Herbet Marcuse, father of the New Left and Inspiration for many Left-Identitarian Movements

Despite the recent historic increase in working class agitation and a recent rise in dissident political thought, it is clear that the revolutionary movement in Britain is in its infancy. As capitalism is rocked by crisis after crisis, naturally many workers are beginning to reject bourgeois ideology and see the real conditions of capitalism and of profit-based society. Indeed, it doesn’t take much of a logical leap to understand how, say, the climate crisis could be solved by state ownership of industry, or how the crisis of overproduction (a constant of industrial capitalism) can be solved by the planned economy. These questions are relatively simple to answer, with historic examples in every continent of the world providing evidence of the immense benefits of socialist planning. However many questions on contemporary capitalism and capitalist culture are not so clear cut. Due to the movement’s infancy and the lack of a mass organisation to effectively organise for revolution there is general confusion on what the ‘correct’ line is on many current issues facing the movement for emancipation. Comrades joining the movement often come with severe gaps in their consciousness and a cocktail of bourgeois ideology that, without proper training from an effective organisation with concrete theoretical understanding, can result in a warped quasi-Marxism that retains significant elements from the bourgeois milieu they emerge from – whether that be ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’. Here I will be discussing the dangers of retaining bourgeois ideology and the role played by various forces in the media, in the state and in the capitalist class in general in shaping certain notions held by the rank and file of the emerging socialist revolutionary movement. But before all that, however, we have to deal with some history and confront some foundational componants of the contemporary western left.

Herbert Marcuse was one of the most influential Marxists of his day. His theories on the commodification of workers and the effect of alienation on the human subject are deeply thought-provoking and highly useful in providing the contemporary Marxist with an understanding of the dynamics inherent to our current stage in capitalist development. His critique of the trade unions and workers parties of Europe, identifying their compliance with the hegemonic capitalist order (something anyone who was/is a Labour Party or Unite the Union member can tell you all about), was thorough and well-reasoned. Again, Marcuse was an insightful writer with many relevant theories applicable to the capitalism of today. However it is the conclusions he comes to that are somewhat concerning: Marcuse insinuates in his 1964 classic One-Dimensional Man that because of the current form taken by capitalism, workers are no longer a force capable of leading a revolution, that by being bound up in the mechanism of state control essentially invalidates their revolutionary potential. Another French writer of the day, the more traditional Leninist Louis Althusser, identified the mainstream workers movement as an Ideological State Apparatus of the capitalist system, something which is entrenched and ingrained in our society and serves to reaffirm the ideology of bourgeois control (whichever form it takes). The philosophy of Marcuse and the New Left was a response to the slow collapse of western Europe’s communist movement the searching for a new revolutionary subject constituting an unfortunate abandonment of class politics and a disregard for the scientific theory of historical materialism, rejecting the understanding of class struggle as the primary motivating factor in historical development and the advancement of human civilisation.

The New Left became a significant political force and the theoretical underpinning for a number of victorious struggles in the push for social equality in Britain and across the western world, namely through the women’s movement and the anti-racist movement.



However now we must turn back to One-Dimensional Man and address some issues with Marcuse’s theory. Marcuse asserted in his books, articles and lectures that the left must search for ‘new social forces’, namely social minorities (women, queer peoples, non-white peoples, etc.) as the new vanguard for revolutionary change. However looking back at his argument that working class institutions have become an essential component of bourgeois society, the question arises: what has happened to the institutions of the new social forces? It is clear from even the most cursory glance at the feminist, racial justice and queer movements in Britain today that very little of their programme is revolutionary. Indeed, the pandering made by corporations towards the annual pride demonstration, the lip service paid by Tory politicians towards women’s equality and the on-screen racial quotas pushed for by media executives and shareholders shows that the working class movement is not the only one susceptible to commodification and incorporation into bourgeois ideology. In fact, I would argue that it was far easier to incorporate the politics of identity and new social forces into the ideological state apparatuses of capitalism for one simple reason: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”. Marcuse’s greatest pitfall was the rejection of arguably Marxism’s most important philosophical lynchpin, the theory of historical materialism. Social justice campaign are only progressive (in the historical, civilisational sense) when they are accompanied by a revolutionary class ideology, otherwise they represent some of the most harmful forces for promoting and reinforcing bourgeois ideology.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss a key point of contention in the growing revolutionary movement, the question of transgender people and the phenomenon of ‘transgenderism’, their relation to capitalist society and what the Marxist response should be to this emergent factor in the struggle for building a socialist movement. There is often a crude conflation made between transgenderism as a phenomenon and transgenderism as a component of liberal ideology, and in our investigations of capitalism and the methods of overcoming it, we must provide an understanding of the origins of this (historically comparative) surge in gender dysphoria and the collapse of traditional gender structures if we are to understand the current situation and the role identity politics plays in ruling class ideology and its function in the maintenance of capitalism. The argument about the scientific, material nature of a binary gender system versus a gender-spectrum results in a conflict between the various tendencies of today’s accepted bourgeois science and the accepted bourgeois science of decades past, with peer-reviewed and trustworthy bourgeois scientific journals justifying both positions with equal merit. Because of this, to look directly to the natural sciences for our answer is unhelpful. Clearly there are people who identify with their opposite biological sex or with some other point on the ‘spectrum’ between male and female, who present themselves in ways which do not align with the culturally traditional habits of their biological sex. We know these people exist, so there must be a reason beyond the tired argument that “being a poor worker opens you up to mental disorders”, implying that this transgender phenomenon in the west is simply the result of the same alienation that causes depression and other illnesses amongst the proletariat, and while this argument scratches the surface of this question, it misses an important difference between the labour of today and the labour of decades prior. The complexification and expansion of capitalism in the past century constitutes a radically different socio-economic situation in regards to the male-female relationship.

Capitalism today (in Britain and parts of the West more generally) has been set on a process of liquidating the artificial, culturally-enforced barrier between mens and womens work, with a high emphasis in today’s bourgeois ideology being the equality of women to be exploited for the same wage as their male counterparts (articulated in a slightly different way, of course) and for male and female CEOs to share the exploitation of this newly “egalitarian”proletariat. The highly accelerated development of the productive forces and the cultural push for males and females to pass between the old artificial barrier has resulted in the total lack of necessity for gendered labour in the current conditions, and with the streamlining of capitalism more generally (the fading of religion as a means of social control, the state’s declining relevance and the rapid increase in direct corporate control over the economy), the tendency towards ungendered labour is symptomatic of an ever-rising efficiency in the capitalist mode of production in regards to profit extraction, resulting in a significantly altered relationship between the sexes. De-industrialisation and the growth of the third-sector economy has been instrumental in this degendering of labour in first world capitalist states, the dominance of a non-productive economy and the lack of institutions such as working men’s clubs (ideological state apparatuses in their own right, reinforcing a certain form of masculinity onto it’s members) have also had a deep impact on the way men and women look at labour, themselves and each other. In place of workers institutions new institutions have come about to reinforce bourgeois ideology to the new social forces, as well as old institutions being retrofitted for the current conditions. Youth clubs, churches, schools, universities, institutions of social conditioning all propogate an ideology reflective of the degendering of labour – it is not, as many reactionaries see it, the other way around. Advances in technology have alleviated the more burdensome aspects of housework, something Lenin and Krupskaya talked of as a necessity in bringing about gender equality in the Soviet Union (see: Lenin on the Emancipation of Women).

How does this development affect the culture at large and, more importantly, how does it explain the transgender phenomenon? Labour – in this instance the alienated, individualised-social labour of contemporary capitalism – serves as the fundamental force in the construction of an ‘identity’, along with the secondary social conditioning of culture, leading to the development of the notion of ‘individual’ and collective identity. A working class man growing up today in bourgeois society has an entirely different experience to one growing up in the society of 30 years ago, and it is this experience (that of de-gendered labour and the cultural focus on the elimination of male-female cultural inequality), combined with consumer-liberalism’s excessive push for individual self-expressive identity at the expense of a collective class identity which result in a “fluid” gender system, that being a system whereby gender distinctions no longer serve as the primary division of labour and gender is given over to the market. Many feminist theorists such as Judith Butler see gender as a set of performances, but in order to perform in a capitalist society you must purchase the necessary commodities that signify how you wish to be interpreted. Under the current stage of capitalism even genitalia and hormones are commodities to assist in your performance. The division of gender was what Marx and Engels had initially suggested as the fundamental division of labour in 1846, based on their poservations of the rigidly patriarchal form culture took in this underdeveloped stage in capitalist development. Engels goes on to write in The Origin of the Family that the “first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage”, and this liquidation of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as being distinct functions of capital shows to us the extent to which capitalism and the market have developed, complexified and entrenched themselves since the time of Engels and Marx. The elimination of this “first class antagonism” through the devaluing of gender, marriage, monogamy, etc. is indicative of this accelerating process by which capitalism has uprooted itself from the superstructural remnants of pre-capitalist modes of production. In contrast to the arguments of trans rights activists in the Marxist movement it appears that this emergeant gender fluidity is not an affront to capital or a negation of capitalist social structures but a product of them and the most authentically capitalist gender formation.

Returning to the biology-social construct dichotomy, biologically speaking there are two sexes (discounting the marginal intersex population), but the social aspect of gender emerge totally from the same conditions where all cultural and social activity arise: They are the superstructural response to the workings of the economic base, and as the base grows in complexity and as the superstructure becomes more entrenched and all-encompassing in its protection of bourgeois dictatorship, capitalist gender norms and social relations shift and change to accommodate this gigantic, bloated system: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

Capitalism has, through its liquidation of the male-female labour division, created the current rise in gender dysphoria we see in our stage of capitalist development. A post from the organisation Red Fightback, a small Marxist-Leninist organisation in Britain, caused quite a stir amongst British Marxists due to the response from the CPGB ML. Not to get bogged down in discussing inter-communist online drama, the post portrayed the transgender phenomenon as a total shock to the system of capitalism, something which serves as a revolutionary moment due solely to it being a negation of the socially conservative attitudes held by (some of) the bourgeoisie on the question of gender. The implication here is that being in the category of “trans” bestows upon you some revolutionary importance, some significance in that your very being is somehow at odds with capitalism. It should be obvious why this is false. First of all, transgender people still appropriate the cultural performances of their adopted gender identity within the framework set by liberal capitalism and thus the very act of being trans does not qualify a revolutionary action. Secondly, and more importantly, their assertion misses that transgenderism in its current form is a product of capitalism and is promoted by capitalism via liberal sections of the media and organs of culture. Liberalism’s validation of transgender identities is a validation of the gender dysphoria created by capitalism and, at the core of it, a validation of capitalism itself and its tendency to uproot traditional structures in service of profit and the preservation of bourgeois dictatorship.

Though is it not also the task of the communist, under a system of proletarian dictatorship, to also liquidate the needless and inefficient gendered division of labour? It would be historically anachronistic for socialism to reconstruct a gendered division of labour and attempt to pursue a system of mens and womens labour as separate. A socialism with women working in the home and men working in the factory and field is unnescasry and rejects the fundamental scientific core of communism, the drive to learn from historical civilisational forms and create new, experimental ones in their place. From the current conditions of capitalism, the ending of gendered labour, comes a new socialist development on the issue of gender and identity. Socialism, in the collectivization of labour and elimination of private (individual) control over production and atomisation of the worker, negates bourgeois individualism (although due to the superstructure’s tendency to lag behind the base this negating process requires patience and determination) and replacing it with a class identity without the old structures of defined male and female social activity or the corrosive gender-individualism of the current stage in liberal ideological development. In other words, the excesses of capitalism result in an excessive individualised identity, which can only be superseded by a totalising class identity of the proletariat based on their material relationship to production over any metaphysical notions of gender expression or cultural allegiance. It is well known that during the cultural revolution in China women were encouraged to stand up for themselves, dress in gender-neutral clothing and perform the same tasks and labour as men, and vica versa. In effect the Chinese cultural revolutionaries both anticipated degenderisation and began to build a more authentic form of cultural androgyny than our contemporary bourgeois gender fluidity. Feminist writer Carol Hanisch, while addressing a symposium on the cultural revolution in 1996, spoke on the effect the revolution had on gender relations:

It wasn’t just on the theoretical level that we learned from the Chinese Revolution, however. Inspired by an episode described in Fanshen where a group of militant women confronted a man who beat his wife by beating him up, a small group of radical women paid a visit to a man who had been cheating on his wife. They decided to cut his long hair to teach him a lesson. There were four or five of them, but even so, they couldn’t carry out their action, finding the man too strong. They hadn’t learned yet that numbers are often not enough; you have to know how to fight. On another occasion that I know of, a similar group did successfully confront a boss who had refused to pay a woman who had worked for him as a waitress what he owed her when she quit.



This was in a country that had only recently abolished the barbaric practice of footbinding, a nation that had for centuries kept the distinction between male and female labour rigid and strictly enforced. The relations between men and women in China changed drastically during the initial revolutionary struggle and the subsequent cultural revolution and this change greatly inspired radicals and revolutionaries across the world. Hanisch continues:



There’s something else, however, that we absorbed from the Chinese revolutionary experience that’s harder to put into words: Call it inspiration, call it hope, call it desperation, call it courage, call it the subjective conditions, call it the spirit of revolution. Whatever you call it, it was there for us and we added to it. Then it disappeared and nearly everyone who experienced it, longs for it.



Hanisch sees in the cultural revolution a roadmap for a better kind of social relationship. In attempting to build a revolutionary movement we must first identify the realities of our current situation, then we must apply the lessons of the past to these problems, and this applies significantly in regards to the gender question. Without properly understanding the dynamics of this phenomenon we fall victim to becoming mouthpieces for bourgeois ideology, no matter how progressive it appears on first glance. We must also realise when we are being played. It is no secret that historically intelligence agencies have been instrumental in subverting radical struggle. I implore the reader to investigate Operation Mockingbird and COINTELPRO, as well as researching the CIA and FBI credentials of prominent left wing identitarians such as Gloria Steinem. The only way to counter disinformation and subversion is with theoretical understanding and critical ability.

NOTE: In future articles on this blog I will follow up on this post with some essays going into detail as to why the gendered division of labour was a necasary historical development in the first place, as well as examining in greater detail the more direct causes of gender dysphoria. Also I’ll talk about other stuff like how shitty the British left is and why socialists need to draw a clear dividing line between communism and ‘leftism’