We fight for the oppressed

In the third part of his series DK Renton explains why fighting oppression is central to rs21’s politics.

Revolutions, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote, are 

the festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other time are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as creators of a new social order.

His comrade, sometimes ally, sometime rival, Leon Trotsky wrote in similar terms about the revolution which broke out in February 1917. It began, he recorded, as a ‘petticoat rebellion’, with women textile workers going on strike, where they were joined by soldiers’ wives demanding bread. 

Any successful future workers’ revolution is similarly likely to begin with the most oppressed; those who both work for a living and are also the victims of social oppression, whether that is racism, sexism, homophobia, disability discrimination or transphobia. 

In 1870, Marx proposed to the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association that they accept ‘that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes … cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.’ Ireland, Marx wrote, was ‘the bulwark of the landed aristocracy,’ the place from where the most reactionary elements of English society derived their vast incomes. There needed to be a peasant uprising in Ireland which would take possession of the land and enable the starving to eat. 

The land question has been up to now the exclusive form of the social question because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of the Irish people.

The colonial role played by Britain in Ireland had an effect at home too, in the English cities. 

Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker, he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself.

These relationships were not unique to England and Ireland, Marx continued, something similar could also be seen in the United States and in the hostility of ‘poor whites’ to the black inhabitants of the former slave states.

The subaltern position of the Irish, Marx argued, made them ‘more passionate and revolutionary than the English’ – for this reason, they were found in the front row at any insurrectionary protest. But division was a source of weakness to the movement. Oppression was offering capitalists the chance to pit one group of workers against another.

In the first years of socialist advance, during the 1880s and 1890s, other models of oppression flourished, beyond this simple model of division as weakness. The best-selling book published by the German Social Democrats was August Bebel’s Women and Socialism, the book called for greater access to divorce, the abolition of unequal sex roles, the end to mercenary marriage contracts, and maternity leave. All these were evils to be fought, the problem Bebel argued was man’s domination of the family. 

When Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor explained women’s unfreedom to her fellow socialists in Britain, she compared the situation of women in marriage to that of the worker in the factory, 

She, like the labour-classes, is in an oppressed condition; that her position, like theirs, is one of merciless degradation. Women are the creatures of an organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised tyranny of idlers.

Just as the freedom of the workers had to be women by their own hands, she wrote, the same applied to women: 

Women will find allies in the better sort of men, as the labourers are finding allies among the philosophers, artists and poets. But the one has nothing to hope from man as a whole and the other has nothing to hope from the middle class as a whole.

At every point, when new groups of oppressed people have raised the banner of freedom, there have been socialists listening to and learning from them. In the 1890s, it was a socialist publisher, Labour Press, who brought out Edward Carpenter’s book Love’s Coming of Age, which spoke of the bourgeois family as ‘legal chains’, and promised that it would ‘pass away’. Carpenter defended the idea of non-procreative sex, noticed the appearance of a new Modern Woman freer than previous generations and often ‘homogenic’, in other words lesbian. In 1906, Carpenter added a further chapter, on ‘Urnings,’ young people of the ‘intermediate sex’, ‘fine, healthy specimens of their sex, muscular and well-developed in body, of powerful brain, high standard of conduct.’ In the aftermath of Oscar Wilde trial, Carpenter could not openly defend same-sex physical relationships, and yet no reader could have been in any doubt of what he was saying in naming Michaelangelo, Shakespeare, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and the poet Sappho as among the greatest artists and leaders in history.

In the 1970s, just as black radicals began to identify state racism – rather than necessarily the hostility of white workers – as the greatest source of prejudice in their lives, groups of white socialists were listening to this message and amplifying it to their own, majority-white, audiences. Within Rock Against Racism (RAR) for example, the East End doctor and champion of radical culture David Widgery wrote, 

The problem is not just the new fascists from the old slime … [W]hen the state backs up racialism, it’s different. Outwardly respectable but inside fired with the same mentality and the same fears, the bigger danger is the racist magistrates with their cold sneering authority … policemen for whom answering back is a crime and every black kid with pride is a challenge.

Widgery came from a narrow part the British left, was a member of the SWP, as were other activists in RAR. But their campaign appealed to people across different left traditions, winning the interest of Stuart Hall, for example. Hall was a former Communist. Yet, even if Hall had reason to distrust the SWP and Widgery’s Trotskyism, he was enough of a rebel to see in punk and the new anti-fascism a challenge to the state and to all racial hierarchies. Rock Against Racism, Hall wrote, was ‘One of the timeliest and best constructed of cultural interventions, repaying serious and extended analysis.’ He loved the way that the movement had gone beyond narrow ideas of the political, had embodied a serious account of race, had used new forms of music to inspire those too often assumed to be unpolitical.

In the same period, too, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation led by figures such as Paul Hunt and Vic Finkelstein (a South African Communist who had been imprisoned and then expelled from his home for anti-apartheid activities) penned the ideas which gave birth to the social model of disability: 

Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments, by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society. It is society which disables physically impaired people.

Another revolutionary, Leslie Feinberg, was managing editor of the Workers World newspaper when she published her book, Stone Butch Blues in 1993. It tells the story of working class queer communities in New York state from the 1940s onwards, and of union organising, describing the impact of the Stonewall riots, the protagonist’s decision to take hormones, envisaging a world of queer identity, and working-class solidarity. 

Radicals need traditions in which to think, predecessors against which to challenge ourselves. We learn from them in the hope of seeing further than they did. Without Feinberg and others of her generation, you would not have today’s trans liberation movement. 

But if many socialists have answered every new social movement with support and interest, let’s be honest – that was never the total experience of the oppressed. Every new movement polarised the working class. The English opponents of Irish freedom, noticed by Marx, included tens of thousands of workers willing to maintain Protestant ascendancy in Ireland and not just in such centres of emigration from Northern Ireland as Glasgow where you might expect reaction to flourish but in other cities too, Birmingham, even Liverpool. Just as workers were divided, so were the left, there were always disenchanted radicals who, after a period of resistance, were now willing to identify with the powerful or the state.

Just as Eleanor Marx was writing, for example, Belfort Bax, one of the leaders of the Social Democratic Federation was denouncing socialist feminists for their excessive ‘consideration for weakness’. They were obviously wrong, he insisted, to imagine that women as man’s ‘radical inferiors’, might ever approach intellectual equality with men. While, as for the idea that women were ‘grievously oppressed by men’, all you needed to do was to look at rich women and how they lived, their retinue of servants, the idleness of their lifestyle. Women, not men, he concluded, had enjoyed ‘the lion’s share at the banquet of life.’

Read Belfort Bax and it’s hard to believe anyone took such nonsense as good politics. But Bax had a reputation among his comrades, won by years of polemics against the evils of British colonialism abroad. Hyndman, the leader of his party, wrote in his memoirs about his own lack of ‘enthusiasm for female suffrage by itself,’ and commended Bax for speaking the truth when he said that women – banned from owning property, deprived of divorce, incapable of legal protection when raped by their husbands, burdened by the dual tasks of having to work and sustain the family – somehow had more power than men.

Edward Carpenter’s early defence of homosexuality was disdained by other socialists, with the SDF’s newspaper Justice insisting in the aftermath of the Wilde trial that the ‘addiction’ of homosexuality would not survive socialism.

As the historians of the left and its reactionary wing, Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley have observed, several Marxist-trained union leaders of the strike movements of the 1880s, including the once heroic dockers’ leader Ben Tillett, became after 1900 supporters of the racist campaign to ban Jewish migration to the East End. 

It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that most groups on the British far left were won to an unequivocal support for gay rights. While RAR was arguing in 1970s Britain for anti-racists to fight institutional racism, many other Marxists found it easier to identify with that campaign’s sister organisation the Anti-Nazi League, which tended to narrow the struggle against racism down to the single point of fighting fascists. Years had to pass before any significant numbers of Marxists had taken on board the challenge of the social model of disability; I wonder if even now most of us have fully integrated it. 

We have all seen, in recent years, Marxist parties make the weirdest convoluted attempts to label opposition to trans liberation as somehow ‘materialist’ or ‘natural’.

Even within the camp of the far left, there are always people willing to make excuses for oppression and people fighting them. Just declaring yourself a socialist solves less than it should. Becoming a revolutionary is just the beginning of a process. You need to keep on choosing your allegiances wisely, keep on thinking all the time, searching for the rooted, principled, anti-oppression politics that will keep you on the side of revolution always.