[lbo-talk] Michaels, Against Diversity

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Oct 5 14:21:50 PDT 2009


Julio Huato writes ' anti-racism and anti-sexism are top in the political agenda of the global left. If you ask me, they are left-wing politics on the cutting edge. '

The picture is more complicated. I can remember when the left, reformist and radical, here in Britain was determinedly hostile to all oppression issues on the grounds that they were a 'distraction' from 'class politics', or sometimes 'bread and butter issues'. I mean sometime around 1977. Then, if you raised a political issue at a trades council, like the occupation of northern Ireland, or racism, the officers would rule your motion out of order, on the grounds that it was political, and therefore should be discussed by the Labour Party, and not in the union. When race riots broke out in Britain in 1980, the trotskyist Socialist Worker argued fiercely that they were not race riots, but a united uprising against unemployment by black and white.

That 'classist' outlook was an evasion. Their view of class was reductive, based on a distinctive section of the organised working class, exclusive of women and migrants. In this country, it was the Communist Party of Great Britain, especially when its industrial section was dominated by some powerful left trade union leaders, who had an effective veto over policy, that summed up that approach.

The position today is quite different. The Communist Party of Great Britain went through a sea change in the 1980s. Where they had turned their backs on the issues of oppression in the name of organised labour in the sixties and seventies, in the eighties they tacked the other way. Suddenly the party went all Gramscian, feminist and multi-cultural. That seemed like a belated acknowledgement that the New Left had it right. But actually it was just another kind of evasion. They used those issues of feminism and multi-culturalism to distance themselves from the organised labour movement, just as they had previously used the authority of organised labour to restrict their conception of what was a political issue.

What was happening in the Communist Party was just a microcosm of the left generally. The organised working class was shrinking in importance, and instead the left became preoccupied with anti-fascism, child abuse, pornography, overwhelmingly about 'identity' issues.

The British labour government of the late nineties and early millennium passed legislation against stalkers, equalised the age of consent for gay men, created more legislation against discrimination - but steadfastly refused to lift the previous government's laws against trade union organisation.

So I think Julio has a point when he says that 'antiracism and antisexism' are cutting issues for the left, but that is because the left has reconciled itself to capitalism, and is mostly preoccupied with managing identity issues.



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