Merry Leftist Christmas: A Guide to Surviving the Holiday of Culture War Horror: Part 1

It’s Christmas Day, your vegan/vegetarian option is going down, you’re sat back, listening to the hum of background chatter from relatives, and you’re starting to wonder; maybe feminists were right about the family.

Christmas is the time when we’re all made to feel like the only leftie in the world, right? Suddenly billionaires are good people, trans people are predators, the police aren’t racist, and the left? Actually, incredibly dangerous anarchists, who want to rip up the entirety of society’s fabric (If only!), having penetrated all institutions of society with their pronouns, Marxism, hatred for the police and more, despite having a neoliberal society, a far-right government, and racist, sexist, and transphobic headlines hitting the front of the media… every day.

‘Culture war’ is the word on everyone’s lips, young and old, and no one can decide who is more sensitive; the person who believes anyone can have the pronouns they want, and absolute respect and protection of them, or the person who believes having pronouns in your bio must be a form of tyranny, made especially to antagonise the manly boomer men, and the middle-class woman for whom this is simply too far. So, to help you get through this trying time, here we have Part 1 of A Leftist’s Guide to Surviving the Holiday of Culture War Horror. First, we’re dealing with Mum and Dad.

The Mum: just can’t get her head around the ‘trans issue’

JK Rowling didn’t deserve the pile on, Suzanne Moore should never have been l. We shouldn’t ‘cancel’ women, what happened to reasonable debate?

First, and most importantly, trans lives aren’t a debate. When we lower ourselves to engaging with ‘gender critical’ feminists, we perpetuate the dominant understanding that trans lives are not worthy of the same legitimacy that cis women are. Let’s come back to one of Rowling’s tweets, “I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it’s hateful to say so.” This is one of the many times you will hear supposed ‘feminists’ echo (not to mention befriend) the far-right, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

There is no right way to be a woman, isn’t that the very core of feminist thought? Assumedly Rowling also thinks that Simone de Beauvoir was stirring up misogyny when she said that “one is not born, but becomes a woman”. The oppression we experience as women is the result of a rigid binary that demands specific characteristics of the ‘two genders’, not because we were born with an inferior set of genitals. The people that harass us on the street do not know what our chromosomes are. As Lola Olufemi argues, sex and gender are socially constructed categories, but this recognition does not undermine our ability to understand that the violence that is produced because of them is real. Trans people are not a threat to feminist advancement, as TERFs like Rowling would have us believe. On the other hand, demanding that we naturalise the attributes of patriarchal conceptions of gender, emphasising that there is only one way to be a woman, that is the biggest threat to feminism today.

Finally, the left’s so-called ‘cancel culture’, and the media’s phrase of the year, is in fact accountability for your actions and words, that actually most often equates to no consequences at all. Case in point? J.K. Rowling’s new book, featuring a transphobic trope, reached the No1 spot on the UK book charts, selling 65,000 copies in 5 days alone. Let us not forget queen of the TERFS, S*z*nne M**re, whose cancellation landed her on the front page of the Daily Mail. If only this cancellation worked.

Maybe, just maybe, gender is socially constructed, but sex is biology, its scientific fact.

Actually, the literal scientists would disagree. This article gives a quick summary of how skewed claims to biological essentialism really are. We often hear nonsense such as, “she’s particularly strong for a woman”, “what a feminine face that boy has”, “he’s weak for a man”. Biological difference is often utilised to explain things like personality, social and political differences and more. There is a huge variation of both physical and mental human traits that completely transcend a gender binary. In Lola Olufemi’s book, she explains “these are not exceptions that defy a rule; there simply is no rule”.

There is no difference between gender and sex, sex is just as much a construction as gender is. Both are rituals that emerge out of repeated behaviours that accumulate over time. The only unnatural thing here is the desire to police other people’s bodies. To tell them what characteristics they should develop, pressurising people to ‘do’ their gender right, framing one as the inferior victim, and one as the superior aggressor. The only consequence could be a great deal of violence, for all women. After all, that’s what we live with right now.

But what about the children?!

Actually Karen, what makes children confused is the endless engineering of who they should be, according to the label a medical professional assigned them at birth. 45% of young trans people have attempted suicide, not because of confusion with their identity, but because society is doing the best it can to make that chosen identity impossible, and life beyond a gender binary unliveable.

A couple of weeks ago, the High Court of England and Wales handed down a judgement that will ban puberty blockers – a physically reversible treatment that arrests puberty, to alleviate dysphoria or to buy teenagers more time to decide whether they would like to begin cross hormonal treatment. The case was brought to the court by a woman that took puberty blockers as a teen, had top surgery, as an adult, then chose to de-transition. She was concerned by the ability 16-year olds have to consent to puberty blockers, despite the fact that her issue came with the decision she made…as an adult. This is undoubtedly a sad case, but is absolutely one within a tiny minority. Another unmistakably anti-women movement, the anti-abortion cause, has used this too. The idea that some women will regret their abortion is unfortunate, but this provides no reason as to why every woman should be denied the fundamental freedom to choose.

On her Instagram, Shon Faye gave an informative and poignant explanation of this Court ruling, and how to be a good ally. Watch it, and then forward it! Of course, if you’re feeling really riled up, and with no breakthrough in sight, forget that present you planned and donate the money to Gendered Intelligence. Link here.

After all of this you still feel you need back-up? Direct them to Lola Olufemi’s book chapter, ‘Transmisogyny: Who wins?’, this article in the New York Times on ‘Who Counts as a Woman?, or this article from Shon Faye, ‘Today’s anti-trans rhetoric looks a lot like old-school homophobia’ . Or, of course, you can always abandon the argument, remind them that the vast majority of people have opposed almost every movement for freedom in history – people weren’t big fans (wanted him dead) of Martin Luther King and civil rights, and look what happened! Transgender people will have justice, the limits of gender will disintegrate. The opinions of boomers won’t be joining us on this journey.

The Dad: loves capitalism, despite being closer to being homeless than ever becoming a billionaire.

You can’t paint all billionaires as unethical, or unpleasant individuals, they often do lots of good!

Actually yes, we really can, and no, they really don’t. To be a billionaire is to have been incredibly (almost beyond comprehension) successful at the game of capitalism – stealing the means of production from workers, by paying them wages that equate to much less than the value that workers produce for said billionaire. I particularly enjoy this description, in this excellent article, “If you find yourself in possession of one billion dollars, and keep it, then you are wilfully refusing to stand in solidarity with the whole of the rest of the human species.”

Jeff Bezos actually increased his personal wealth of £13 billion on a singular day, at the same time in which the rest of us are in collective misery at a pandemic that has cost us a record number of jobs, futures, and lives. Jeff Bezos is also the man that bought software specifically for visualising data on unions, fired employees that spoke out against the lack of safety in warehouses during the pandemic, and advertised for intelligence analysists whose duties would include tracking “labour organizing threats''. As of October 2020, more than 20,000 US-based Amazon employees had been infected by the coronavirus. Coincidentally, the U.S. Amazon workforce has never successfully been able to form a union, since the company’s founding, in 1994. If, as we’re told, we need billionaires, and they don’t need us, why is Jeff Bezos so concerned by his workers unionising?

Jeff Bezos has become known as a bit of a villain, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, so, if that’s not persuasive enough, try another example. Warren Buffet, often perceived as the ‘good’ face of the billionaire class, owns, as you can imagine, numerous large companies, but one of the most famous is Coca-Cola. The company is known for some of the worst violations of worker’s rights. The most infamous scandal occurred in Columbia, where union offices were burnt down, paramilitary groups shot dead union leaders, and afterwards, slashed wages in half so as to prevent any worker protesting again. Warren Buffet never spoke out, and Coca-Cola defended themselves by explaining they could not be responsible, since the factories were outsourced. Ben Tippet sums up this attitude of the wealthy as an “It’s not my business kind of business”. Buffet has donated $46 billion to charities since 2000, and suggested he should pay marginally more tax, but what does that actually mean when his money sanctions death and exploitation on the working class?

We see this behaviour all the time from supposed ‘ethical capitalists’, and no one puts it better than Engels: “The bourgeoisie is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but makes a bargain with the poor, saying: ‘If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery’”. There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire because any wealth under capitalism is not ethical, it is inherently violent and exploitative. To come back to the Warren Buffet, he says it best: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class that’s making war, and we’re winning”.

Can I recommend Ben Tippet’s book ‘Split: Class Divides Uncovered’? It’s a book I wish everyone would read. Or you know, Marx.

It's just the way the world works! It’s always been the way, and clearly it works for most.

First of all, you sound like Margaret Thatcher’s “there’s no alternative”, and no one wants to sound like Thatcher. It sounds an awful lot like neoliberal ‘trickle down’ economics too, you know the one that just a few days ago was disproved by a study showing that 50 years of neoliberalism has revealed wealth to have… not at all trickled down. Its not like the left has been saying that since what seems like the dawn of time of course.

If, we pretend for a second that this ‘a rising tide will lift all boats’ myth is accurate, then the implications are… abysmal. Global GDP has grown by 65% since 1990, at the same time that the number of impoverished people living on $5 a day has increased, by over 370 million. The global poorest 60% receive 5% of this new income. So, by a capitalist logic, it would take 207 years to eradicate poverty, at the level of $5 a day. This would equate to global GDP needing to be 175 what it is today in 2020. Given that capitalism has already pushed this planet into an ecological breakdown, and the next 50 years look increasingly terrifying for the fate of humanity, the cost would be not only unimaginable, but impossible. A recent comic has become popular on social media, whose caption reads, “Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

Fundamentally, what this person needs is a lesson in imagination. Young people aren’t naïve, nor do we demand the impossible just to antagonise. I for one, am not interested in cowering to what has always been known, the prison, the police, billionaires, GDP, development, colonialism, because it is what we might know after this that demands our attention. We have such little time left to save life on this planet. Ecological breakdown, consistent crises of capitalism, the devaluation of black life, widespread austerity, pandemics, the war on trans lives, the endless subjugation of women; all of these things we have grown up with have demanded that we think up an alternative, simply out of necessity. The world as it is, is unliveable for so many, so that the wealthy few can live beyond their means. It is what we can think up now that will bring the next world closer to us in the present. There is, and always has been an alternative - if we can imagine it; we can have it.

Wealthy people have worked hard, and ultimately, we need them for the sake of the economy!

First, I promise you that a teacher, cleaner, or nurse works much harder than any CEO. Overwhelmingly, the wealthy have been able to become so due to their family’s wealth. An example is Kylie Jenner, who, at 21, appeared on the cover of Forbes, as the youngest ‘self-made billionaire’, despite coming from the incomprehensibly wealthy Kardashian family, and having her business-woman mother as her manager at the age of 15. The response to this is easy though, “she’s an exceptional case”, “what about Bill Gates!”. Bill Gates’ mother was president of ‘United Way’, she recommended her son to a colleague, who was chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation. A few weeks later, IBM hired the small firm Microsoft. This kind of story isn’t unique – see Jeff Bezos’s parents £245,573 donation to stop Amazon from flopping the year after Bezos started it from, as the story goes, his garage. The entirety of the top self-made billionaires list can be debunked, with ease.

Now, no one at the Christmas dinner table is going to want to get into the formulas of Marx, so I will put it (kinda) briefly and simply. The money of the wealthy is made entirely from the surplus value that their workers produce. Workers sell their capacity to labour, and are paid enough money in order to subsist in the particular society they live in, but they work collectively, and with technological machinery. This collective labour produces more money than required to subsist in the world, however, this must go to the capitalist enterprise, because it was made during the time in which the worker’s labour belongs to the capitalist. Take a look at how concerned the wealthy were with people going back to work during a pandemic, despite, most often being unable to guarantee safety. This is a prime example that billionaires themselves understand that workers make their money.

This ‘economy’ that you speak of crashes, regularly. It is not fit for purpose. What use is an economy if it does not demand the recognition of any other metric of humanity? What use is an economy if we are unable to save the planet, keep working people alive, and provide for everyone equally? Capitalism does not have to be in crisis to cause severe damage. The requirement that we work to live, that we hand over the value we have created at the end of the day to our big bosses, that we accept we should suffer somewhat in the name of getting the economy back on its knees is not how we should have to live. Imagining beyond capitalism is absolutely necessary, how else will we save ourselves? I can’t help but have Marx’s argument that capitalism has eroded our capacity and ability to create our own humane society swirling around my head.

Good luck comrades! Part 2 is how to deal with your liberal Auntie, and the Uncle who absolutely isn’t racist, BUT…