📚 Finished reading Minority Rule by Ash Sarkar.
Ash Sarkar, of Novara Media and “I’m literally a communist you idiot” fame, has written a book, which I added to my list of things to read as part of my quest to try and instil in myself some real hope that there was something - anything - the political left could figure out how to do in order deal the perma-crisis that it feels like we’ve all inhabited for at least a few years now.
I’m very glad I read it. To be clear, it doesn’t present a detailed blueprint for what should happen tomorrow - but nor does it pretend to. But I feel that it at least correctly and articulately identifies the key problem, which is more than one can say about a lot of writing on the subject (imho, of course).
The book’s title “Minority Rule” comes from the identically named concept, which she defines as:
…the paranoid fear that identity minorities and progressives are conniving to oppress majority populations.
aka the culture war. This is the whole yawnsome anti-“woke” anti-“liberal elite” shtick. Sure, the prioritisation of the target to most acutely vilify shifts over time. Right now, in the UK, it feels very much like we are all supposed to believe that it’s asylum seekers that are conniving with [insert group you don’t like] to reign above the poor beleaguered British native. That is to say that we somehow imagine that the relatively tiny of group of folk present in our country that have the least power and resources by basically all imaginable measures are our true oppressors; the real reason our lives are difficult, the real reason our country is crumbling. It’s all their fault.
In the past (and still in the present to a large extent) of course it was trans people. Or poor people. Or immigrants as a whole. Or gay people. Or Black people. Or the Irish. You get the picture. Different target, same inane argument.
Regarding the most salient target in recent UK times - asylum seekers - she writes:
How did a word which should otherwise invite feelings of sympathy, solidarity and welcome become a trigger for repulsion, hostility and suspicion?
Sarkar argues that the majoritarian of people are actually perfectly right to think their lives are an unnecessary struggle, almost unbearable at some times for some people - although she’s no particular fan of the conceptual prioritisation of lived experience itself.
And also that we’re right to fear that a small shadowy group of folk are largely responsible for our dismal conditions. But that many of us intuited the wrong group: it’s not some penniless person taking life-or-death risks in order to escape from their foreign torturer that means you have to pay most of your salary out for your crappy rented accommodation, and that’s if you’re lucky. It is the often faceless rich and powerful elites that hold sway.
These same elites proactively use the culture-war tactic of instigating minority rule moral panic in order to keep what is actually the vast majority of the country if we use her preferred definitions - the working-class - divided.
Wealth may not trickle down, but hatred certainly does.
Sadly their efforts worked all too well.
She critiques also many of the aspects of a certain type of modernish day leftist that have been much lampooned by rather less sympathetic authors - fighting amongst themselves about who is the most oppressed, refusing to work with other groups unless they agree 100% with their priorities and so on that have furthered fractured the home of the traditional workers' movement.
All this - and indeed the malign purpose of the culture war itself in her view - has been weaponised by the right and the forces of capital in order to create a fear-hatred loop of distraction large enough that we spend our time arguing about often undefinable “cultural” stuff whilst never finding time to stop to think about our much more quantifiable, and often much more impactful, shared material conditions.
Per the author. materialism is a critical idea to understand. She defines it as:
…the idea that it’s real-world conditions that shape consciousness, and not the other way around: so if you want to understand a person, or a whole community of people, you should look at the distribution of wealth, resources and access to power.
At present we almost never stand back in solidarity with our class as a whole, mutually disgusted at the incredible economic disparities we increasingly see between the poorest and the richest folk in the UK. Or even between the actually a fair bit above average and the richest for that matter.
In her view. we waste a tremendous amount of time and energy “debating”, for example, what bathroom someone who presents as female should use. This stops us from rising up in revolution predicated on the fact that an outrageous number people of all races, genders, sexes, sexualities et al live a cold and hungry existence in one of the richest countries in the world - whilst the same time a few elites makes the same amount of money by doing approximately nothing - or worse than nothing - overnight as we would make in a year.
Sarkar has also a lot to say about how the modern media - traditional and social - landscape has tremendously exacerbated this problem. Namely:
- A decline in original newsgathering.
- An increase in commentary around the remaining news.
- Social media changing how conventional media operates.
- A decrease in the threshold for ‘newsworthy’.
- Audience reaction as used as a measure of impact, rather than useful context.
Which bi-directionally influences the modern-day practice of politics, and the apparent increasing feeblisation of those supposedly in government:
Politicians behave more like pundits, signalling their stance on social issues to be cheered by sections of the media, rather than people who actually have the power to transform conditions in the country at large.
After making fairly searing critique of the modern form of indemnity politics as practiced by some of the recent left, she goes on to show, correctly in my view, how now a particular common type of right wing politico has adopted exactly the same style of identity politics despite all their whining and whinging about it.
In her telling, the left enabled this to some extent. The right is able to weaponize identity politics because, contrary to its roots, we created a version that prioritises individual experiences over collective realities.
..identity politics has been appropriated, weakened and warped to become a force that actively inhibits the causes it’s meant to advance
As seems always the case in the modern world: behaviour X is horrible when you do it; behaviour X is great when I do it.
An important consideration: the result not only harms the minorities its weaponised against - but all of us.
A salient example of this to me is the current debate over the European Convention on Human Rights legislation as enacted in the UK. What seems constantly missed in the incessant mass media debates over here is that, yes, laws based on the ECHR can be used to protect the human rights of immigrants to the UK, although in practice they very, very rarely actually are. But in theory, yes, and that is because they are human.
As are you and I. These same laws are what protect your rights and the rights of your family. Do you really want to give all that up just for a very very slightly higher chance of kicking a few people you probably only ever heard of because someone posted a random article half full of misinformation on Facebook out of the country? What makes you think abolishing the ECHR would actually have the effect you want? And even if it did, do you really trust all governments, present and future, to respect your rights even when there’s no legislation that enforces them?
There’s criticism for both the right and the left wing of politics in this book. I expect that there are folk on either side that will have a lot of strong words for the author, although past clashes would suggest she is probably better able to handle it than most of us. Nonetheless, I think it does us all well to read this book from start to finish and think about the causes of our current ideological conflict. If you’re an evil billionaire, sure, you will find little sympathetic to your interests here. But that’s OK, your material needs are already more than met and you can live in your class-conscious bubble and continue to delude yourself into thinking “well actually billionaires are the oppressed class” in your descent into a corrupted form of identity politics if you must (or perhaps become a patriotic millionaire if you have retained your humanity). For the rest of us, quite the opposite.
All the common phrases on this matter sound a bit trite and over-used. But they’re nonetheless true. We have more in common. And perhaps only by acknowledging our shared material status and engaging in some kind of solidarity-driven class conscious politics will we able to do something about the things that make our day-to-day life so hard in the first place.
The “white working class” is of course a real thing, and race - no matter how contrived in principle certainly has a huge impact on many people’s lives in practice. But whilst we’re 100% rage-baited into thinking about the “white” part of the phrase - conducting solely “cultural” rather than class based analysis - we will not improve any of the challenges of deprivation, educational attainment, inequality and so on that many working class families of all types face.
…no one’s talking about the class bit of white working class. It is, fundamentally, a concept that’s intended to stoke the politics of racial resentment
Resulting in no segment of the working class seeing their lives materially improved.
After all, who does actually do you more personal harm - a desperate and traumatised person living in hope that our country will make good on its agreed obligation to allow those most in need to live in and make valuable contributions to our country - or the bank that wants to take your house off you because your employer won’t pay you nearly enough to afford the mortgage payments that your bank just decided should skyrocket?
Who hurts you more? A person who was born with the genitals of one sex but lives their lives peacefully presenting as a different gender - something you may well never have reason to even know - or the monopolistic water company that constantly increases the expensive loans you have to take out in order to cover your bills, whilst polluting the shared natural resource of one of life’s few actual essentials - water - with literal sewage without consequence - whilst at the same time transforming multi-millionaires into billionaires?
What then is the solution? Details are necessarily a little sparse in this book, which to its credit doesn’t in the slightest pretend it is giving out a step-by-step blueprint for the future. There is clearly a lot still yet to be figured out, especially given the massive decline in the institutions associated with the leftist or working class movements of yore. But, to her, and I think my, telling, the answer must surely lie in solidarity.
If we feel alienated, disempowered or lonely, it’s because a project of intense atomisation has made us that way.
A project that tremendously benefited in particular the neo-liberal right of course. Sarkar implores us to focus on the material harms that are being done to us, our friends and our fellow countryfolk on the basis that this will promote economic fairness, but also so much more.
When we are conscious of ourselves as a majority class, we can begin to take back all that was stolen from us – including our sense of comradeship with one another.
