Actually, I had the cheek to wonder on the way home if the conference I attended on Saturday was unique. It’s certainly unusual in the current political climate…

The materialist left

That means people who profess a politics based on sound, evidenced analysis of what’s going on in our society. It means acknowledging the very soundly evidenced facts about systemic oppression on the grounds of sex, race and class. In particular, it means tokenism is a waste of time when the vast majority of our citizens are struggling to access healthcare, social care, decent housing and education. I’m sure anyone left of centre will at least agree in theory that far, but what about this…

It means acknowledging that the most severe consequences of oppression fall on the most immediately visible vulnerable groups, such as Black and Western Asian people, and women and girls.

So there we were, a roomful of socialists, feminists and socialist feminists, who could even talk freely about the social consequences of biology, and about the military-industrial complex, and its deathly alliance with Zionism and the media.

Identity politics

In his talk, Chetan Bhatt went a long way to explaining why our political scene is currently so fraught with rages and tears, cancellations and walk-outs, and all those splits that the right so love to claim are just a characteristic of the left.

As I understand it, it goes like this: true socialism is based on social analysis. That is, fact-seeking, and evidence-informed debate. You don’t need to be a true-believer, and you don’t have to fear heretics.

By contrast, identity politics is a child of neoliberalism. With its complete absence of society-wide analysis, it can only react to opposing ideas with the notion that those you don’t agree with are bad people, they are full of hate, and must be removed from your group, party or conversation for everyone’s safety.

I asked some conference-goers in the pub afterwards, why it was that we could indulge in such heated political debates as the one we were currently having over supper, all full of passionate yes-buts and interruptions, and yet feel so confident no-one was going to burst into tears or stage an angry walk-out. Someone replied, ‘because we’re being honest’. Well yes, but people who are wrapped up in identity politics wouldn’t agree (or be aware) that a lot of their politics is based on fantasy beliefs. I guess they’d tell us we were looking at the wrong facts…

Dependency and denial

In her talk, Jane Clare Jones discussed dependency and denial. What do we depend on? Well, everyone starts out depending on the woman who gave birth to them, and many continue to depend on mum for a very long time. Some people, particularly some male people, don’t like that, and so are more than happy to sign up to an ideology where the opposition are largely older women, who ‘ought to be cancelled’.

I’m going to put JCJ’s analogy with the oil industry here because, as well as being a good way to point out the common theme in most areas of operation in our extractive, exploitative society, it’s also a handy way to move between the two big denial issues. Clarifying the relationship between sex and gender, she asked us to think about the relationship between oil and the corporate oil industry. Here goes:

Oil exists, independently of the oil industry – but the oil industry wouldn’t exist if not for the presence of oil. Humans made the oil industry. The oil is there, naturally.

Sex exists, independently of gender – but gender would not exist if not for the reality of sex. Humans made up gender. Sex is there, naturally.

Oil would exist without the oil industry. It would be perfectly possible for us to disband the oil industry and leave the oil in the ground, if we hadn’t got ourselves stuck in an extractive, exploitative society.

Sex would exist without gender. It would be perfectly possible for us to dismantle gender, whilst acknowledging and legislating around the realities of sex, if we hadn’t got ourselves stuck in an extractive, exploitative society.

In short, the existence of both oil and sex are solid facts. The oil industry, corporations, the sex industry and gender are optional, notional things we are free to suggest we’d be better off without; however, the oil industry and the sex and gender industries are desperate for us to believe THEY are factual and necessary.

There’s also the larger and even more urgent issue of climate crisis. Between the capitalist desire for eternal growth and the military-industrial complex’s determination to control everything and everyone, our planet is at the limits of its toleration of us. The consequences of that are coming home fast and are so utterly overwhelming that very few politicians or commentators are really up to dealing with what we’re actually facing – the reality that everything we depend on, from food and water to the rule of law, is in urgent crisis.

So from Mum to Mother Earth, dependency and denial of dependency are currently very strong forces against freedom of speech and rational debate on the political scene.

Socialist internationalism

Pragna Patel’s speech was packed with fascinating examples of campaigns she’s been involved with through Southall Black Sisters and other socialist, feminist organisations, and demonstrated how battling for the welfare of women and girls, particularly Black women and girls, logically positions you against extractive systems such as settler-colonialism, and other deathly forces of neoliberalism that centrists and some feminists are fond of telling us are peripheral to feminism.

Questions before answers

One of the questions we had when the conference was being planned was “How do we, the ‘materialist left’ distinguish ourselves from those on the right, who also oppose Identity Politics?” A question which has grown in significance and urgency since the recent council elections across the country which baffled quite a lot of us as we saw increasing numbers of citizens who would be extremely vulnerable if a far-right government were elected, vote for Reform UK. A prime example of that was laid out before us as we gathered for this  conference (in Manchester).

The goings on outside

The roads adjacent to the venue were full of police vehicles, including the crew buses they use for riot-squad and or when expecting to make multiple arrests. We looked at each other in trepidation, momentarily thinking we were being besieged but, it wasn’t about us. There was a gathering nearby which, judging by the flags, was by Iranian royalists. It was big, it was noisy and it included placards saying ‘Make Iran Great Again’. I wasn’t in a position to understand the background to this but it appears these are people who are taking on board Trump’s solution for Iran, including a new Shah and, presumably, rescuing Iran by bombing Iranians.

Are these, we wondered, examples of the people who we felt were voting far-right against their own interests? It was much discussed in conference.

Finding answers

Many conference attendees thought women and ethnic minorities are amongst those voting for organisations like Reform because they want to oppose the current government and the left is not offering them anything. Added to this, we noted that as Starmer’s authoritarian government goes further and further down the road of outlawing protest and dissent, and the Green Party fails again and again to provide a logical left-leaning rationale to back what Zak Polanski appears to be saying, the even-further right is easily able to present itself as the last bastion of free speech in particular, and freedom in general.

That’s why my main conclusion from the day’s deliberations is that we need to get out there campaigning and community-building on the real, material issues that affect real people, such as housing, health, education and yes, climate crisis and eternal wars; and we need to bring political education and debate with us everywhere we go, so people can see the evidence, and find a logical alternative to the far right; so that others will join us in investigating the real causes of the many afflictions our society is suffering from instead of jumping on the scapegoats and fantasy-solutions offered both by the far right and by the identity-politics-driven left.

Dealing with dissent

Perhaps most importantly, we need to spread the idea that community-building involves working with people who have a variety of opinions. It’s absolutely vital that we help our society, particularly the politically active portions of our society, to relearn the notion that disagreements should be addressed by research and debate, not tears, tantrums and cancellations. Strategies of cancellation, boycott and sabotage are tools to deal with powerful organisations that have rejected ordinary approaches such as letters, petitions and protests, NOT ways of batting away or scaring off ordinary people who disagree with you.

The Materialist Left

We were a group of socialists and socialist feminists who, as early members of Your Party, came together to work on the idea of defending the broad-left tone that made the Corbyn movement accessible to millions, and in the hope of fending off the belligerent, identity-politics led tone that could, ultimately, destroy the project. Since then, quite a few have stepped back from, or left Your Party whilst others have stuck with it and put in a lot of work.

I’m a member of Your Party, but what has gone on in the last few years has only increased my scepticism about party politics. That’s why I’m very glad both that the Materialist Left has endured and grown, and that it is not only for Your Party members. I don’t know how the numbers pan out, but I note that although attendees on Saturday included people who are getting local Your Party groups rolling, others are members of other parties, or of none. Some are active in their unions – a group including Materialist Left member Simon Midgley are right now at the UNISON National Delegate Conference, trying to inject some reality into UNISON’s response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that sex means biological sex. They are getting considerable traction, and are making contact with more UNISON members who wish to return to evidenced reality in politics.

Others, like me, are doing their politics closer to home, outside of party or trade union politics. I still suspect that as well as the inevitable rancour and division identity politics creates, it was a combination of Whatsapp spats and attempts to ‘start at the top’ that caused the agonies of division and distrust in Your Party.

Let’s get active, locally, face-to-face! There are videos, and lots more excellent speeches and ideas from Saturday’s conference, and lots of thank yous to say. I’ll post again when the videos are published, and there’ll be more on the Materialist Left substack and social media in the near future.

Just as surely as social media steam-ups lead to despair and division, a good, comradely face-to-face discussion builds hope and solidarity. I feel far, far better for spending a weekend in Manchester with the Materialist Left.

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