This is the second installment of a three-part article. I won’t re-hash the points and caveats I made in my previous article, rather you can read it here.
In an editorial I wrote for Planet: the Welsh Internationalist magazine in 2018, I laid out embryonic proposals for conceiving of a universalist politics which serves and can be supported by the majority while empowering women and minorities. This would be a politics which diverged from the false universalism of the past (which usually had as its default a particular construct of human) while also avoiding the neoliberal, elitist modes of ‘HR identity politics’, and the censorious, cultish excesses of US-style social justice warriors:
‘This needs to entail a renewed politics of the majority, a universalism which isn’t emblematised by the white, straight, male. One that is rather the strength in numbers of diverse groups collaged into a formidable majority, that is supported by the mutual aid of solidarity, the idea that we can’t be free unless we are all free.’
I argued that this alternative form of universalism, one which is inextricably enmeshed with women’s and minority rights, could be found at the core of Jeremy Corbyn’s and Leanne Wood’s politics as leaders of Labour and Plaid, albeit that there was scope to develop this further.
The ‘vision’ within the Planet editorial wasn’t entirely mine, of course. It was partly inspired by conversations with friends from different backgrounds, and also drew obliquely from, and was emboldened by, work by (e.g.) Mark Fisher, Dawn Foster and Ambalavaner Sivanandan.
Since 2018, these attempts to disentangle and extract a progressive identity politics from problematic manifestations of ‘woke’, and renew it as part of a broader left-wing strategy have been refined and clarified further. In the last 8 years, a number of public intellectuals such as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Asad Haider, Jodi Dean, Emma Dabiri, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser have published important perspectives on this issue (which differ in the nature of their scepticism towards what can be caricatured as ‘woke culture’, but all offer a – usually class-based – alternative that doesn’t abandon it entirely). A particularly constructive example of these being Ash Sarkar’s bestselling Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War.
No longer do we privately hold nebulous, gut-level misgivings that something has gone strangely awry with how we interact with each other politically, rather a whole vocabulary has developed to express this publicly. Some of these terms remain rather arcane (albeit useful): ‘elite capture’ and ‘epistemic deference’, anyone? But others have become popularised as we’ve wised up to the abuse of identity for elite or factional ends (and to its appropriation by the Right, as Minority Rule points out): the ‘weaponising’ of identity, ‘bad faith interpretations’, ‘language-policing’, ‘cry-bullying’, and – hurray! – widespread Millennial/Gen Z repudiation of the neoliberal ‘girl boss feminism’ that so tainted women’s rights in recent decades.
In UK party politics, this is articulated by Green politicians such as Zack Polanski and Hannah Spencer who refuse to mute their support for women’s and minority rights; but also foreground economic inequality and the rights of the ‘99%’, and talk of the need for a more empathetic approach to those in the electorate who have been taken in by Far Right narratives, or just ‘say the wrong thing’, than that associated with ‘cancel culture’ and Millennial scolding.
In Wales since 2018, attempts to forge a new and more meaningfully progressive approach to identity and class have also flourished. In an event to mark 50 years of Planet, asylum and LGBT+ rights lawyer Hussein Said made a powerful case to not ‘indulge in privilege politics’ but rather unite against the ruling class, who are the ones really responsible for the most deadly manifestations of inequality such as neo-imperial war and environmental damage. Simon Brooks’ Hanes Cymry: Lleiafrifoedd Ethnig a’r Gwareiddiad Cymraeg discussed the complexities of multi-ethnicity in the context of Welsh-language culture. In his references to breaking ‘with the old political group think of the liberal left’ and Welsh Labour ‘managing and appeasing’, is it too much to hope for that Rhun ap Iorwerth and his team have read Dan Evans’ ground-breaking work A Nation of Shopkeepers: the Unstoppable Rise of the Petty Bourgeoisie? Evans’ class analysis identifies the finger-wagging ‘professional-managerial class’ who are driving many to the Far Right through simultaneously overseeing a decline in material conditions and public sphere, while increasingly language-policing and micro-managing workers and clients.
In short, left-leaning positions on identity politics have evolved substantially in the last few years. Why, then, is there such an urgent need to revisit and disseminate an alternative to the ‘id pol’ of the late 2010s and early 2020s in the lead up to the 7th of May? Because the Right are feeding off the situation that most people haven’t been made aware that anything has changed since so-called ‘Peak Woke’ of 2020, and are drawing on a grotesque caricature of that discourse to boot.
The issue here is not only reaching those thinking of voting Reform, but also those more middle-of-the-road voters of the ‘99%’ who would recoil from Farage and not be necessarily driven by frustration and anger, but would turn to the Tories, centrists or disengage with the electoral process partly due to misguided mood music (derived from right-wing propaganda) that the left-wing parties are not acting in their interests, rather for the benefit of a remote ‘caste’ of minority groups (or for an equally ‘alien’, younger, often more educated generation) that they now think they have little in common with.
In the final instalment of this article I’ll look further at all this, and indulge the ultimate cliché of lefty article conclusions: What Is To Be Done (In A Few Sentences).