The Use of Identity Politics to Undermine the Left

Quick reminder of Real Left’s meeting in Islington, London on the ‘Fallout of Lockdowns on the Global South’ on Friday 10 Nov from 7pm. Full details including how to reserve your place here.

Anna Coco investigates the use of identity politics and intelligence agency subversion to destroy the left’s material analysis of power relations under capitalism. Originally published by Red Star publishers

The US government and ruling elite have infiltrated and attempted to destroy the Left since its inception. In the 1960’s the CIA think tanks came up with numerous strategies to destroy the Left, such as promoting drug use and promiscuous sexuality as a form of not only “Brave New World” escapism, but diverting attention from working class issues. Remember Jerry Garcia repeating Timothy Leary’s famous quote “turn on, tune in, and drop out?” Even the decriminalization of marijuana today is really not to stop the Prison Industrial Complex, which is still arresting millions of young men, especially those of colour, but about pushing escapism as a replacement for protesting in a country where half the population lives near or below the poverty line. “Get high; forget your cares.” “Don’t fight back. Jesus was a pacifist.” (Forget that Jesus flogged the bankers in the temple during Passover.) The Communist Party USA and other Left parties were successful in pushing back this degeneration, discouraging drug and alcohol use as well as criticizing sexual objectification, particularly of women.

Another government strategy involved promoting Identity Politics, which along with political correctness in the late 1980’s actually achieved its goal of successfully undermining the Left as can be seen in its current state. This time period wasn’t coincidental, since this was the time the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union was collapsing. It was at this point that the Left started turning inward and becoming fragmented, with no centre to keep it together, which is what the Soviet Union represented. Feeling betrayed, demoralized, and bewildered, the CIA easily infiltrated and injected the Left with its poisonous sting, causing many Left parties to reject dialectical materialism, and in some cases even Marxism itself! ID politics was the late 1960’s brain child of the CIA to divide and conquer the Left, pitting groups against each other. Political Correctness helped promote ID politics by using the same methods as McCarthyism. Since socialism is a logical, scientific economic system, proponents couldn’t be allowed to explain or discuss what is was or it would convert others; therefore McCarthyism relied on shutting down debates and free discussion by employing name calling, shouting down speakers, and further isolating and marginalizing Leftists, especially through blacklisting them.

From the 1930’s to the 1970’s the motto of the Communist Party and the Left was “Black and White Unite”. The question for example of the CP getting involved, whether in the Scottsboro Case or in unionizing the segregated South, took place with many open debates, where all questions were allowed to be raised, discussed, and answered, including those by less advanced white workers who didn’t understand or agree. It was the openness of these discussions and debates that allowed this sector to understand the nature of racism and to make the CP’s motto a success. In a nation that was then only 12% black, gaining white support during the Civil Rights era was crucial in changing the nation and its laws. The Black Panther Party understood this and gave talk in some of the poorest white communities such as in the Appalachians; even converting and forming important alliances with white working class organizations, such as the Young Patriots in Chicago.

The CIA unfortunately successfully changed “Black and White Unite” into Identity Politics in the 1970’s, where different special interest groups began vying for crumbs, promoting selfish individualism and rejecting collectivism, one of the basic foundations of Marxist Leninist ideology.

Following bourgeois feminism, white men were now the enemy and women felt pitted to fight men in order to demand more managerial jobs- black people began demanding the right to have more black police officers; as if women oppressing other women or black officers cracking the heads of black men was somehow progressive. What followers of ID politics failed to understand was that changing the driver didn’t change the system. My chances as a woman of dying from a preventable heart attack are the same whether the doctor at the hospital today is male or female, as are the chances a black man having his head smashed in by the cops whether the officer is white or black. Instead of collectivism, workers divided among race, sex, ethnicity, religion, etc., promoting selfish individualism. Of course there are supportive women and people of colour. But certain individuals are not the system. A perfect example was the Left dismantling the anti-war movement during the Obama administration because it would be seen as racist to protest a black president. What was forgotten were the millions killed abroad in US wars of Imperialism, especially Africans who didn’t care what race the current president was. As a result, today, Libyan men are being sold into slavery!

Whereas before ID politics, the enemy was clearly understood to be US imperialism, or the 1%, now the enemy had become the white, heterosexual, male workers. Marxists understand that white men are not our enemies, but our necessary allies in getting reforms under capitalism and in overthrowing the true enemy, the 1%. United we stand, divided we fall.

Unfortunately this vilification and exclusion of white males led to bitterness, creating the racism and sexism we see today. Many were driven into the arms of the right-wing in order to feel included. Enter transgender ideology, the new ID politics of today. Exploiting the Lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement, although the ideology itself is anti-gay and homophobic, it has been promoting itself as the Civil Rights movement of the 21st century. Let’s forget that Native people, African-Americans, and women still haven’t won many significant civil rights.

If white men were the enemy of yesteryear, women are now the new enemy, regardless of colour or race, allowing men their turn to experience inclusion in the Left by attacking and excluding women. It’s not for nothing that penises are still called penises, but vaginas are front-holes, breast-feeding is chest-feeding, and woman can get their monthlies just like men (although I would seriously suggest that any man who does should go see a doctor ASAP and have their hemorrhoids put back in). Because transgender ideology, which is not the same as transgender individuals, just as all feminists are not bourgeois feminists, is a two-pronged attack not just against women, but the Left, too.

Its first prong of attack undermines women’s contribution to reproducing capital, both as the sex that bears tomorrow workers and cannon fodder and as workers. Discussions on birth control, maternity leave, food stamps, public services, as well as low wages and work inequality along with sexual harassment that affect working class women, become subordinate to transgender questions that affect less than 1/10 of 1% of the population, such as unisex bathrooms.

The second prong undermines the unity of the Left and the possibility of revolution. As Lenin said, “There can be no real mass movement without the women.” How can there be when women represent half the population and are the most exploited sex under crapitalism? In fact, how many people are aware that every major revolution in history was started by women? From the English, French, and the Russian Revolution, which by the way took place on March 8, 1917, International Women’s Day, it was women demanding bread that began it all. It is women who generally have to take care of and feed the family, especially the children. Prevent women from organizing or leading their own organizations, and the 1% are guaranteed there will be no reform or revolution.

What is Marxism? What does it represent? It doesn’t represent Hegelian idealism nor does it represent bourgeois mechanistic science. It represents a historical, dialectical materialism that analyzes the evolution of human society from one form to another, as Charles Darwin’s theories in the Origin of the Species analyzed the evolution of living beings.

Much of the transgender movement isn’t even working class; it mainly represents white, upper middle-class males who are racist, homophobic, and misogynist. It argues for gender stereotypes that tell homosexual men, for example, that they are really women or that racism is an imaginary concept. When transwomen says they are women, they are in fact negating not just biology and science, but eliminating the whole history of oppression that women experience. You heard the expression, you are what you eat. Imagine someone saying “I ate some soul food last night and I’m feeling black, although I’ve never seen a black person in my lilywhite town.”

Transgender ideology has set a dangerous precedent by referring to feelings rather than biology, which ultimately allows discrimination not just against women, but people of colour including native people. Women aren’t oppressed because of a feeling, but because of their sex; for physically being the only sex that can literally reproduce the workers for capital. Being a woman isn’t a feeling. Just like being black isn’t a feeling. Being a Native American isn’t a feeling. I can’t wash off my sex any more than a person of colour can wash off their colour. Is capitalism a feeling, too? Can we unfeel exploitation on Monday morning?

Liberals who reject dialectical materialism reject nature and the evolutionary connection in nature. Transgender ideology is effectively using language to erase women and subordinate them to the fetishes of men in nearly every English-speaking country. With the passing in England of the Gender Recognition Act, which Congress is trying to pass in the US as the Equality Act, women must defer to men as men now have the right to enter female facilities and colonize female sports at will against the wishes of women and the safety of girls. It took until 1920 for women in the US to have separate bathrooms, which Russian women won in the 1917 revolution. Lenin in fact championed female-only spaces and female leadership in female organizations. Really, how many women would like to turn around in the women’s showers and see a throbbing erection on a transgender woman staring at you? What about at a Rape Centre or women’s prison? For those who don’t know, it’s already happening: paedophiles and male rapists insisting they feel like women have been allowed into girls’ bathrooms and even placed in women’s prisons where they have raped women. Female sports and scholarships, better kiss that goodbye as men by birth have a physical advantage over women. Let’s go back to 1950’s America.

When the Left so wholehearted absorbed trans ideology, it threw scientific socialism under the bus as well as thoroughly self-destructing, making it the butt of jokes for the right-wing. From Black Lives Matter to FRSO Left, ISO, WWP, CWL, and PC USA to name just a few, all these organizations are now being redubbed Politically Correct USA.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the CP subverted itself to neoliberalism when it decided to pimp itself to the Democratic Party. Even the ISO, FRSO right and many other so-called Left parties began embracing bourgeois liberalism, which has its roots in neo-liberalism or the free market economy, completing wedding themselves to parliamentary instead revolutionary goals.

It is rape to ever demand or try to coerce someone to have sex regardless of their age, sex, or gender. There is no place in any civilized society to allow rape or rape culture, and especially not the Left. In other cases, women were expelled for exposing male sexual predators, such as in ISO, DSA, WWP, and PC USA. I was told I should be ashamed of myself for shaming the PC USA by exposing a predator, when that party should be ashamed. In other cases women were expelled because they didn’t agree with male comrades over the question of prostitution and violent porn. Imagine the outrage if a black man was stripped of his position and expelled, because he didn’t like to be called an N* and didn’t agree that slavery and lynching films weren’t empowering? In fact, why is the Left offended by Black Face, but not by Drag? Transgenderism is misogyny in drag. Soros has spent millions of dollars promoting transgenderism¹;² yet women on the Left who complained were ridiculed and silenced.

Think of the level of misogyny; the CIA couldn’t destroy so many groups like WW, which has existed for 60 years. How did it finally destroy these parties through transgenderism? Before we think this is an organic movement, which is separate from being transgender, it is actually funded by the CIA and its think tanks. That is the reason why it is so well funded. Any legitimate organization would distance itself from these elements and I’m sure there are LGBTQ+ organizations that did.

When the National Center for Transgender Equality Action Fund hosted the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards in Washington D.C. on May 17, 2018, its sponsors looked like something from a parody. The list included: the CIA, George Soros’ Open Society, Facebook (which is partially funded by the Atlantic Council, i.e. NATO), Google, Amazon, Capital One Bank, Shook, Hardy & Bacon (a law firm dedicated to defending Big Pharma), as well as a number of pharmaceutical companies and clinics including: Gilead Sciences, Meltzer Clinic, and Pharma. [See comments at the end of this article.] For women on the Left, this open display by the CIA and Soros was like the government and the bankers sticking their middle finger at them. It proved what they had been saying all along.

To this day, the Left still hasn’t apologized to women and is still promoting destructive ID politics, pushing women to the hypocritical right-wing. It makes perfect sense for liberals to be doing this, because as their name suggests neo-liberalism, they want to push women to the right. But why the Left? In fact, why was the Left so eager to adopt trans ideology and expel women.

Either promote the Left, that is the Left we’ve inherited and, like a corrupt union, we understand as Marxist-Leninists that we don’t destroy, but attempt to revitalize, or create female Left organizations like Women for Racial and Economic Equality to push Left more left.

1. The source for the CIA and others having funded the 2018 Trans Equality Now Awards seems to have “disappeared” from the internet, and they seem to have decided that their sponsorship of the 2019 awards would have been too open. However, after some searching, we were able to find the Transgender Equality Annual Report 2017, see: annual report 2017 final.pdf (transequality.org) (page 8; page 10 of pdf), which includes the same sponsors as in 2018. ↩︎
2. Also, Soros’ Open Society Foundations has funded individual transgender activists who are leaders in various Left organizations. One is Imani Henry, a leading member of International Action Center and Workers World Party. The source of this is available in the ‘Community Fellowship Grants’ document uploaded on the Open Society website. See: Open Society Institute: Com… (opensocietyfoundations.org) on p. 10-11. This criticism is more aimed at his party than at him himself, for allowing him to accept this funding, just as no progressive trade union organization would have its members accept money from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), a notorious conduit for CIA funding. ↩︎