RMT general secretary Eddie Dempsey has published a new article in Tribune, arguing that the disconnection between the working class and the organised left is partly down to the left focusing too heavily on issues such as “gender, race, and climate”, which Dempsey argues are the “preoccupations” of “middle-class activists.”
Dempsey’s article is couched as a defence of “universalism” against “postmodernism” and “identity politics”. Workers’ Liberty has critiqued, over many years, what we see as a “retreat from class” across much of the radical left, into NGO-style politics, often substituting other social forces as the central agent of change. Dempsey offers a distorted caricature of that critique. In reality, his perspective is another form of identity politics, with “working-class” reduced to a category of cultural identity rather than a diverse social collective.
The ability of the working class to act as a universal agent of collective human emancipation is precisely based on our ability to integrate the struggles of those sections of our class which face specific forms of oppression into our programme for liberation and equality. Without such an approach, class unity is always under threat.
Many of the political demands Dempsey advocates, including nationalising key industries, abolishing legal restrictions on the right to strike, and rebuilding union membership at workplace level, are vital. Bolting them on to an argument that appears to dismiss struggles over “gender, race, and climate” as “middle-class” concerns does these demands an immense disservice.
It is undoubtedly the case that, as Dempsey argues, some working-class voters view the organised left, as “preoccupied” by “gender, race, and climate”. But that perception itself is, in part, an ideological construction. Take another issue Dempsey perhaps sees as a “preoccupation” of “middle-class activists”: trans rights. The right and far-right have engaged in a concerted counter-offensive against trans rights, part of a wider assault on equality which also involves attacks on women’s reproductive freedom. The left, or at least parts of it, have necessarily engaged in a defence of trans rights. The right then accuses the left of being obsessed with trans rights, which it attempts to separate from the “real” concerns of “ordinary people”.
So too with migrants’ rights, against which there is a savage right-wing offensive in many countries across the world. Attempts to defend migrants’ rights are then cited as evidence that the left is obsessed with migrants’ rights, and unconcerned with issues affecting local workers.
We should cede no ground to the right here. The notion that issues of oppression and discrimination based on gender, race, or other categories such as sexuality or disability, or issues such as migrants’ rights, are somehow separate from core working-class concerns is false. It is based on an essentialised notion of what it means to be “working-class”, which apparently, in Dempsey’s worldview, also involves not caring about the fate of the planet.
It will be news to the TfL workers currently facing deportation, many of whom are members of Dempsey’s own union and whose demonstration Dempsey recently attended, that their concerns are “middle-class preoccupations”. It will be news to the 50% of the working class who are women, dogged by unpaid domestic burdens, trapped in a sex-segregated labour market, subject to misogyny their whole lives, that their day-to-day struggles are distractions from what should be the core concerns of class-struggle politics.
Dempsey himself acknowledges that there is a “disproportionate number are women in care and service roles”, where they “earn below-average wages”. This clearly shows the way in which gender oppression and class exploitation intersect. Surely, then, the left and the labour movement should acknowledge these specific oppressions. To dismiss such things as “preoccupations” is to dismiss the lives and struggles of working-class people.
The idea that fighting catastrophic climate change, which will disproportionately impact working-class and poor people throughout the world, should not be a core concern of the labour movement is especially bizarre. Is it a badge of proletarian credentials to want the planet we live on to burn? Is the Fire Brigades Union, which actively campaigns about climate change, because its effects are immediate workplace issues for FBU members, in hock to the “preoccupations” of “middle-class activists”?
Dempsey also appears to overstate the decline in union membership, claiming the proportion of workers in unions “has fallen from 38 percent in 1979 to just over 10 percent today.” In fact, union density in 1979 was over 50%, with over 13 million workers in unions. Today, with just under seven million workers in unions, density is a little over 20%. The real scale of the decline is dramatic enough, without any need to exaggerate. Dempsey’s figures are closer to the truth if they are meant to refer solely to the private sector, although this is unclear from his article.
The identity-politics element of Dempsey’s argument is clear in the section of his article blaming “demographic changes” for “destabilising life” in “many towns and cities”. He also claims that “the nation state is the highest form of community”, a strange assertion in the context of an argument purporting to promote “class politics”. Nation states are necessarily cross-class blocs, ultimately irreconcilable with class politics, as they seek to bind both workers and bosses together in a common conception of “national identity” and “national interest”. Struggles against specific national oppressions, where a group is subjugated by an occupying power on the basis of nationality, remain important democratic issues, but even then, socialists’ aim should be to disrupt and ultimately break up “national” blocs along class lines.
Our alternative to the destabilising effects of neoliberalism is not a return to some kind of stasis. We want to “destabilise”, and ultimately overthrow, the oppressive and unequal power relations that still characterise much of social life for many people, including within the “nations” and “communities” that Dempsey valorises. The labour movement must make itself a “tribune of the oppressed”, seeking to fuse every struggle for rights and equality with the class struggle against economic exploitation.
The RMT has active equality committees and conferences, as well as robust policy on climate change, including the union’s offshore oil workers’ section backing the “Our Power” report, a plan for a worker-led transition into renewables. A recent AGM resolution committed the union to tackling the politics of Reform. Whilst Dempsey’s comments are consistent with those he has made in the past, he should at least make clear that he is expressing his personal view, not union policies.
At a time when the far right is on the rise, and the Labour government trips over itself to triangulate with it, we need a labour movement and a left that stands uncompromisingly for women’s rights, racial equality, LGBT+ rights, and disabled people’s rights, and insists that, far from being “middle-class preoccupations”, these are class-struggle issues. Faced with catastrophic climate change, the labour movement must fight for a worker-led transition to a sustainable future.
The left does need to reconnect with both the principles of universalism, and an emphasis on the centrality of class struggle. But we will not rebuild class power on the basis of a “working-class” identity politics that divides our class under the pretext of uniting it.
Originally published by Workers’ Liberty
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