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How oppressed majorities are kept fragmented and exploited

Mike Phipps reviews Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, by Ash Sarkar, published by Bloomsbury.

“Our time is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload,” writes Ash Sarkar in the Introduction of this polemical book. “If we are not getting happier, or feeling that the trajectory we are going in is a good one – why are we paralysed by inaction? That is the question that this book is trying to answer.”

The short answer is that wealth inequality warps politics and stunts our ability to improve society: “If you can’t see the world clearly, you can’t change it.”

In particular, the media and much of the political class collaborate to make identity-driven conflicts the most important issues of the day, undercutting the potential for unity and solidarity across class, race and gender boundaries. This is the rallying cry of the new right: that vocal minorities are now oppressing the majority of ordinary people. It’s a narrative that serves to fragment the real majority of exploited and oppressed people into warring groups.

The right, however, will also choose to foreground the rights of an oppressed minority when it suits them – for example, the Israeli-backed line that any protests, however peaceful, against the genocide in Gaza make Jewish people feel ‘unsafe’. And not just protests, but any display of Palestinian identity. In February 2023, complaints lodged by UK Lawyers for Israel resulted in Chelsea and Westminster Hospital removing a display of artwork created by Palestinian children. “How people feel is important,” says Sarkar. “But it’s not so important as a genocide, ethnic cleansing or ongoing war crimes.”

“An individualistic and competitive model of victimhood”

The left too, she argues, has undermined class consciousness by embracing “an individualistic and competitive model of victimhood.” This has been driven by the notion of irreducible differences between identity groups, the idea that these groups have competing interests, and that lived experience is a form of unassailable political authority.

The author provides quite a few examples to support her argument – perhaps too many in the form of incoherent social media posts – but she has a point. She cites adrienne maree brown: “Every kind of dissonance in movements is understood through a lens of violence, abuse, and victimisation.”

Sarkar is especially scathing about the notion of ‘victimhood’. “Rather than thinking of oppression as a set of conditions and vulnerabilities that you share with others, victimhood elevates your voice and ‘lived experience’ above that of other people.” It is a status that confers authority and can be used as a credential to exclude other vulnerable people. It corrodes solidarity: “Creating social capital out of suffering means that we have a perverse incentive to hold onto our victimhood, rather than work together to change the conditions that created it.”

Media amplification

The media exploit these divisions and polarise debate. Profound structural changes have abetted this. At a time when more people have access to news than ever before, employment in US newsrooms across print, TV and radio fell by a quarter between 2008 and 2020. In Britian, 245 newspapers have closed since 2005.

Newsgathering is expensive. But commentary is cheaper and popular. Meanwhile, 43% of the UK’s most influential editors and broadcasters went to private schools, a fact that is likely to skew debate. And the more heated that debate – even over a non-issue – the better the ratings. Access to social media is far more open, but quality control is almost entirely lacking. Yet the algorithm of Twitter, for example, boosts angry and antagonistic content.

These issues are aggravated by the disintegration of the distinction between politics and political media, creating  a new caste of pundit-politicians. It’s exemplified by Suella Braverman saying: “I would love to be having, [on] the front page of the Telegraph, a plane taking off to Rwanda,” a reference to the Tory policy of deporting asylum seekers to that country. Sarkar characterises her comment as “a Home Secretary who dreamt of nothing more ambitious than being the dog who was wagged by its tail.”

It’s increasingly standard for top Westminster journalists to tweet out what they have been texted by their sources without checking its accuracy. Lobby journalists dare not be too critical or questioning, or they would lose access to the politicians who feed them titbits, which would make their job harder and undermine their career.

Only occasionally is this chummy relationship unveiled, as when ex-Newsnight-editor-turned-government spokesperson Allegra Stratton was forced to resign after being filmed laughing about illegal parties at Number Ten during Covid lockdown. Less than six months later she returned to another top media job.

But she is just one example of “how close interpersonal relationships and the professional hokey-cokey blur the distinction between political operators and the journalists assigned to hold them to account.” Look for example at Good Morning Britain presenter Ed Balls interviewing his wife Yvette Cooper on government policy on the programme.

Despite supposed differences along party lines, the Lobby’s range of opinion is quite narrow. They were universally anti-Corbyn, for example, and only too willing to see protests against Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza as ‘pro-Hamas’.

Demographics

People will find a fair bit to argue with here, such as the idea that younger people are stacked up in “electorally useless” cities, in super-safe seats, where no-one cares about your vote. But this is not so true as it once was: that fact that Leanne Mohamad came within 500 votes of unseating the now Health Secretary Wes Streeting MP in Ilford north in the 2004 general election underlines the fact that Labour’s heartlands are no longer unbreachable.

In any case, as Sarkar points out, it’s not as if swing voters, whom politicians chase after, get a good deal either. What’s interesting about current electoral politics is that class, always the key feature of the electoral landscape, is being redefined by the right to suit their interests, pitting traditional working class communities against migrants, by focusing on superficial cultural, rather than core economic, aspects of class identity.

In this context, the notion of the ‘white working class’ was invented by pundits, with interests supposedly counterposed to those from minoritised communities. Hacks who had once ridiculed ‘chavs’ now leapt to the defence of the ‘left behind’ – against migrants, people of colour and, above all, the left who had supposedly prioritised the needs of ethnic minorities over ‘privileged’ whites.

Sarkar debunks this analysis effectively. But in any case, this rhetoric may have had limited impact overall – perhaps more effective in the ‘left-behind’ towns of the Red Wall than in the big multicultural cities. She reminds us that in July 2024, a few weeks before the far-right riots set off by misinformation about murders in Southport, unrest broke out in the deprived Harehill area of Leeds, when police, called to help social services take some Roma children into care, were attacked by crowds. While mainstream journalists looked for a racial dimension to the disturbance, the reality was that all kinds of people joined the riot, just as many people of different ethnic backgrounds helped stop it.

The belief that poor whites are the victims of a ‘conspiracy of antiracists’ has parallels with the idea that women are the losers if transgender rights are advanced. Sarkar wades through a great deal of polarised rhetoric – the Times and Sunday Times ran more than 300 articles, almost all hostile, about transgender people in one year alone – and concludes that the ‘debate’ feeds a moral panic about demographics – the composition of the population – and fuels conspiracy theories, such as the Great Replacement, that are part of a far right agenda.

We saw the fruits of this in the racist riots of the summer of 2024, when hotels housing migrants, migrant businesses and random people on the street who happened not to be white were attacked. Seven out of the ten most deprived areas of the country were affected, a fact underlined by the backgrounds of many of the subsequently convicted perpetrators. But their actions had been encouraged by decades of anti-migrant rhetoric from politicians and the media.

Sarkar doesn’t really get on to the new Trump presidency, but it underlines her case that “If liberal technocrats are unavailable, capitalists are more than happy to jump into bed with fascists.” It’s not just Elon Musk and other high-profile figures: sensing the new mood, companies are abandoning their diversity and climate policies with alacrity. As Stewart Lansley pointed out on this site recently, authoritarianism is central to their corporate mentality: “A growing number of the world’s mega corporations, from oil and health conglomerates to Amazon and Google, have been turned into private fiefdoms for their owners.”

Minority Rule is a lively read which joins the dots and finds new things to say about recent events. But it’s also more than a commentary: understanding how things work should also be a spur to changing them.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.