Yesterday BadMouse released a new video entitled “CPGB-ML: An Infantile Disorder”, which as the title would suggest is his critique of the Proletarian Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), which for the rest of this post will be refered to simply as CPGB-ML, but is also more of a general critique against the “brocialist” class-first tendency of the left, and is thus a defence of the intersectionalist tendency of the left.

Here we’ll address a few talking points within the video that in my view stick out the most. It must be made clear from the outset that I am no fan of the CPGB-ML. In fact even in the video BadMouse did do a fair job of pointing out major problems with them, such as their insufferable larping and their strange willingness to openly support right-wingers (they supported the Brexit Party in the European Parliamentary elections). What I am here to do is to address some really bad arguments made by BadMouse in support of intersectionalism.

One of the first things that springs to mind is his statement on how the two-gender model is only a product of modern understanding, stating that before the modern era people believed that there was only one gender (that gender being male, and female being a deviation of male). My only response to this is really, “yeah? so what?”. If we take your point to be true, what you’re really saying here is that science has demolished the one gender model, and replaced it with the two gender one. I find it curious how that angle is never given attention to, and I think it must be because he takes gender to be primarily if not absolutely a social construct (note that he says early on that biology can “play a part” in shaping gender norms, suggesting that biology is not the primary source).

Speaking of that, he calls anyone who insists on grounding an assessment of gender on biology to be “undialectical”, on the grounds things are based on what came before them. Well, I find it odd that he thinks nature doesn’t come before anything. Seriously, what is there before the social relations that too much of the left puts too much emphasis on? What is there from which humans themselves emerge, before their social structures do? It is the natural world, of which we are a part, and it is the laws of evolution, from which we derive several of our behaviours. To assume otherwise is really to assume that our social relations and concepts emerged out of a vacuum. Now that really would be undialectical, and anti-materialist because it assumes creatio ex nihilo.

In addressing the talking point that gender, if not determined by chromosomes, is determined by the functions of pregnancy, menstruation and reproduction (via the genitalia), his argument is simply to point out that this does not apply to all members of a given gender, stating that not all women get pregnant, not all women can menstruate, and apparently “many” people are born intersex. First of all, the condition of being born intersex is very rare. Even the Intersex Society of North America (now-defunct) could only tell you that 1.7% of births are to intersex children. Hardly “many”, and hardly a threat to the two-gender model in itself.

Then there is the point of how some women can’t menstruate. This again is a shallow point to make, and BadMouse does not earn any brownie points for this one. The condition of being unable to menstruate is called amenorrhea, and it is known to be divided into two types. Primary amenorrhea is when the menses do not occur between the ages of 13 and 16 in the conditions of normal development, while secondary amenorrhea is when a woman who has already been menstruating stops doing so for an extended period of time absent of pregnancy, cycle suppression or lactation. Several causes are attributed to this condition, which range from lack of estrogen to ovarian failure to recreational drug abuse and many others. According to the Honor Society of Nursing, primary amenorrhea occurs in less than 1% of women and secondary amenorrhea occurs in less than 5% of women. So again we find this isn’t just some natural divergence that poses a problem for general trends.

Then there is the point of how some women cannot get pregnant. He doesn’t name the condition that causes this, so again we are to take this as sort of a natural divergence without really questioning it, but most people would look at that and decided that this is called infertility. Or at least that’s what I’ve found while trying to search for what BadMouse means here.

What BadMouse is doing is taking examples where the lines between what is still scientifically understood to be biological gender and using this as somehow proof that this scientific understanding of gender is either incorrect, inconclusive, or deeply flawed. It’s like taking the God of the Gaps argument and applying it to biology; a comparison that I suspect BadMouse and his ilk will not be too pleased with. Of course he’ll tell you that this is just about old-fashioned perspectives that have supposedly gone out of date, but he hardly establishes scientific consensus on this. I guess he feels he can’t do this because he is too white, too straight and too cis.

Indeed the only time he seems to acknowledge material reality in the realm of gender or sexuality is when he claims that the LGBT community defines itself in the realm of material reality, and to be fair it often does. But why do they define themselves in material reality and heteronormativity does not? It’s not explained very clearly, which leaves us to assume that the unstated premise is that, if you are a normal, straight, cis-gendered person, you don’t have that material undergirding and your identity is just the product of bourgeois social relations.

His claim that the reason LGBT+ exists as a collective definition because they are defined collectively as a threat to the way that we normally view gender and sexuality and as such challenge the norms associated with them. Is this why many differences and conflicts between such disparate groupings (such as how bisexuals are often loathed by other “LGBT” individuals) can be ignored? Is this entire thing defined by what it is against? If that’s the case, why are paraphilic tendencies such as zoophilia and pedohpilia often not counted among that arrangement? Because we all rightly condemn it to be immoral and degenerate? That would be nice and all, but doesn’t it also fit into the category of challenging the norms of sexuality? And if we decide that it doesn’t, why? It’s a problem that I think not enough of them pay attention to, and I think it should be paid attention to because, on Twitter in particular, we are seeing people trying to smuggle pedophilia into LGBT spaces by calling themselves “MAPs” (meaning “minor-attracted persons”). But it doesn’t often come up outside of when we all condemn the MAPs for being the pedophilic freaks that they are.

I want to make absolutely clear that this is not to be confused with the position that homosexuality is inherently pedophilic. I consider such claims to be vulgar, unscientific and straightforwardly bigoted. What I mean to say instead is that, if you’re going to define a disparate group by nothing but whether or not they go against normal views on sexuality, then you have a definition so vague as to include the kind of people who would make homosexuals, bisexuals and trans people look bad because they will actively try to position themselves within the same spaces.

Moving on from that ugliness, I find it curious that BadMouse states that if “LGBT+” people aren’t oppressed, then there is no need for them to be liberated by socialism, stating in the video graphic that if they are not oppressed then “Queerfolk have nothing specifically to gain from socialism anyway”. He says this, and then wonders why we anti-idpol leftists consider identity politics to be bourgeois. What he’s doing is implying that the LGBT movement has nothing to gain from socialism, and if that’s true then there is nothing stopping them from opposing working class politics if their “struggles” and “stories” aren’t given enough attention. This is not the kind of bone you want to throw to people who you consider fascist, or for that matter to actual traditionalist socialists, who will seize upon this. Of course it’s also worth noting that he claims that people who disagree with him do nothing for the LGBT community other than promise them equality under socialism. I guess fighting or advocating for their rights doesn’t count. And don’t give me some spiel about how “believing they should have equality under the law is not enough” because BadMouse himself states that we ought to be fighting for their rights even in the here and now, in the capitalist environment.

He then goes onto accuse anti-idpol leftists of soft bigotry (or hard in the case of CPGB-ML) and chauvinism, by accusing them of having the same talking points as CPGB-ML. The fact that we on the anti-idpol left find CPGB-ML to be ridiculous just as our pro-idpol enemies do seems to be lost on him.

In fact, let me sum up my grievances with the CPGB-ML just for the moment. They have an unwavering attachment to the hardcore of Marxism-Leninism, and don’t ever seem to want to investigate why Marxism-Leninism has gone out of fashion in much of the left. They are quite happy to support right wing parties rather than cultivate a genuine left-wing Eurosceptic movement, and defended George Galloway for doing the same on the grounds of anti-imperialism. Their leadership is quite honestly the most dessicated I’ve ever seen in a political party, being headed largely by either boomers or people who can be counted among the Elder Gods (the honorary president is over 100 years old), which in my view can explain quite a bit about how senile the party seems to be. And, I will credit BadMouse here, they have this weird traditionalism about them where they mandate that you dress and cut your hair like you’re what they seem to believe normal working class people dress like (I’ll give you a tip, they often do not dress like they’re attending an NPI gathering). But most important of all for me is that, being the Stalinists that they are, they defend nightmarishly authoritarian regimes that abandoned Marxism years ago, namely China and North Korea (the latter of which is explicitly fascist). I guess you can expect that sort of thing when one of your leaders owns factories in China — a self-identified communist who privately controls means of production? Talk about irony!

But going back to the criticism of BadMouse, I almost get this feeling that he assumes the anti-idpol crowd talks like they are all CPGB-ML members or rather just that they are his Dad. Setting aside that he just throws around this trope like it’s axiomatic, it’s also suggestive that he never really interacts with the anti-idpol. In fact, if I recall correctly, he’s blocked a few of them. He assumes that we don’t treat non-whites and non-straight and non-cis people as though they are normal people, which is not only blatantly false but also quite ironic considering that his intersectional framework demands that you not do so — after all, to view them as simply humans would be to “erase them”, to collapse their “unique” struggles and identities back into the common fold of humanity. Oh and are we really going to ignore that, sometimes, they themselves actively present themselves as unique and separate from normal people?

Most insidious of all is how he claims that CPGB-ML, and for him by proxy the anti-idpol left, would never have supported gay rights in the 1980s and that the only reason they have to now is because of privilege. There is nothing of substance to address here, it is a simple poisoning of the well that emerges as a post-hoc argument intended to smear the anti-idpol left. The only truth we might be able to attribute to this argument is that some of the CPGB-ML are old enough that we can guess that they might have been legit homophobes back in the day.

BadMouse seems to imply that “class-reductionist” politics is fundamentally minoritarian, that is to say he believes that class-first leftists will only ever attract a small amount of people to their cause. The implication, of course, is that intersectionalism will attract a wide audience of people to the left. How wide exactly? Well we can assume this means straight cis white people who are obsessed with intersectionalism as a means of combatting their own sense of racial guilt, but I doubt that’s what he actually means. I think he seems to be of the impression that the class-first left defines the working class as a cultural stereotype, as opposed to, you know, people who do not own the means of production and whose labour is the source of values and the wealth of society, like the rest of the socialist left. That category alone is fundamentally majoritarian. So who are we alienating here? A selection of guilty-minded whites and a small contingent of the population who don’t find their stories reflected in our movement. OK.

Oh wait. That’s not the real reason he dismisses class first politics. The real reason he does so is because, in his own words, “it’s boring”. Yes. Not really because it has no basis in reality or it’s not salient, but because it’s boring for him. It doesn’t make him feel excited. What an utterly pathetic character BadMouse is. This suggests an unstated premise of intersectional politics, that it is primarily performative, driven by aestheticism and sensation more than by pursuit of the truth. Such is, in a word, adventurism.

Finally we will address the point of how CPGB-ML rejects “the intersection”, referring to intersectionalism. More specifically, let’s talk about how BadMouse seems to dismiss the point of how imperialism has appropriated a form of LGBT politics. Now he is technically correct when he points out that the corporate appropriation of gay rights is not at all sincere, and everyone on the left can see this, but he would be naive if he thinks that imperialism hasn’t found in modern LGBT politics a tool by which to justify imperialism. If you may recall, Donald Trump announced earlier this year that they were going launch what they called a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality, with specific attention being paid to Iran. That is not a coincidence, considering that at the time there has been a great deal of build-up to the possibility of greater aggression towards Iran. Although at present Trump has decided against invading Iran in response to them shooting an unmanned drone flying over Iranian waters, the Trump administration is still pursuing sanctions against Iran. If you can’t put two and two together on this one and you insist on anti-imperialism being a no-brainer then I don’t know what to tell you. Oh but that doesn’t matter to BadMouse. New developments in imperialism don’t matter if they diverge from past trends, or as he put it the past legacy of opposing gay rights. For a dialectical materialist, you sure aren’t being very dialectical.

There is a strawman that he applies to the people he terms “brocialists”, that he believes we believe gay rights to be bourgeois. Well, we don’t, but you sure do given what you implied earlier about queer people having no stake inherent stake in socialism. We definitely think that identity politics is bourgeois though, no argument there. And perhaps that’s because, oh I don’t know, it adopts bourgeois liberal ontology, often while masquerading as socialist ontology, and its obfuscation of or simple de-emphasis on class has allowed it become easily co-opted by the liberal establishment — a point that the idpol left never seems to convincingly address. He accuses us taking the polar opposite stance of liberal idpollers, which is a very strange way of saying that we are actually fundamentally opposed to them. I bet he thought he was going to get credit for that from us, but really it just seems banal.

He makes a very interesting point about how the constructions of the bourgeoisie need to be worked through, rather than discarded on the altar of progress. To me it sounds like he was acknowledging that some aspects of bourgeois society are valid and can be rendered useful to the cause of socialism, which is funny, because I have a feeling that he will never apply this anywhere outside identity politics. Democratic socialists (the historical kind, not Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) have been vocal on how a framework of democracy and liberty can be inherited and transformed into a proletarian institution rather than, as BadMouse put it, discarded on the altar of progress. But BadMouse would probably not subscribe to this, because he has no attachment to the idea that, say, freedom of speech should be a non-negotiable right in a free society.

In summary, BadMouse demonstrates the ways in which the intersectionalist (as the title of this post suggests) tends to make a mountain out of a molehill. Its points about gender are ultimately shallow and the entire critique of class politics just comes back to “unique” struggles. I have no doubt that the white working class will be absent from his concern over “unique” struggles, due to the fact that he appears to be an avowed Sakaist.