“Class War Not Culture War” Reviewed

Madeleine Johannsen has done the left a service. Her new book, Class War not Culture War, is exactly what socialists in Ireland need to read. Identity politics are proliferating and it is easy to get lost in the struggles. It is easy too, for those struggles to get lost. This book is a map of those struggles. It is also a map out of them.

Madeleine will be rightly praised. Class War not Culture War is meticulously researched. Its chapters are dialectically structured (showing the contradictory dance of opposites); she outlines in complex detail the “right wing populist” and “liberal” poles of the different culture war debates before resolving matters on the primary battleground of the class war.

It’s not that the wrongs and rights of the culture war don’t matter - they do, enormously; if you’re looking for some wild polemic throwing trans people and immigrants under the bus you won’t find it here. Madeleine is a working class warrior who has been fighting against right wing governments, racists, sexists, homophobes and transphobes for decades.

But the primary enemy remains capitalism and victory lies in working class solidarity: “We oppose racism because it divides the working class and diverts our focus away from the ruling class and the system. We oppose sexism and homophobia for the same reason. It is in the interest of the working class to fight against all oppression because our class needs allies in the struggle against capitalism.”

Gender

In the chapter on gender, Madeleine builds a sustained attack on biological determinism. Biological determinism means arguing that everything is determined by nature or our genes.

This tells trans people that they don’t really exist. It tells women that they belong in the home rearing children or that they can never be thin enough, beautiful enough, desirable enough. Madeleine advances the basic Marxist idea that policing of gender is all about the preservation of the nuclear family.

And the nuclear family is essential to capitalism. She points out that globally, $10 trillion worth of unpaid labour is carried out in the nuclear family. No corporation is going to foot that bill. No liberal democracy would make the rich pay. And it is poor women who carry out most of this work. Gender oppression is integral to capitalist exploitation. In other words, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia can only be fought to victory as class war.

Social Media and Fighting Right Wing Moral Panics

Capitalism is resourceful. Look at how it has commodified the contents of our heads and the impulses in our hearts and indentured so many of us as unpaid labourers producing that value everytime we use social media! Madeleine draws our attention to how polarisation in culture wars is so integral to the profitability of social media. Starting with Mark Fisher’s assertion that social media is “currently enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital” she argues not only for what socialists should do in that enemy territory but also how socialists should turn those struggles to class war.

She gives the example of right wing moral panics. The most toxic, rage-inducing ideas are the most productive of interactions: “The social media platforms literally incentivise the production of more and more extreme content”. Racist lies about immigrants being sexual deviants, spongers, or the pawns of a “great replacement” can spread like poison. Madeleine does not simply dismiss the harmful effect of such content. Words have potentially lethal real-world effects.

While opposed giving more power to the capitalist state she says the left must be absolutely determined to stand in solidarity with oppressed groups: “If free speech means stirring hatred against minorities we are against it. We will stand up against and shut down fascists when they try to organise in public”.

Moving past moralism - take sides, but take sides and win!

It is not enough, though simply to respond to these ideas with sloganeering or constant counter protests. Socialists need to get stuck in to class struggle and argue, debate, cajole. That is the only way to win: “Just because a worker once said something racist or sexist doesn’t mean that they should be condemned for all eternity. Instead we should be reaching out, argue hard but with the aim of convincing and winning workers to socialism, not pushing them away.”

To respond only with moralism from the left is to stay within the closed loop of the algorithmic profit-engine. Chastising people from the sidelines about their misuse of pronouns, for example, without taking a more radical approach as well may result in an antagonistic dialogue of the deaf. And this has another real-world effect of setting workers against each other: we must seek the intent behind a given utterance.

Failing to do so can amount to an unintended elitism: “ensuring that those with less education feel like they can’t speak at all. It’s about middle class people shutting up working class people.”

To repeat: throughout this book, Madeleine is relentless in actually taking the side of the oppressed in given “culture wars” but she is relentless too in demanding that socialists fight to win. We must not stop at criticism. We must seek to win working class people over to our view. We must forge working class solidarity to fight the common enemy of the capitalist class and their allies.

Revolutionary Theory

As I pointed out above it can be easy to get lost in the struggles of identity politics and it can be easy for those struggles to get lost. The capitalist system demands that we do not understand what is under our noses. To put it another way, “the ruling ideas of every age are the ideas of the ruling class”. Madeleine repeats Marx’s formulation more than once.

As socialists we need ideas that help us see what is under our noses. Without revolutionary ideas we are stuck in the moralistic back and forth of identity politics. Like any story told by the winning side, identity politics blames the victim. Socialists cannot get stuck in that trap because then we will be stuck with racism, islamophobia, gender phobia. And as long as we are stuck there we will be stuck with capitalism.

In this respect, “Class war not Culture War” is a rare gift. Madeleine gives accessible, faithful and practical introductory accounts of key Marxist ideas: She uses Marx’s four-part analysis of alienation to prise open social and psychological phenomena such as domestic violence & toxic masculinity while maintaining a position of absolute solidarity with the victims of both.

She gives a quick summary of Engels’ arguments in the “Family, Private Property and State” in order to trace the historical development of the oppression of women but also to map out how to overcome that oppression through class solidarity.

She also uses Engels as basis to examine how each of the (i) conservative/misogynistic right, (ii) trans exclusionary feminists and (iii) patriarchy-theory feminists all revive biological determinism in the service of maintaining gender oppression to perpetuate capitalism. In this way, she bypasses agitators from the opposing poles in identity wars by grounding her own theory and action in Marxism.

She outlines Russian philosopher Voloshinov’s account of language as indicative of underlying social conditions so as to both acknowledge the weight of language and to point to how it is determined by class struggle.

Race

Her analysis of race shows the same determination to take sides with the oppressed but to do so on the basis of class struggle. There’s no point in fighting unless you are prepared to win! She traces the development of racist ideas that emerged in the wake of colonialism. Ideas concerning the supposed inferiority of black and brown people were vital to justify horrors such as the slave trade.

They are vital today to justify the mass incarceration of black people in the for-profit prison system in the US. To justify the endemic racism against Travellers in Ireland. To justify the stain upon humanity that is the Israeli genocide on the Palestinian people.

Madeleine is profoundly aware of the endurance of racism and islamophobia. She gives example after example from history, from the world today, from her own personal experience. She is intensely committed to fighting these. To do so, she seeks to find common ground for working class solidarity.

First, she reminds us that the concept of race is not a scientific concept. From a biological and sociological perspective there is only the human race. But Madeleine does not stop there. She criticises “privilege theory” as it is blind to the realities that black and brown capitalists themeselves benefit from racist division because it divides the working class and keeps workers’ minds off challenging the capitalist system. It is in Marx, however, that she bases her assault on racism.

She gives the example of Marx’s description of anti-Irish racism as: “the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this”.

Dividing with cruelty, killing with kindness

Once again, though, the dialectical structure of Madeleine’s book allows her to describe the complexity of how capitalism uses race. If they can’t divide with cruelty, they’ll kill with kindness!

She gives plenty of examples of how corporations co-opt social movements to launder what they’re really doing. Amazon, Nike, Microsoft, Ben and Jerry’s all spend money on anti-racist marketing but expend far more effort in union busting, exploitation of workers, profiteering. She sees the same impulse in how Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil jumped on Repeal and the Same-Sex Marriage referendums to “soften” their well-deserved image as landlord and bosses’ parties.

Class War

Madeleine’s final chapter on class builds upon the primary Marxist opposition between capital and labour by attempting to account for differences between the working class proper and the petty bourgeoisie who simultaneously lie “above” and “below” the working class.

Those of the former with left wing politics: “college educated petty bourgeoisie…the corporate managers, academics and other professionals, for example in the NGO sector” can disorganise the working class by over emphasis on identity politics. Identity politics can sound radical but will never challenge the system that the petty bourgeoisie need for their material base. This is a particular characteristic of some of the left in Ireland.

Those from the latter grouping - taxi drivers, small business owners, self employed - do not as a matter of course, enter into collective economic action and so tend to find group identity in the nuclear family, nationalism and potentially with far right politics and fascism.

“They can all pretend to be anti establishment in some way while in reality promoting ideas that pose no real threat to the establishment at all. One section ties the shoelaces of the working class movement, while the other wants to burn us in ovens.”

For Madeleine it is only the working class that can, as a class, overcome capitalism. It is simply not in the interests of the capitalists to do away with capitalism. Neither is it likely that either section of the petty bourgeoisie, can as a class, collectively organise to overthrow this system.

Madeleine sets out the basic Marxist argument that it is only those who produce all the wealth of society, those who do not own productive property, those with only their labour to sell and nothing to lose but their chains who have the interest and the ability to become a revolutionary class.

The Challenge for Socialists

In neither case does Madeleine make a deterministic argument. She never argues that class cannot be transcended. She does argue that class cannot be transcended through the closed loop of identity politics decoupled from class war. This is her message for socialists:

“Socialists have to resist being dragged solely into the culture war and forgetting about the class war. That doesn’t mean that we don’t challenge racism, sexism and homophobia but we do it in order to unite our class against the real enemy. We do it as part of the struggle against the system, not as a separate struggle.” She has written a profound, courageous and important book.

Buy it today on our website store. Then join the Reds in the class war.