Since the 2010s, the world has been rocked by multiple waves of struggle against oppression — from movements for reproductive freedom, against gender-based violence, to Black Lives Matter.
At the same time, we’re facing a growing and emboldened right, determined to roll back all the gains made over decades. Facing up to the right-wing backlash means asking what approach is needed to stop the clock from being turned back.
No concessions!
We believe Marxism is the approach needed today more than ever. Genuine Marxism means steadfast opposition to all oppression, whether that be racism, sexism, transphobia, ableism, national oppression or any other form.
Unfortunately, this is not always the default approach of a section of the ‘left’. George Galloway and his ‘Workers Party of Britain’ has, for instance, in recent years taken to directly emulating aspects of right-wing culture war politics. In the recent Runcorn and Helsby by-election, their election campaign was based around the slogan of “stop the boats, stop the wars”.
Less overtly horrendous, but still deeply wrong, is the approach from other groups of sidelining or dismissing questions of women’s, racial or LGBTQ+ oppression. This sometimes takes the form of, for example, describing fights for trans rights as a ‘distraction’ from ‘real class issues’.
Instead, these groups argue that the socialist movement should focus solely on economic ‘bread and butter’ issues. Often this comes with the false claim that focussing on demands of the oppressed will ‘divide’ and ‘alienate’ the working class. This is fundamentally mistaken. Fighting back against oppression doesn’t divide the working class; failing to challenge it does.
As we enter into a new era of militarism and war, for example, we’re seeing influencers like Andrew Tate’s propaganda about the need for young men to become “alphas” and adopt a “warrior mindset”. These harmful ideas ultimately always benefit the exploiting ruling class, whose system relies on the unpaid domestic and reproductive labour which is primarily done by women, and which can also be used to weaken the solidarity of working-class people.
Likewise, if the media and courts are allowed to pin the blame for gender-based violence on trans people with their bathroom witchhunt, this can actually strengthen the hand of the right to attack the rights of all women, along with the wider working class.
Identity politics and Marxism
Marxists stand in solidarity at all times with whoever is fighting oppression. As part of this, we discuss, develop and advocate for what we believe to be the most effective methods in the struggle. At times, this means engaging in debate about which ideas are most useful in the fight against oppression. This can include debating other theories which run counter to Marxism.
Over the last decade and a half, feminist and anti-racist movements in particular have seen the rise of new frameworks of understanding oppression. Especially concentrated on campuses and in academia, these ideas include intersectionality and privilege theory, which both fall under the broad umbrella of identity politics.
What is most appealing in these ideas is how they can be used to describe people’s experiences and ‘call out’ oppression in a clear and uncompromising way. On one level, they are a positive expression of the desire to challenge all traces of oppressive language and behaviour.
But what they generally lack is a foundational, class-based analysis of where oppression comes from and how to fight it. Their roots are in academic postmodernism — a way of looking at the world which rejects having an overall framework or ‘grand narrative’ for understanding society outside of individual experiences. This often leads these theories towards individualistic and ultimately pessimistic conclusions which point away from radical struggle.
Rather than beginning its analysis from a view of class society and how it generates and reinforces oppression, as Marxists do, identity politics begins from the opposite standpoint. It asserts the idea that the only way that oppression can be understood is through having direct, unmediated ‘lived experience’ of it.
Of course, understanding the different ways oppression can be experienced by individuals is crucial. But individual experience can only tell you so much about the way society is structured. Within the Black community, there are those who support the ideas of ‘Black capitalism’ and those who support socialist ideas.
Within the trans community, there are those fighting to reclaim Pride from the corporations and those who engage in pinkwashing. Yet in both cases, all those involved will have had experiences of oppression in their daily lives.
People’s identities do not necessarily determine their politics. Kemi Badenoch for example, despite being a Black woman, espouses the worst ideas of the reactionary culture wars, including all the racist tropes. On the other hand, we can look to Jeremy Corbyn, an old white man, who has proven to be consistently anti-racist and on the side of the Palestinian people. These examples show how people can think and act outside of their identity and act in solidarity.
Why do we talk about class?
Any understanding of fighting oppression will always be limited if it doesn’t root itself in a class analysis of society. This is because the capitalist system will always need oppression to maintain itself.
For example, the bosses will simultaneously use super-exploited migrant labour to boost profits and try to divide workers by stirring up racism, blaming migrants for the race to the bottom in wages and conditions which the capitalists themselves created.
This same capitalist class has women (especially women of colour) working in sectors that are systematically underpaid, underfunded and undervalued, such as care work, nursing and cleaning. Women under capitalism face a ‘dual burden’ — of both precarious, low-paid work, and the additional unpaid labour of cooking, cleaning and childcare. By propping this up with the ideology of the ‘traditional’ nuclear family, the capitalist class is able to save enormous sums of money each year.
On the flip side, there is the working class. Class, for Marxists, is not about identity — it is about our economic position in society. Regardless of how we see ourselves, those of us who work for an employer for a wage, and rely on this wage to survive, are part of the working class.
Class is significant not just as a source of marginalisation or oppression, but as a source of huge potential collective power. This is because it is the working class that makes society run. Every floor that is mopped, every brick in a building, every child taught in a classroom — none of these would be possible without the daily labour of the working class.
In the right-wing media, to be ‘working class’ is often equated with being white and male. GB News and other outlets routinely talk about the ‘forgotten, left-behind white working class’, as if Black or Asian workers are somehow privileged by comparison!
The working class is, by its very nature, diverse. A Black woman cleaner working at a university is just as much part of the working class as a white male manual worker in a factory is. These narratives, used to divide the working class along racial lines, are also designed to fragment and destroy solidarity. Their purpose is to stop us from drawing the conclusion that workers of all backgrounds have a shared material interest in fighting to change society.
Anti-oppression movements
Working-class people of all backgrounds ultimately have a shared interest in the abolition of the capitalist system that is based on their own exploitation. But that doesn’t mean that all sections of the working class will draw radical conclusions at the same speed, or that workers can’t be influenced by reactionary ideas.
In the recent period, sections of the working class which suffer oppression under capitalism have been some of the most combative. As well as women workers and workers of colour playing a disproportionately large role in strikes and union action, there have also been massive and crucially important social movements in recent years.
Marxists emphasise the potential role the workers’ movement can play in acting as the “tribune of the oppressed” to use the words of Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin. But with often conservative trade union leaderships failing to play this role, it’s inevitable that the movements against oppression which have developed in the last period have not had a working-class leadership.
Often these have been what Marxists would call ‘cross-class’ movements, involving many working-class people alongside people from the middle class and even some representatives of the ruling class, usually overrepresented in their leadership.
Marxists don’t stand aside from these movements. We actively take part in them, while fighting for a working-class approach to liberation. Rather than the dead-end liberal strategy of placing individual people of an oppressed background in ‘high places’ (CEOs, MPs, police commissioners etc), we counterpose to this a class-struggle approach.
We raise the need for a mass fightback against racism, misogyny, transphobia and ableism, while addressing the root causes in the capitalist system. We point to working-class demands which are needed — for a fully-funded, trans-inclusive and publicly-run NHS, for free, high-quality universal childcare, for a £20-an-hour minimum wage and mass building of council housing — all paid for with massive taxes on the rich and wider socialist policies.
Marxists also point to the unions as a crucial avenue through which oppression can be fought. Recent research from the Trades Union Congress found there is still a shocking 13.1% pay gap between
Unions are organised expressions of workers’ collective power. When they organise mass strike action can not only raise wages and conditions, but also raise the confidence of people to challenge oppression inside and outside the workplace.
In 1968, women at Ford Dagenham went on strike for pay equality, through which they won a significant victory, including legal reform, with the introduction of the Equal Pay Act 1970. The strike also helped challenge the perception of unions as ‘men’s organisations’.
In the 1984–85 miners’ strike, Women Against Pit Closures was set up. While it was established to raise support for the men on strike, the women’s experience of class struggle increased their confidence to raise their own voices, and in many cases to challenge the sexist attitudes among the men within their communities.
Likewise, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners were instrumental in swinging the National Union of Mineworkers behind the cause of gay rights in the 1980s. The Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King in his final years, was similarly drawn to the trade union movement as a key avenue in the fight for Black liberation.
He summed up the reasons why in 1967, when he said: “We aren’t merely struggling to integrate a lunch counter now. We’re struggling to get some money to be able to buy a hamburger or a steak when we get to the counter.”
No liberation under capitalism
Malcolm X famously once said “you cannot have capitalism without racism”. He was right, and the exact same goes for transphobia, women’s oppression and ableism. We will not end these until we end capitalism.
This doesn’t mean we should simply sit and wait for the revolution before we fight back. Struggles against oppression today can win important gains, even under capitalism. But as long as this system exists, the ruling class will seek to take them away. The minimal progress for trans rights over decades, for example, has been chopped away by the government, as the billionaire media looks for an easy scapegoat.
This is why anti-oppression struggles need to also be socialist. Socialism means seizing hold of the enormous wealth of the capitalists, along with the means of production, and placing it in the hands of ordinary working-class people.
Bringing the giant corporations and banks into democratic public ownership would free up the resources needed to wipe out hunger and poverty. Instead of billions going to wars, a democratic socialist plan would instead address the daily needs of working — class people and the planet.
From providing free childcare, to a well-funded public care sector, as well as state facilities like public laundries and restaurants, the basis would be laid for capitalism’s enforced and restrictive nuclear family to disappear over time, as women’s freedom from the constraints of family life would be lifted. This would be replaced with genuine freedom for people to enter and leave relationships on a voluntary basis, as well as to express and explore their gender identities without stigma.
By ending this system based on competition and exploitation, socialism would lay the basis for a genuine wholesale change of attitudes and behaviour. Of course, this wouldn’t be automatic. Centuries of inequality would leave a heavy imprint on society, and would need to be actively challenged. But by establishing a new way of running society based on solidarity, real democracy and cooperation, the basis would be laid for oppression to be finally rooted out once and for all.
