that the working class can only be appealed to on the basis that “an injury to one is an injury to all.”  One need only consider history to see that this approach has never worked; this approach does not challenge the divisions present in society, and it is obvious to see that this approach never can.  Only when the people have been connected to the broader working class through their own experience can they understand their place within it and begin to develop a class consciousness; without making this connection from their place within society to the class struggle first, they will not see themselves as part of the class as a whole.

Even the CPGB-ML’s own iconography represents this, to a degree: the hammer, representing the urban industrial worker, and the sickle, representing the rural peasantry.  When Lenin appealed to the peasantry, did he simply appeal to them as workers?  Did he do this for the industrial workers in the same way?  He did not; he appealed to them by connecting their respective grievances to the greater struggle against capitalism.  This is the important part; one must actually acknowledge the differences within the working class and engage with these particulars before the working class can be united.  There is no one-size-fits-all approach to building consciousness.  People do not see themselves as in the same boat as others; capitalism has trained them not to.  It is true that the class struggle is the critical struggle that we must all actively participate in, however, this struggle takes on a variety of forms that must be shown to be just reflections of the class struggle.  Declarations do not convince people, demonstrations do.

Their insistence that the ‘average worker’ will reject them if they were to support trans people is also a puzzling stance to take.  Are we to believe that communist movements are built by simply appealing to the sensibilities of the working class?  Are we chasing votes or are we building a revolution?  What are we doing if not challenging the misconceptions that keep us in servitude?  By working to mirror this caricature of the working class as closely as possible, they just replicate the most reactionary elements within their own party.  That this caricature is ultimately just a vision of what they think the working class ought to be, is evident when you consider how consistently this vision of the working class lines up perfectly with their unwillingness to engage with LGBT+ struggles and their broad-appeal rejection of grassroots practice.  Their supposedly objective vision of society ordains them as the vanguard party; that the working class will come to them is treated as a given.

III. The intersection of LGBT+ and other oppressive systems

Capitalist nations have not contented themselves with the exploitation of their own people.  Imperialism, often called the highest stage of capitalism, has its fingers around the entire globe.  Where it may use a softer grip in the mother country, in its colonies and semi-colonies, brutal exploitation generates super-profits which are used to provide luxury commodities for the homeland.  Oppression is intense in these subjugated nations, and what would be considered unthinkable brutality here is the norm there.  In addition, racial oppression divides even the working class of the mother country.  In the United States, for example, African slaves were brutally exploited, along with the indigenous peoples in the “New World”, in order to serve the white settler-colonial nation; an exploitative relationship that continues largely unabated to this very day.  In these cases, the imperialist power imposes its own norms upon the native populace, destroying their own norms and culture.  Criminalizing “deviant” behavior paves the way for the imperialists’ oppressive systems by force.

These peoples are subjected to the imperialist power’s standards of beauty and behavior, the imperialist power’s religion is imposed upon them, and all attempts by the colonized peoples to retain their own sense of identity is savagely repressed with state-sanctioned violence.  This happens not only abroad, but at home, where racial minorities are subjected to white standards.  It hardly takes any time to find an example of, for instance, a black woman’s womanhood being questioned on spurious grounds.  Examples of repression of indigenous peoples’ familial structures, sexual practices, gender expressions, and so on are commonplace.  The Indian hijra under British imperialism, homosexuality of some indigenous American peoples under Spain’s genocidal practices—take even the example of Caster Semenya for a contemporary example of racialized misogyny.

Deviations by non-white people in the imperialist powers of today from Eurocentric ideals about gender and sexuality are not tolerated.  While the superficial justifications may vary in any case (religious objections and conflicts abound), the result is that the gender roles and compulsory heteronormative sexuality under capitalist society is imposed upon the colonized peoples—often violently, especially in the Third World.  The CPGB-ML has asserted that the 

“western imperialist bourgeoisie has suddenly discovered and embraced gay and transgender rights, which only yesterday it was vigorously opposing… the advantage to the bourgeoisie of its newly-discovered enthusiasm for gay rights is that it can use them to castigate oppressed countries who stick to traditional religious prejudices...”

This preposterous statement implies that they have somehow failed to notice that the western imperialist bourgeoisie has far more often castigated oppressed countries for sticking to traditional sexual and gendered practices that defy heteronormative gender roles and sexuality.  That Saudi Arabia is spared our unholy gay bourgeois wrath has everything to do with Saudi Arabia’s ruling class generally co-operating with the imperialist United States and nothing to do with “enthusiasm for gay rights” the bourgeois has supposedly developed over the last 40 years.  This enthusiasm does not exist; it is an illusion that is created by elevating the preconceived notion of LGBT+ rights as “bourgeois ideology” into a principle, and applying that to their analysis of capitalism and imperialism.  This blinds the party to the very real oppression abroad and how it compounds with racial oppression at home, a blindness that could be alleviated by engaging critically with the “material reality” that they appeal to so often.

This serves to show that a rejection of identity wholesale in favor of crude, purist notions of class inevitably produces a deficient analysis of capitalism and imperialism.  There is not just ‘the working class’, it is a diverse group whose members face differing kinds of oppression.  This oppression still comes from capitalism itself, which liberal identity politics does not recognize; however, the oppression is directed along lines of identity, which the CPGB-ML does not acknowledge with respect to LGBT+ rights.

IV. Strategic failures as a result of bad theory

The preceding sections provide examples of the deficiency of the CPGB-ML’s stances.  These stances, being built on shaky, idealistic foundations, are divorced from the theory that is foundational to Marxism-Leninism; they do not provide accurate assessments of the struggles they speak authoritatively about.  Beyond this, these stances also affect the strategy the party employs in its efforts to build class consciousness, and by extension, revolution.

I have already touched on the first strategic failure; that is, the refusal to go grassroots in favor of a broad-base approach.  By this, I mean that the party restricts themselves to appealing only to the working class as a whole.  I have already demonstrated the problem here, as well; workers must be engaged with on issues specific to them in order to bring them into the movement.  People form their understanding with the conditions in which they live, in combination with the ideology they hold.  The ideology they hold, by default, is typically bourgeois ideology in nature; this ideology must be challenged.  In this respect, the party’s stance on identity politics is correct: identity politics as an ideology is bourgeois in nature.  The problem with their approach to identity politics is that they also reject the underlying conditions which produces it, that is to say, they reject not only the ideology which shapes identity politics but the grievances of the people who ‘practice’ it.

The obvious problem here is that the grievances of these people are very real grievances.  The CPGB-ML’s rejection of these grievances stems from their inability or unwillingness to engage with the grievances directly; that is, they do not engage in any kind of analysis of the issues plaguing groups that practice identity politics.  Whether this is because of prejudice or ignorance, it is hard to say, and frankly kind of irrelevant.

However, to repeat: their rejection of the ideology behind identity politics is valid.  Their fault comes from only engaging with the superficial ideology and none of the material conditions underlying it.  While ‘idpol-ers’ hold both the ideology and grievances as legitimate, and the CPGB-ML denies the legitimacy of both, the truth is that the underlying conditions are valid (as I demonstrated to some degree in Part One), while the ideology is rotten.  By exposing the contradictions in the ideology, it would be reveal the deficiency of omitting the class element; in returning the class element to the struggles, these struggles are not denied, but justified and supported in the larger context of class struggle under capitalism.

It is this kind of dismissal that characterizes the entire CPGB-ML’s approach to building socialism.  By rejecting the opportunity to engage with the various underlying circumstances of workers directly, the opportunity to connect their distinct struggles to the larger class struggle is lost.  This direct engagement cannot be skipped over, and it cannot be done in broad strokes.  Whether it be challenging identity politics, or convincing white and black workers to unite as a class, without going to these people directly, engaging with their struggles, and connecting these struggles to one another by way of including the class element, the movement will never be able to take place.  When you engage in this broad strokes approach and refuse to get down and “do the dirty work” as it were, you fail to bring about the class consciousness required for revolution.

V. A brief critique of identity politics

This all being said, the last elephant in the room is identity politics itself.  I will specifically critique it on the LGBT+ angle, as it is more relevant to the piece.  However, the arguments here will more or less hold for any other struggle being carried out through the lens of bourgeois identity politics.

As Lewis Hodder writes in “Inside the last days of the CPGB-ML”, the problem with identity politics is that:

“This is the failure of identity politics, that the immediacy of identity is elevated into a principle; it is without concrete content and remains indeterminate, along with all of the contradictions that manifest itself from taking either race or gender as a self-evident apparition and the defining factor of oppression.”

This is to say, the problem with identity politics is not the validity of the underlying identities, which the CPGB-ML rejects as well.  The problem is that this “elevation” of identity into a principle is without justification.  This is where the CPGB-ML comes close to getting it right, in saying that it is idealism; liberal identity politics is idealistic.  Furthermore, this elevation of identity into principle also obscures the real source of oppression—bourgeois society’s need to maintain oppressive structures to maintain capitalism—by asserting that the identity itself is the crux of oppression.  It is this assertion that leads liberal identity politics down the road of reformism: they do not see their oppression as an inherent contradiction of the system, which does not compel them to challenge that system.

Instead, they content themselves with concessions, and long, arduous struggle to acquire them.  One of these concessions is that bourgeois members of these oppressed identities are given a modicum of power.  The problem of liberal identity politics, then, becomes this: the drive to overthrow the system is suppressed in favor of requesting limited participation in the system.  This is similar to the liberal clamor for “female CEOs”, in which success within the oppressive system is held up as a virtue.  It is clear to us that no amount of female CEOs or gay representatives will fix the true problem, but as identity politics can only associate identity with oppression directly, success in the system is treated as proof that the system is no longer (as) oppressive.  Of course, these bourgeois LGBT+ people are economically removed from the proletarian struggle; their economic interests, which require them to exploit the labor of the proletariat, suppress their identification with their proletarian LGBT+ fellows.

This granting of certain oppressed peoples the “privilege” of becoming an exploiter themselves gives them this economic incentive to oppose revolution, and content themselves with slow, marginal legal reforms, so as to not challenge their economic supremacy.  They are still LGBT+ themselves, no doubt: the problem is that by placing them in an economic position that relies on the exploitative system, they come to justify the exploitative system, and betray the best interests of the LGBT+ community as a whole.  Of course this is not a problem for capitalism: it is quite handy to have members of an oppressed group justify the system that keeps them oppressed in the first place.

Thus, our rejection of identity politics has to be along these lines: we must insist on the class element being of primary consideration in relation to our individual struggles, we must insist on the overthrow of the system and never content ourselves with meager reforms, and finally, we must never allow bourgeois members of our own communities to divert us from the path of revolution in order to prop up their own exploitative position.  We should see identity politics as a problem, to be sure; but it should also be an opportunity to connect disparate struggles to the larger struggle of capitalist class society, and by engaging with the underlying conditions unique to these various identities, we can create for them meaningful connection to that larger struggle.  Only through this engagement can we truly uncouple LGBT+ oppression, as well as all other oppressive systems, from opportunist tendencies within our movements and truly unite to create a society in which oppression can finally be ended.

CONCLUSION

In this essay, I have provided my justification for LGBT+ struggles as class struggles, and spoken of the deficiency of the approach of the CPGB-ML with regards to these struggles.  It is my hope that with this essay, I have demonstrated the need for communists to connect to the struggles of people directly; that communists must stand with oppressed people actively, and not merely passively accept them; that communists have a duty to engage with the scientific aspects of our ideology, and not merely the theoretical abstract aspects; and finally, that as communists, we cannot allow ourselves to become complacent, and must always subject ourselves to criticism, so that we never fall into the trap of assuming that the revolution will come to us.  It will only come when people can personally connect to the wider struggle, and to this end, it is our duty to stand with all oppressed peoples, to vigorously defend their struggles, and to bring their plight to the forefront of any action we take.  In this way only can we build the trust needed for the formation of a revolutionary proletariat, and finally bring about the overthrow of the system that exploits us all.

References

 1. Excerpt of a speech given by (person name) at the 8th Congress; this section about why gay rights is not a class issue according to the CPGB-ML. https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/04/20/news/why-gay-rights-is-not-a-class-issue/

 2. Excerpt of a speech given by (person name) at the 8th Congress; this excerpt about transgender people and gender fluidity https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2019/03/23/news/the-reactionary-nightmare-of-gender-fluidity/

 3. Excerpt of a speech given by (person name) at the 8th Congress; this excerpt about how “identity politics” supposedly divides the working class https://www.cpgb-ml.org/2018/12/07/news/the-only-thing-that-unites-us-is-class/

CPGB-ML Timeline

 1. Saturday 3 July 2004 – Party founded at Saklatvala Hall in Southall.  After expulsion from the Socialist Labour Party run by Arthur Scargill over clashes between the social-democrat wing and the Marxist-Leninist wing, some ex-SLP members create the CPGB-ML, citing the SLP’s support for the “imperialist Labour party” as one of the chief reasons for creating the new party.

 2. Monday 26 February 2018 – Red Fightback, another Marxist-Leninist organization in Great Britain, posts an article detailing their stance on LGBT oppression in capitalism.

 3. Early 2018 – Lewis Hodder, among others in the CPGB-ML, encounter resistance by the Central Committee regarding transphobia and homophobia within the party. Hodder is prohibited from attending the 8th Congress (see September entry, below)

 4. 4 June 2018 – CPGB-ML Twitter account links the above Red Fightback article, receiving a great deal of backlash in the replies.

 5. July-August 2018 – Hodder begins work on an essay attempting to “set a baseline of theory that would allow these problems [on trans/homophobia and other reactionary sentiments] to be overcome,” that would not be finished until April of the following year.

 6. September 2018 – CPGB-ML holds their 8th Congress, stating “five months of discussions and inner-party debate” in preparation, and that “Motions were submitted from around the country on housing, education, identity politics, racism, employment rights and a great many other issues...”

 7. CPGB-ML passes Motion 8 (see References document for full details) during their 8th Congress, enacting a rule that makes any “propagation of identity politics” grounds for expulsion from the CPGB-ML.

 8. Party founder and chair Harpal Brar steps down after 14 years, replaced by Ella Rule. Zane Carpenter and Joti Brar (daughter of Harpal Brar) elected as vice-chairs.

 9. October-December 2018 – Transcriptions of speeches given at the 8th Congress are posted in quick succession, all centering around identity politics and making frequent reference to LGBT rights.

 10. December 2018 – An article is posted briefly covering some changes to the party’s tactics and organization; of note, membership purges are admitted to in the then recent past.

 11. 29 April 2019 – Lewis Hodder (see above), now former CPGB-ML member, posts an essay entitled “Inside the last days of the CPGB-ML” on Ebb Magazine, citing clashes with the CPGB-ML Central Committee that resulted in his barring from the 8th Congress, and the resultant fallout from inter-party fighting in the middle of 2018.

This timeline is not totally complete: some articles and videos that were relevant to this have been deleted or are no longer available due to missing archives.  However, it serves to show the relatively brief, intense period of vicious transphobia and homophobia by the party—the developments and later purges of the part occur over the course of less than a year.

[badmousestuff-blog]

The problem with Free Speech (Script)

One day I was helping out with the Free Palestine stall on Church Street. About an hour in a young dude came up to me, and gave us the usual conservative drivel.

He told me that he couldn’t support the left, because to him we were against free speech. Right below me were flyers detailing the extent of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians, and how little the world still hears about their plight. He stated that he wasn’t interested in our campaign, and bid me farewell. For, of course we must have our standards.

(Rowan Atkinson speech)

There’s never been a more unshakeable dogma in my lifetime than that of Freedom of Speech.

The real test of a country’s standards is if it allows people to criticise one another, especially the regime. The foundation of Liberty and Freedom and Friberty, is the story of free expression, after all, if you want to know who has the power, just look at which group you’re not allowed to criticise. Right?

Well no, I’m here to say that Free Speech isn’t just some base, flatline, monolith from which all societies are to be judged like an angelical truth, its a political concept, thought up by human beings, subject to critique, and frankly is in great need of one.

Let’s start with something simple.

Your concept that Free Speech is good, is only possible if your opponent also agrees with you, i.e. they’re not going to kill you if you disagree.

So therefore if your opponent doesn’t ?? and will use aggression against you, then you can’t really argue for free speech can you?

The conditions around you need to be such that nobody is going to die.

Right, whats next, oh I gotta do the Hitler bit, right…

Y’know the story, Weiner Republic, Full suffrage, large democracy, massive instability and debt caused from the prior war, enter the Nazis, and the German Communist party. Yes everyone seems to forget that the Commies were there too, headed by Ernst Thalmann, and at their peak gained 16% of the vote in 1932. Whilst Ernst was forward in his Anti-Fascism, the Social Democrats, and their newspapers, didn’t seem to understand the concept of a united front, they refused to confront the Fascists in an effective manner and simultaneously denounced the KDP as being a bunch of Muscovites, sporting the famous Iron Front symbol, The third arrow originally meant Anti-Communism, mind.

The SPD’s failure to effectively confront Fascism aided Hitler’s rise to power, sent the KDP underground, and Ernst to 11 years in the hole, followed by a firing squad.

So don’t tell me free-speech exists in vacuum, it doesn’t. In this video we’ll ask the necessary further questions.

Who dictates the media, who controls which advertisements we see, which views are more profitable? Does the removal of speech in given scenarios serve a common good? And if the enlightenment was correct why did Liberalism fail in its mission?

(Rowan Atkinson)

This clip was one of the first main intro points for me as well as many others into the realm of Super Free Speech, and it’s strange looking back just how dated it is. It’s not like we didn’t have the arguments back then, but moreso that nobody really cared, we were all swept up in the dogma, to challenge free speech would be on the same level as strangling a baby.

Anybody can go around today and talk about the joy of free speech, but it means nothing to a person who has no power with that speech, Freedom to Beg? That's not a freedom; that’s institutionalised sadism.

I’m not a believer in Maslow’s hierarchy but hypothetically, this really wouldn’t go number 2, it’d be right down at number… 27. Why do I say this? Well in the words of some philosophy guy people say I look like, “No rights matter if you’re dead”.

Food, Water, Healthcare, and Housing. These are all things you need in order to survive, in other words fulfil the other things that we consider ‘rights’ - rights that are worth struggling for. And despite the fact that the millions end up dying from the lack of these rights, even when they’re universally agreed upon, ever notice how this struggle goes very very quiet… Suspiciously quiet.

Sargon on the Socialists

I wonder…??? I wonder why the left seems to be largely committed to these causes, it’s something you find scantly addressed in the middle and right spheres with the exception of private individual charity (OSCAR WILDE), and Carl may find himself wondering why it is that these ideologies can barely create a solid solidarity towards these topics.

You might be a Liberal and say “Yeah yeah, I support that too though” but fact remains there’s no confidence here.

I see no outpouring of condemnation coming from you when Politicians like Bolsonaro press forward their restrictive measures, unlike what you have to say about this powerless Redhead. Why is that?

Count Dankula, who interestingly I had a couple scuffles with a while back without realising it, last year taught his dog to do a Hitler Salute, and he got fined £800. Now that’s probably one of the most petty excuses for a sentencing I’ll admit, but again this isn’t about whether it was justified, it’s about people’s standards.

Dankula received enormous support from, well, everyone, and he’s now more famous than he ever previously was, enough to be at the forefront of the free-speech festival later that year, and even use his fame to help push the emergence of UKIP. This is attention that people would pay top dollar for, way more than £800. He should be proud that he got a court hearing.

Frankly, me and my colleagues didn’t really care about this whole thing too much, just ask my IWW friend who I was with when this all went down. What happened around the same time that did catch some of our attention though was the plight of the J20 protesters who got arrested back during Trump’s inauguration.

Some of these people are on the butchers list to serve 60 year sentences for standing against a president who’s, a real dick, like I get the whole Liberal opposition is fucking corny but still he’s a dick, they’ve all been dicks, he’s just continuing what every dick who ever stood on centre stage ever started, this is America, you think Bernie’s going to save you? You think reforming the democrats can change the number one imperialist power?

Apologies. If you’re at all concerned that I didn’t give a toss about Dankula’s pug joke, if you’ve ever had friends like him this stuff isn’t too surprising, I know these are highly political times but a guy who votes UKIP is really not our number one concern right now.

I didn’t give a toss, but I know somebody who did, Mike Stuchbury, who you’ll remember from his childish twitter ramblings and dealings with Watson. Who proclaimed that the left needs to stand with Free Speech, A free-speech that is largely in the teat of Right-leaning discourse.

Sargon who was there with him, earlier that year got de-platformed by lefty-liberals in his debate with Muke.

The dogma is enforcing itself here, the left is all supposed to throw up our hands in swich liquor, of which vertu engendered is the flour, and decide Whether we should allow freedom of speech to our enemies, or not allow it, when the actual thing we should be doing, is taking hold of the narrative and putting forward our own ideas as the new talking point of discussion, instead of fucking Nazi Pug.

“Hey, you, what gives you the right to determine the narrative?”

Thats a good question, the hegemonic propaganda of our status quo is already setting the narrative, Noam Chomsky “I’m bored bye”

How can I make this more interesting… Ah ha…

IT’S TIME FOR FILM THEORY!!1 WOOOO

-

The Pursuit of Happiness.

In 2006 Will Smith told the story of Chris Gardner, a black man who struggled through poverty, separation, and fatherhood whilst living in San Francisco.

He gets an internship with a sales company and despite having to put up with a lot, by the end of the film he passes and at this point, we’re supposed to feel happy and redeemed, but to those who’ve watched it (surely I’m not alone) was it really a happy ending?

I’ll say that I walked out of the viewing feeling very uncomfortable and sour, but why is that?

Well for starters, that Internship he got was a 6 month unpaid one, in the most expensive US city might have something to do with it.

Then he’s got to deal with his wife leaving him, then he’s got to take care of his son, then he loses his source of income, then he’s got to deal with eviction, sleeping rough, not sleeping at all, by the end of the movie sure he gets his redemption but the message of ‘when life gives you lemons, just keep getting pummelled with those lemons and don’t ask why’ ultimately seems hollow.

Contrast that a more traditionally Anti-establishment film which was made by a literal Communist, where the exploiters are treated as they should be and thats what comes across on screen, with surprise horse-dick, and while Happiness doesn’t treat them like saints, they sure don’t come across as devils either.

6 months of free labour he and 19 other people who did not make the cut that they are effectively giving away for free.

What about those other 19 people, who ever tells their story?

The way his superiors always act like total dicks pushing him around and getting him to be their lobby boy, they lost nothing. And now he’s going to work for them.

Is the message here supposed to be “Well if this guy can survive the moon falling on him, what the hell are you complaining about?” Actually yeah, I think that consciously or not, this is what’s being said… Don’t worry we’re getting to the point of all this.

The extent of exploitation is naked, yet in the way the movie is presented I’m inclined to agree to this, and take it into my home, and sleep with it.

Now name me as many pieces of media that regurgitate this same old theme of rags to riches through adversity, to look at the man on centre stage, yet pay no attention to the millions locked in a cage.

Sure, say it how you will, Art is merely what you make of it and there’s not necessarily any devious agenda being pursued at any time. That’s one perspective I guess, another might be that there’s no such thing as Art for Arts sake, it all gears itself to differing political lines.

In a society based on private, individual enterprise, it's no surprise that Art would also foster themes that would support society as the normal and natural, even if they appear on the surface as radical.

Case in point, well the entire Hollywood Catalog.

On the Waterfront is literally Mccarthyism on celluloid, The People vs Larry Flynt guises pornification and billionairedom with a story of libel and freedom of speech.

And ironically enough probably the worst offender is, well I’m gonna lose some of you now, Billy Elliot, the Movie.

In which 2/3rds of the way through Billy’s dad strike breaks as a way to pay for his son to go to a prestigious arts school, y’know rather than maybe having him stay and use his skills to improve, embolden and enliven the downtrodden community, rather than leaving it to die.

Jackie’s very sympathetic in his devotion towards his son, except Striking is caring for your family, you’re fighting for a better future, together, as one, and it’s thrown away in favour of a much more individualistic get out of your circumstances, go and live your dream.

Now I’ve read Lee Hall, I know he didn’t intend for this to come through, but he is also no more aloof than any of us, we’re all susceptible to this ‘Common Culture’.

Just see the way our ‘Common Culture’ infiltrates into how Communism is talked about, in 2015’s Trumbo. The Hollywood screenwriter who was blacklisted for 2 decades for being a member of Communist Party.

Could make for some groundbreaking stuff right?...

Well no, instead we’re left with a film that focuses entirely on freedom of expression, which is ironic because if they represented him truthfully it would’ve resulted in a much more nuanced movie.

All we get is a 2 minute scene talking about Communist ethics and god its done in the most sanitised, unradical, storybook tale way possible, that doesn’t in any possible regard represent who the actual Dalton Trumbo was.

“If a book or play or film is produced which is harmful to the best interests of the working class, that work and its author should and must be attacked in the sharpest possible terms.”

I think I have a case that profit incentives are steering the way in which media is presented…

We have no problem pointing out the subtle propaganda messages in Soviet children’s cartoons (Cheburashka) but reverse that onto our society, prepare for some awkward stares.

You may argue that none of what I’ve just spoken about here has anything to do with censorship of free expression but this is the problem, our notions of censorship are stuck firmly behind the Berlin wall, and thats far too simplistic not to mention outdated.

Undoubtably Coca-cola has a far greater reach of expression than I ever will be able to ascertain, what says who can speak on a public forum, decide the content of a documentary, of a publication, of a movie, or a political campaign?

If a book is blacklisted by all publishers for political reasons, what difference does it make having 1 publishing house or 100?

If 90% of the movie market alone is controlled by just 7 companies, what kind of advice is “Just start your own business”.

If we want to talk about the free flow of expression and information, what little are these flyers (Free Palestine) when Zionism has a whole nation, and 2 continents supporting it?

This is the kind of expression we’re dealing with today, not the voices of individuals, but of multinationals. The fact that we had in any way an outpouring of sympathies towards one of these companies, Sony, for having their movie The Interview possibly censored by DPRK agents is a testament to how lost in the plot we have become.

And if by chance the media cannot direct the status quo by monopoly, it brings out its tried and tested method.

Commodify it.

I present to you Guerrillero Heroico, this photograph was allowed such free spread not simply because its bloody badass, but because there was no IP designated upon it, by Korda’s intention as a Communist himself he agreed with the free-flow of art. And what did this result in at the behest of Capitalist Corporations? The pastiche of revolution, to be bought and sold many times over.

Take any form of media, word, an expression, it will be hoisted away, slapped on a shirt, and sold back to you at a handsome price. You cannot escape this.

The moment that this (my tattoo) becomes the new Che it loses all its power, resistance is reduced to at worst LARPing, at best Nerd Fandom, and the winners are the profiteers.

If profit is the aim of the game, the speech that is supported will inevitably favour that which nurtures the economy, not destroys it, unless in farce. Speech ain’t a level base of which a country is determined by, its an apparatus held by those that dictate the game.

This is why there is a necessity for us to control the narrative, control the message, because if we don’t, they’re still going to.

-

Obligations:

When armies with unequal numbers go into battle, a draw is a defeat for the lesser side.

Make believe it or not Radical Centrist politics have their political leanings as well, even if just by effect.

Look I like free speech, I love it, I’m a goddamn youtuber, but I’m not stupid, I know what’s coming, I know that groups would try and silence me if they could. That’s politics.

You might go “All we’re talking about is the legal sphere”. Firstly the legal is the political, pure ideology to say otherwise, but second it’s difficult for you to call yourself a fighter for free speech when as I’ve explained there’s sooo much more to it than simply the judicial.

Many proponents will even side-step the judicial boundaries anyway when monopoly becomes involved, and if I have to explain how Monopoly is not an externality of our system but an inherent part of accumulation then… sigh.

Strange how we’re usually all skeptical of an Economic Free Market but the Free marketplace of ideas unlocks your inner Libertarian.

Its when I see stuff like this that I begin wondering if this is all just a trend that will eventually die off when people realise the complexities of their circumstances. I remember just a few years ago how many Libertarians were speaking the merits of free speech until they discovered that methodological individualism wasn’t actually achieving their goals. I count down the days when Lauren Southern finally calls for limits on speech just like her limits on borders. After all freedom is not free it must be defended right?

And btw folks usually aren’t as brave to actively advocate limits so they’ll always present justifications, such as that these views are mental disorders, or they’ll destroy civilisation, or these people are Degenerates.

This is a historic moment in political discourse, at this point ultimately we’re interested in picking sides, and you’ll do this just as much as anyone will.

On the left we like to talk a lot about Left Unity. I’m not necessarily against the idea, but a lot of the time people make a religion out of it, glossing over the fact that many aspects of various factions (???) contradict. It might not be immediately obvious, but when push comes to shove these conflicts become very apparent. There are some principles in which each side certainly doesn’t see eye to eye.

“Politics is pervasive, everything is political and the choice to remain apolitical is usually just an endorsement of the status quo”

If it wasn’t obvious, I’m a Communist, yeah yeah say what you want, I believe in the liberation of those who do all the work through armed struggle based upon material conditions. I’m going to therefore be in favour of real mass culture, the stuff that gets people focused on achieving liberating aims instead of just appealing to markets. Its for this reason that I’m not interested in defending the views of right-wing nationalists, fascists, reactionaries… my enemies in other words, the ideas largely speaking which regress the people and they’re not interested in defending me either, wouldn’t expect them to.

If all you’re talking about is the centre, you’re gonna get flanked, sorry.

You might bump in when I denounce Dankula stating “His punishment showcases the system is at fault” and I would agree. This system is at fault, its been at fault since before our constitution was written, and it’ll never stop being at fault until you solve the contradictions.

Liberalism did fail, its ideals never came to fruition and that’s the reason why Socialists bring forth the praxis to achieve it, sometimes that’ll involve using words, sometimes it’ll involve lots and lots of guns, but let me tell you, you can’t always fight a war by playing nice, sometimes you have to use a diversity of tactics to achieve it.

Maybe we need 11 of them? (Shows book)

But thats more of a material answer and I know that most you don’t give a crap about some dead Chinese guy., but getting back to the original idea about responsibilities behind our speech, well, here’s something to think about.

So… here goes nothing.

If you’re a straight white male aged 11-16 in the UK and weren’t brought up to fit into the standard male dynamic, chances are you got picked on, sometimes a lot, sometimes that’s every day, not necessarily violence but words from numerous mouths are highly unnerving.

I did not have a particularly fun time adolescence. Every day was horrible, I never had a feeling going in that this would be exciting or, this would be a day where things would be different, everyday was a total black smudge with no end in sight.

Unlike other people, I never got to have a group that I fit into, so I had no escape, nothing to take my mind off things.

Looking back I don’t know why I bothered going in, I wasn’t getting amazing grades anyway.

When I went to Drama school and other clubs on the weekends and after school, I would also get picked on, but it wasn’t in spite, it was just general, friendly teasing. But there wasn’t a difference in my mind, because when you’ve had to deal with so much constant abuse, and paranoia, and humiliation 30 hours a week, it fucks you up.

So when Id say to the weekend buds “I dont like this” theyd go “Oh come on man its just a bit of fun, its okay, dont worry about it, its just a joke, its all okay”

Back then I didn’t have the nerve, I just put up with it, but if I could go back, Id say. No, actually its not Okay, because you don’t know for the life of me how much I have had to deal with this shit, to me that doesn’t come across like you’re being funny, like your laughing with me, it comes across like you’re a psychopath who wants to get pleasure out of my misfortune.

Of course the response to this would be obvious “Well what am I supposed to do? Just talk to you like a robot. You should just get over it, leave it in the past. Your making it harder for everyone” or some other faux-victimised response.

And sometimes y’know they might be right, maybe I should’ve not made worse a bad situation, but fact remains I still bleed.

To you, this is just having fun and games, to you and your other friends its normal, but to me its a threat.

Now today you can call me what you want I don’t care, I’m out of that place now and I’m all the better for it,

But even though some 7 or 8 years since then I’ve been able to recover, I still carry a hangover of it all, and it affected my decisions later on in life sometimes to a dire extent,

Its had the effect of making me feel both distrustful of people, and also like Im a burden to be around other people,

I never feel I should hang around for too long, I never want to take chances in friendship for fear I’ll embarrass myself, I say one thing out of tempo and suddenly flashbacks and an enormous shadow of mordor conjures over me. And I think most of all its been very difficult for me to express my emotions because I used to do it a hell of a lot.

Those 5 years were the single handed worst years of my life. And if you were at any point responsible for adding to that devastation and humiliation, then a large part of me wants to lash your goddamn skull inside out.

Because as trivial and generic as my story may be, that part of my life has been stolen from me, and those 5 years I will never get back.

So what’s the point of all this?

“Ossidents are sometimes surprised that, instead of buying a dress for their wife, the colonized buy a transistor radio. They shouldn't be, the colonized are convinced their fate is in the balance. They live in a doomsday atmosphere and nothing must elude them”

I want you to place the relatively minor experiences I received as a child, and translate those into other groups, victims of domestic abuse, victims of colonialism, racism, sexism, queer phobia. Like I said I’m out of that place now, but others aren’t, for many people they still live day to day in this ever pressing struggle, trying to just tell people “Please, just don’t do this”.

It’s not okay. But maybe together you’ll help me out with solving these problems?

My conclusion to this is simple,

Free Speech is not just something you can fling around to score political points, it doesn’t materialise simply because we all decide it should. If we want free-speech we need to break a few eggs to make an omelette.

We need to be sure that the conditions in society don’t proliferate toxic ideas that might even lead to the downfall of said society.

This very Tattoo that 90 years ago would’ve been Anti-Communist as hell has become a Pan-Left symbol against Fascism. Its living proof that with the correct methods the conditions of words, symbols, ideas can be resolved.

When class struggle subsides, when our social divides have been solved, when the conflict doesn’t oppose the existence of certain folks, then maybe, we can well and truly say that we can have free speech, and we’ll stand at a comedy show and yell “Yes, lets talk about those BEEP BEEEEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP” and be met with cheering applause from all sides. But until then, Don’t be a dick.

[badmousestuff-blog]

Is TAXATION THEFT

(SHOTS OF ME OPENING A LETTER)

Mmm Money. Oh hello there, Badmouse, I was just enjoying the sweet sweet smell of the British Payslip, nah its pretty bland, this one here’s from a job I had about 2 years ago, ah memories, memories, memories…. (Sees Tax) I’ve been stolen from.

£50 taken from me! Money that I don’t even get to decide how it gets spent, 1 vote every 5 years out of 2 preselected jerks every 5 years I wouldn’t call a great turnaround. We don’t tolerate thieves coming into our houses and stealing our prized possessions, why do we allow the Federal government to do the same?

(British Mouse appears) We don’t have a Federal Government in Britain, you poser twat.

Rational Mouse: Maybe I can be of assistance.

Its not really ‘THEFT’ though is it? Its a lot less of this “Gimmie your money, of you’ll die!” And a lot more of this “Gimme your money, and I’ll give you, Mrs Piggy Winkle.

IrM: Still Theft Buddy! If one man steals from you, is that Theft? What about 5? What if they buy the man a hamburger and give him a vote? Is that not still the…

MYOPIA ———————————————

RM: This is Myopic and Archaic guff dude

(Irrational Mouse Gasps)

This isn’t how the form of governance we now inhabit came to be anyway, its like that Who will Pick the Cotton without slaves analogy when you compare it to Roads.

Its conflating a systemic transport basis, to a generalised commodity thats sold many times over. They’re not the same thing, theres a very obvious reason why business prefers state run roads the same way industrialised economies prefer state run schools. You’re sort of neglecting why these things came to emerge in the first place. Is it it any coincidence that most of the toll roads started being gutted when Feudalism came to a close?

IrM: Who even are you?

RM: Oh, I’m RATIONAL MOUSE

IrM: So that means I’m…

(RM does the Jack Nicolson eyebrows)

IRRATIONAL MOUSE… Well thats not fair is it?

RM: Look just read the script bud, y’know how it ends

IrM: Fucking writers, you don’t do anything…

RM: Excuse me

IrM: The state has been showcased to be an incredibly inefficient, bureaucratic nightmare, that can never innovate like the market can, it wastes too much of its money, I mean have you seen the state’s attempts to be cool, they couldn’t even make a Millennium Dome profitable.

EFFICIENCY ———————————————

RM: Well you’re right on profits but apart from that its pretty much all Chicago School taft

(IrM gasps)

So many of us have a distrust for the public sector these days, its really no wonder seeing as for the past 40 years men in suits have done an active push of erasing the private sector defects by blaming the state. Quite interestingly, and surprisingly for a lot of leftists, the state sector is actually very efficient, especially when it comes to R&D.

IrM: Blow me

RM: No, I’m serious, wide spread free at the point of use services benefit amazingly from economics of scale. https://newint.org/features/2015/12/01/private-public-sector http://www.psiru.org/sites/default/files/2014-07-EWGHT-efficiency.pdf

Let me put it this way, what seems more efficient to you. Have 10 businesses all competing to not to make the best product, but to win them over to you, you can’t just ask them. In order to do that you’ve gotta come up with some snazzy designs, aesthetically pleasing logos, a funky marketing gimmick, before long you’re spending so much dough in marketing you’re not even interested in helping people, just getting yourself seen. Or You could just have one org that does all of that stuff, it doesn’t need to compete. Sounds to me like a lot of hands that could be spend doing R&D.

IrM: Thats investment not waste, besides R&D is the definition of the private sector … Yea?

RM: No. The private sector utilises R&D a lot, but effectively every piece of GPT was created in the public sector. Yes Samsung made this phone, but who made the battery that goes in it? Why is the state sector significant? TIME. Companies flock new models of these out every year to keep the money train rolling, and most importantly keep faith with their shareholders. Makes them flimsy, crappy, liable to break. But GPT takes decades not years to bring it up to commercial satisfaction. Do you really think that  shareholders are gonna give you investment with the tagline of “Coming this summer. 2047”

Fact remains, we’ve had plenty of time to analyse the effects of the free-market and what we find is theres hardly any greater efficiency.

IrM: You’re really getting off topic here, okay fine businesses want roads, the market isn’t as efficient as I thought, it doesn’t mean that taxes are moral.

WHY BASE AN IDEOLOGY AROUND IT? —————————————————————

Fair enough, the government sure as hell does take my money through a warm gun doesn’t it?

But for the vast majority of us… its really small, like in my pay check I only lost 1/20th of my monthly income, and sure its annoying not being able to spend that on the latest gamer game or a lush soap but I am getting free healthcare, an education, a polli… I’m getting firemen, ROADS, libraries, Society. If thats worth £50 a month then fuck me daddy I’m ready.

(BRITISH MOUSE gasps)

Point here is, you’ve got no semblance basing your entire ideology around something so insignificant, especially when the majority of us will not be owners we’ll be workers and buyers. Now I’m no normie, I know that a lot of this just goes on corporate warfare, IMF loans, and bailouts. But I recognise that thats part of the system we live in and sadly we have to hang on to what we’ve got whilst the very government I am under is selling it all off to the highest bidder. Don’t want things getting worse do I?

IrM: Yeahh its not a significant thing to base your ideology around, but you’re not getting the point, Taxation is still THEFT!

RM: Ok.

IrM: (Puzzled) eh… No, Taxation is Theft.

RM: Well at this point does anyone care about the views of an An-cap. Come back to reality dude.

(Blinding light)

IrM: The right of a man to own his own own property is a right ordained by common natural law prerequisite to our beings here on earth, through the self-ownership of a person’s own oneself, by natural exclusivity to the creation of ethics and rule of law, as prescribed in first principles, to disagree is literal rape and medieval iceland an…

RM: Alright I get it, you want a wibbly wobbly philosophical answer. Look I could the Positive/Negative rights shit if you want, Kant and Moral hierarchies if we want, I really don’t think folks give a damn about that right now, besides theres probably better people who could do that job than me (Olly)

I think when the dust has settled it all comes down to taxes being negligible compared to what you defend.

IrM: Huh?

RM: Exploited Labour

IrM: Huh, there is no exploitation, if I want someone to pick my potatoes…

EXPLOITATION IN 45 SECONDS

A man has £10 worth of Capital, he uses this to buy raw materials. He pays a wood turner to turn this wood into a chair worth £50. For this he pays the labourer £10. The turner therefore has to make 5 chairs in this arrangement in order to buy 1 of them for himself. You don’t gotta be a genius to see theres a disconnect going on here…

Remember my old pay check? I made about £1000 a month, Now as you…

IrM: Why do you keep leaving? I’m in here?

RM: I got £1000 a month, in an average day we made £1500 worth of goods, generally there were 3 people there each day. Divided by all of us thats £500 each. Now I’m gonna be super generous and say that only half of that is profit, that brings us up to a daily average of £250, but I only saw £60. Whats going on here?

IrM: You decided to take that job…

RM: No I didn’t it beats eating ass omelettes for a living.

I’m not denying its very liberal estimate it is, but £190 is a lot of money that I literally get no say in how its spent, I’m sure a lot of it would of have to have gone back into my employment or taken out as more taxes, but its not the specific amount I’m interested in, the point is I get no say my labour power, I don’t even get a vote, best I can do is fuck my boss. If we drag this out to a month, thats £3000, I’m getting screwed. And this, this small little number, is what we consider… THEFTTTTTTTTTTTT. Those Chicago boys were good.

IrM: You can… You can start your own business…

RM: Majority will always be workers not owners.

IrM: Not if everyone decided to save up their money and open one

RM: Nobody’s going to buy your cigars if they’ve quit smoking to sell you cigars.

PAUSE

And don’t think I’d stop there, I’d consider RENT theft too, think of all the money we spend so just existing in buildings, somehow I don’t think it costs half our pay checks to have personal washing machine fixers.

IrM: But its their property

RM: O RLY?

IrM: Yes, if they weren’t allowed to do that then they wouldn’t bother, nobody would be able to find anywhere to rent

RM: And maybe if jesus had been hanged we’d all be kneeling over a fucking gibbet.

IrM: Wa.httt??

RM: Theres a reason I think why we call them American Libertarians. See if you pick up a copy of Adam Smiths stuff you’ll notice that he’s not the pastiche we think of him as. Check this out… “The landlords like any other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even from its nature produce” Now I’m not saying BOOM Smith’s a lefty, the point is he didn’t view Capitalism as great just because, he was looking at it based in his experience of the system as it existed in Britain.

But America has a very different history to us Anglos, the entire nation was founded upon a certain hatred of taxes, and tea.

BM: Actually it never really was about the taxes, they just wanted to own the slaves whole sale, didn’t want old money controlling the colonies so they could …

And when you take the views of this man, and throw it into the melting pot of Exceptionalism and Capital, you get all sorts of zany concepts, like the Self-Made man, The U-turned addict, the Noble Christian, and above all the cult of the founders. They’re dead, they’re not going to sleep with you, I’m sorry.

So what of it? Is Taxation theft? Sure, but its not worth basing your life around it. We all think the Capitalist process is just the general flow of life but its very recent, Medieval Ireland and Iceland don’t compare guys, and at the heart of that system is Exploitation, something that we all as a class deal with on a daily basis, and gain nothing from. One might argue, Taxes on business are a trade off for what they get from us.

I know when you first get into politics its juicy to claim theft over a little bite out of your salary, but we only see it that way because its… literally right in front of us, there isn’t a spare column that counts your total labour value. We shouldn’t get so pissed off over the pennies scraped off instead of the huge overhead.

IrM: Well, guess you got me there.

RM: The circle is complete

BM: I must say it really is a very American thing this whole Taxation, not good business isn’t it rather? RM: Well at least we don’t live in a socialist country… like FRANCE!

Yeah thats like 2, 3, 4 personas in 1 video, I could start an extended universe.

BOOM RAWRRRRRRRR

Oh what now?

I’M THE LATE FOR TRENDS GUY, FEMINISM IS CANCER!

nope nope.

WAIT, STOP, SOMEONE GIVE ME AN OPINION!

[badmousestuff-blog]

Ben Shapiro’s fatal flaws on Socialism

Or maybe I should call this “Ben Shaprio gets brutally smashed by Marxist Endowment”

Anyway I’ve not really watched much of Ben Shapiro in the past, I’ve never really seen him as that interesting, however when I found numerous videos related to him with pretty childish titles I’d expect from an An-cap, well that intrigued me. But alas I found Ben’s talks and arguments to be dismissive at best, he hounds on through his arguments with such ferocious speed and in such a large dominating presence that its very understandable why many would think he was a genius on the topic, I think even Peterson has taken notes. But the thing is he’s not, he’s a hack who appears from what I’ve seen to know an incredibly minuscule amount about Socialism, so much so I wouldn’t be surprised if he only found out about it by just listening to a few Milton Friedman and Tom Wood’s videos.

First Ben supposes that Socialism at its fundamental is about ‘Equal Distribution or wealth’. I don’t know how much theory he’s read into, it is true that Socialism tends to bring up the topics of Equal Distribution quite a lot, but this is largely an American Simplification (I say American because the two phrases are often interlinked by so many of them). The history of Socialist theory was never based on Government Redistribution, but upon things like Ownership, Control, and Democracy. To put it simply, its about the Pizza base instead of the Toppings, how the structure is fundamentally formed determines how it operates in the world. Thus we are interested in bringing the production into the hands of the people, as opposed to simply redistributing the creations there of. If production serves our interests, we will not see people going without food, going without housing. Right now production serves profit, which is not as reducible as “Anything that benefits you” like some Shapiro types like to state, Profit is specifically financial gain extracted from the surplus labour which workers create. This is the reason we oppose it.



To add to this Ben appears to have some of that good ole American historical revisionism in him, as evidenced by how he states (in regards to Wealth Re-Distribution) “Who told you that you get to tell the universe how wealth is distributed” In this statement he implies one of the most pernicious myths about Capitalism that if you think about it for longer than 10 seconds you should come to realise hasn’t got any value at all - The idea that Capitalism is Natural.
Capitalism is NOT our natural state, it is not the way that human beings operate naturally, it is not ‘voluntary exchange’, it is not ‘the most ethical world view, it was like all other systems before it a force of humanity, the inevitable result of history leading up to that point. Throughout 95% of human history we lived in small hunter gatherer situations, not communism by any means but certainly anything but Capitalism. What little economic exchange there was it was largely on a small scale friendship basis (Internal Debting), not done for the exchange value of goods. If there is any situation humanity is most like, and has inherited the most from, its Primitive Society. 

Capitalism like any system since then did what it could to enforce its rule (Property laws, Enclosure, Conquest, Police, Exploitation etc) it is not an act of nature that we have the arrangement of society in the way it is right now, its a very human product, and so Ben, talking to his crowd like a bunch of toddlers, gets no Recon points from me. Who am I to say how wealth is distributed? The same person who said Private Capitalist ownership should be the way it gets done, thats who. For all of Ben’s moral grandstanding of the ethics of Capitalism, in doing so he ignores all the parameters that were set up for the existence and expansion of the system, all of the blood that was caused in maintaining its existence, all of the bandages it raps around itself to keep itself sustaining just a little bit longer, so much so that it cannot be reduced to a Petty Commodities Trade. He can talk as much as he wants about how you get paid for your labour under Capitalism, yet never acknowledges the amount of surplus labour extracted from the process that is used to profit the Capitalist’s pockets. A certain Yugoslav has a term for this kind of thinking, its called ‘Pure Ideology.’

But then it got me thinking, Ben’s glaring hypocrisies are far from over, like his statements on morality “Its not moral to steal from someone (Socialism) just because enough people vote on the matter” Its hardly anything more than a redundant view on Socialism, but have you noticed the glaring elephant in the room here? Ben is certainly not a Anarcho-Capitalist, he’s just a plain old vanilla Conservative with a loud voice and Gishy Gallop. So if he’s arguing Socialism is theft, why is he not also arguing that Taxation is theft? After all the government gets to take plenty of money off of you and put it into whatever it wants. Hell you don’t even get a vote on that?
But no, he just argues that taxes should be lower, not gotten rid of, he will accept some taxation just not too much, he thereby falls into the common Conservative double-think. “Taxation is theft, except when I want it to be spent on the things I want it too” Get a grip Ben, either be consistent in saying that both taxes and socialism are buggery or don’t. The fact that this double-think is so prevalent in American society just goes to show how much of a grip Capitalist hegemony has.

What’s amused me very much about Ben’s talking points is just how circle jerky they are, they’ve become so ingrained in people’s minds they just take them on word of mouth, so he’s able to make an utter straw man of what we’re about. “Socialists always go around saying Nordic Countries are great” (They’re not Socialist, thats a BernieBro Liberal myth) “They always say thats not TROOOO Socialism”. Well that is somewhat correct, a lot of folks do argue places like USSR, China, and Cuba aren’t/weren’t Socialist, yet what he fails to realise is that just as many would argue the opposite. I am one of them. I know its very comfortable for many of my fellow leftists to argue “No they were State Capitalist/Transitionary/Fascist” but the thing I’ve had to come to realise is that we don’t get to decide exactly how they’ll turn out, many times we have to look at what we’ve got an analyse from there. Taking these’s countries achievements into account there is definitely no argument that without Socialist revolutions they would have been in a hellhole of a state otherwise. China for example could not have developed itself as the new rival to the west without the massive industrialisation brought upon by Mao, Cuba would probably look like Honduras or Haiti today if it had not defended itself and empowered its people. The results I have found to be incredibly impactful on the lives of these nations (with definite consideration to be made to the areas and economic development they are in), and not to be trivialised as simply ‘Social-Democracy on Steroids’. You can even find that given equal degrees of economic development, Socialism provides a higher standard of living in comparison to Capitalism… over 90% of the time.


Nope, I’m serious, check it out. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amjph00269-0055.pdf




That all being said I would just like to put this forward to Shapiro, to showcase again his glowing elephants. What would he say if I told him about our current Economic situation? Imperialism in the middle east? High taxes and regulations? Total destruction of the environment? Well I found out what his answer was last December. “Not Capitalism, Corporatism” AHHHHHHH, look at what we have here. In fact he’s wanks off so hard to Capitalism that he doesn’t even accept ‘Crony Capitalism’, to him Corporatism isn’t even CAPITALISM! If you haven’t realised the whole ‘Not True’ argument is going to be dependent upon your worldview of what something is, you will argue that Capitalism is not ‘True’ today because of X number of reasons, but you will always argue that Socialism is just that, pure and simple, no prefixes. Yet they will be thinking the same about you. Do yourself a favour and either take the entire cake of what you support, not just the icing top, or have the common curtesy of acknowledging your opponents will be doing the same as you. Well except for me.

So in conclusion then, all I’ve found from these brazened titled videos the likes of “BEN SHAPIRO SODOMIZES HIS MOTHER” is little more than

- Viewing Capitalism from an Idealistic and Non-Existent POV. - Making simplistic/false claims regarding the nature of Socialism. - An overloading of rapid fire accusations used to pacify the opposition - Making total hypocrisies on his positions

Oh sure he’s charismatic, sure he’s loud and proud, but he’s also obtuse, an opportunist, and using his own language… a false prophet.

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