By Andy Yorke
The rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party and Trump’s victory have seen the Revolutionary Communist Party downplay and excuse reactionary ideas in the working class in its 26 February issue of The Communist. The RCP has its origins in Ted Grant’s Militant tradition, a trend that has always displayed what Lenin called ‘economism’, an opportunist method that avoids sharp political questions of the class struggle in order to emphasise workers’ economic struggle as the way to supposedly unite the class — a claim Lenin explicitly rejected.
Two articles display this method to its full, on Reform and ‘The death of “woke”’, which echoes any number of pundits from the Right to Blue Labour. Although ‘wokery’ is put in quotation marks and linked to Trump and the capitalists, the RCP then effectively sides with them, insisting that ‘wokery must be rejected emphatically. Not only has it alienated the working class and offered no solutions to their problems, but it has failed even on its own terms.’
Wrong target
Accepting the hostile language of the right wing — ‘wokery’, ‘political correctness’, ‘idpol’— is always unhealthy in a left wing organisation. Trump is using such terms to rip up diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) protections for minority workers and women, attacking transgender people, abortion rights and, of course, the huge immigrant community. The obvious link between these attacks and the right’s ‘anti-woke’ crusade that legitimates and incites them is not acknowledged, and the article has no clear statement defending the rights of the oppressed. Quoting a banker saying, ‘I feel liberated. We can say “retard” and “pussy” without the fear of getting cancelled’ all the IMT can respond with is a sarcastic ‘inspiring stuff’.
Communists should always make clear their solidarity with the struggles of the oppressed, before presenting a Marxist critique of feminist, intersectionality or queer currents and politics. While it is true that these theories are rooted in bourgeois ideology — as is trade unionism by the way (Lenin) — a shared opposition to oppression is essential in order to win the many activists who accept such theories to communism. We cannot explain how these ideologies hinder our ability to root out oppression if we downplay the importance of doing so, describing reactionary ideas in the working class as simply ‘superficial’ as the anti-woke article does, to be swept away by the joint struggle for jobs and wages.
Even more far-fetched, it states ‘woke politics is deeply unpopular even amongst the minorities it supposedly serves. It is a big part of why Kamala Harris performed worse amongst Black, Latino, and women voters than even Joe Biden did.’ This wilfully distorts voting behaviour. The millions of workers who turned away from the Democrats did so in response to that party’s record on jobs, wages, inflation and, very importantly, Palestine, not to reject ‘wokery’ overall.
Indeed, the RCP tends to exonerate those workers who voted for Trump. Alan Woods in a subsequent online article, ‘The meaning of Donald Trump’, makes the dangerous claim that when Trump fails to deliver jobs and prosperity for this layer, ‘this will push them to the left… some of the boldest, most dedicated and self-sacrificing militants of the future communist movement in America will consist precisely of workers who have passed through the school of Trumpism’. No doubt ‘some’ disillusioned Trump supporters may ‘turn to communism’ if a powerful class conscious movement with a communist vanguard exists to attract them. But building that force must rally, and to begin with, be overwhelmingly composed of, those fighting Trump’s attacks on the democratic, economic and social gains of the working class and the racially and gender oppressed. The latter, most of whom are workers too, may well move more rapidly to resist Trump’s attacks, alerted by his sneering at ‘woke’ and their ‘identity’ (consciousness) as black, Latinx, women, gender diverse people who have suffered historic discrimination in the USA.
What, after all, did ‘woke’ originally mean? For black militants in the US, it meant are you aware of the reality of your oppression by the ruling white society, conscious of the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and its survival in discrimination, policing, etc. It was taken up by women and other oppressed layers. To see it as ‘dividing the working class’ is to ignore the fact that our class is already objectively divided, and it is the task of the revolutionary party to fight to overcome this, by being the ‘tribune of the people, not a trade union secretary’ (Lenin). This is the means by which the revolutionary party can lead all layers oppressed by capitalism, rallying them under the leadership of the advanced layers of the working class.
Those who voted for Trump are not some sort of vanguard in waiting because they fell for his attacks on liberal identity politics. Quite the opposite. They are the more backward parts of the working class. While Trump is no Nazi, this is remarkably close to Third Period Stalinism’s belief that those attracted to Hitler were more revolutionary than the millions of Social Democratic workers and therefore, once they realised that Hitler had deceived them, would rally to the communist party. Hence its disastrous prediction that, ‘after Hitler, it will be our turn next’.
Sadly, history provides no such comfort blanket. The enraged petit-bourgeoisie and lumpen layers, dragging a section of backward workers behind them, may well draw the conclusion that a more extreme ‘leader’ is needed and follow the real American fascists. If the ‘revolutionary communists’ have failed to confront their reactionary social views in the preceding years, then there would be no barrier to their trajectory further to the right. In this sense, the RCP’s opportunism if taken up will disarm us in future battles.
The RCP’s one-sided hostility to liberal feminism and anti-racism also leads it to reject policies such as positive discrimination which are those currents’ main strategy against inequality. They claim they are tokenistic and only benefit ‘girl-boss’ CEOs and middle class professionals.
While such policies are indeed crude and limited, they were adopted in the face of stiff resistance and still protect wide swathes of workers, especially in the public sector. Indeed, the article uses the continued black-white wealth gap to show the failure of these policies. Looking at the gap in wages, it fell up to 2007 but has since doubled. Black men in the US currently earn 24% less than white men; for black women the gap is 21%: hardly a minor discrepancy, and surely abolishing DEI policies will make the situation worse.
For Marxists, the point is not to slipstream the Right as it rips up such limited protections but to build strong union organisation and a fighting policy that unites workers in struggle over all aspects of their class interests, including reducing inequality within the working class. The fight for workers’ control — not only over working conditions and pay but over hiring and firing, with the aim of opening the books — will expose all the techniques and methods used to divide workers while maximising profits. Then workers will be in a position to decide which policies are no longer needed or have become dysfunctional.
Populism and class
The article on Reform shows similar distortions. It refers to a poll of Reform voters showing their support for nationalising water and rail, for workers getting a bigger share and other anti-business and anti-rich attitudes. It claims that only 16% voted Tory in the last election; ‘many more are ordinary workers, indignant towards the system and its defenders’.
This attempt to interpret support for Reform as working class and to claim that it does not ‘really represent a shift to the right within British society’ fails completely. The article deliberately ignores Farage’s decades-long hostility to immigration and his links to the European and US right wing. In fact, the poll shows that Reform voters (80% of whom voted Tory in 2019) are way to the right of the ‘general public’ on ‘traditional British values’, defence, immigration and Trump (see graph).
Reform’s strategy is to gain electoral support for a pro-big business programme, as Trump has done, exploiting the crisis of the mainstream reformist or liberal parties to find new voters. Its main support has been big Tory hard-right donors, more conservative older or retired voters (some working class, most not) particularly outside the big multiracial cities, and the squeezed petty bourgeoisie.
Dangerously, both the American and British populists and far right have recently had success in breaking into layers beyond that core support, significantly among young men, with clever social media campaigns that don’t just attack liberalism but also trans people, women and the rest of the oppressed, often using vicious humour.
Communists should not concede an inch to such ideas but ‘patiently explain’, using class arguments as a lever to break apart such ideas. This can only work if it is combined at the same time with a defence of the oppressed and explicit rejection of the ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric of the right. The RCP’s selective presentation of Reform’s base and the real condition of the socially oppressed is designed to shore up its flawed theory of class and oppression, rather than to chart a revolutionary way forward.
Privilege and Lenin
‘The Death of Woke’ tries to paint the Right’s agenda as a ‘handful of MAGA mavericks’ using ‘anti-woke rhetoric’ to battle the liberal establishment. In reality it is a central plank of their political programme. Opposition to abortion rights and anti-LGBT+ policies are long-standing right wing projects to shore up the bourgeois family, cut the welfare state, and regiment the working class for the new militarism.
Rather than duck these burning issues, communists have to be in the forefront of fighting for the workers’ movement to take up the cause of the oppressed with a revolutionary action programme of concrete demands. This must include special forms of organisation, like a working class women’s movement, that the communist movement, including Lenin, stood for.
The RCP’s 2024 programme does the opposite. It contains only one point dealing with oppression and not a word about trans rights, immigrants or police violence. We need to ‘patiently explain’ to younger men — including some who are black or latino in the US — that male supremacist ideals and freedom of action are not just wrong and oppressive — which they are — but part of a project to make them poorer and more exploited.
In What is to be Done, Lenin took aim at economism, saying, ‘We have shown that the Economists do not altogether repudiate “politics”, but that they are constantly straying from the Social-Democratic to the trade-unionist conception of politics… Is it true that, in general, the economic struggle “is the most widely applicable means” of drawing the masses into the political struggle? It is entirely untrue. Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle, is not one whit less “widely applicable” as a means of “drawing in” the masses.’
The only way for workers to take real steps towards genuine class consciousness is to oppose all traces of oppressive attitudes and chauvinism amongst workers in order to make them fit for revolutionary struggle. Lenin, in his writings on the national question, repeatedly drove this point home in his polemics against ‘Great Russian chauvinism’, rejecting ‘all privileges’ while also insisting that the workers from oppressed groups should reject any separatist, exclusivist claims of their own petit-bourgeois and bourgeois nationalists.
Not either/or
The RCP’s conclusion, in contrast to Lenin, is the purest economism:
‘As the crisis of capitalism deepens, class battles will intensify and increasingly come to the fore – cutting across the culture war and all the poisonous bile that the ruling class foments around migration, and bringing workers together on a class basis.
‘On the basis of the hammer blow of events, workers who today might hold shallow, surface-level prejudices will tomorrow channel their anger towards the bosses, the ruling class, and its representatives.’
The class struggle is a political struggle. Communists seek to combine the economic struggle, which can unite workers and draw in the backward sections, with a clear, open struggle against all forms of oppression and in support of democratic rights, civil liberties and equality – to be a ‘tribune of the people’.
The RCP, by contrast, tends to minimise the latter in theory and in practice, rejecting any idea that male or white workers benefit from women’s oppression or racism, even in partial, short-term but materially significant ways such as higher wages. It fails to grasp dialectically the contradictory position of workers under capitalism, where their fundamentally common interests are obscured by the weight of bourgeois ideas, whether that is expressed in sectional interests, illusions in democracy or the poison of racist or sexist ideas endemic in capitalism and often reinforced by the reformist union bureaucracy. Only revolutionaries can consistently counter these ideas with joint action against exploitation and oppression together, and arguments rooted in a coherent programme that links today’s struggles to the transition to socialism, through revolution.
