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The Racialization of Anti-Semitism in Post-Holocaust Germany

Outsourcing a History of Racism to the Muslim Other


13/07/2021

“The charge of anti-Semitism becomes a strong projection of the history of the Holocaust onto the bodies of ‘outsiders’ like myself, those not directly interpellated by that history, as a classic form of psychoanalytic disavowal; I accuse you of doing what I am afraid I might be doing myself, what I very much so fear doing, what I don’t want to do myself” (J. Puar).

In Spring 2020, Felix Klein, the federal government commissioner for “Jewish life and the fight against anti-Semitism” in Germany, urged the organizers of the German Arts Festival ‘Ruhrtriennale’ to revoke their invitation of the renowned postcolonial scholar Achille Mbembe. Klein asserted that Mbembe was ‘unsuitable’ to speak at the Ruhrtriennale and legitimized his political stance on a cultural festival by accusing Mbembe of anti-Semitism and of ‘relativizing the Holocaust’ as Mbembe had equated the state of Israel with the apartheid system of South Africa in one of his academic writings.

Similar things happened that year to rapper Talib Kweli and the band Young Fathers who had their concerts cancelled after they were accused of anti-Semitism due to their support for the BDS-movement, and to Palestinian journalist Khaled Barakat who was denied a renewal of his residency permit in Germany because he constituted ‘a security risk’ for his ‘anti-Semitic’ viewpoints on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

Most recently, peaceful demonstrations in several German cities in response to the continued ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Jerusalem –attracting thousands of protestors– have been condemned by popular German newspapers, such as Der Bild-Zeitung, as “Judenhass-Demos” that, according to Die Tagesschau, illustrate the “Problem mit Islamischem Antisemitismus in Deutschland”.

Mbembe’s disqualification from the right to speak in public for being judged as an anti-Semite, then, is not an isolated event in Germany, but part of a long list of cases in which primarily minority background Germans and non-Germans have been accused of promoting anti-Semitic sentiments.

In practice, then, one could argue that the interconnected commitments of German leaders to fabricate a redeemed ‘post-racial’ society through an almost obsessive and unidirectional focus on fighting anti-Semitism and remembering the Holocaust –now constituting a source of ‘German pride’ and a ‘new’ post-war German identity– increasingly work to project anti-Semitism onto racialized ‘Others’. Meanwhile, the constructed centrality of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic experience of racism and German and European racial history effectively works to sideline Germany’s colonial past as constitutive of German identity and to disavow the continued application of colonial instruments of racial rule in German and European post-colonial societies.

Hence, while I certainly do not wish to understate the seriousness of anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish attacks, whether perpetrated by Muslims or by right-wing extremists, this article sets out to discuss the outsourcing of anti-Semitism as a new field of racial governance that attributes to Muslims supposedly culturally transmitted psychopathologies that allegedly make them inherently prone to ‘intolerance’, subsequently driving a wedge between a ‘revitalized’, ‘redeemed’ and ‘color-blind’ Germany and minority, primarily Muslim, populations that have ‘not yet’ internalized the values of the post-Holocaust inclusive ‘Judeo-Christian’ society.

The Holocaust as ‘Screen-Memory’ and the Disavowal of Colonial Violence

The Holocaust against the Jews of Europe is internationally recognized as a modern genocide that changed the world. It has become a universal moral paradigm in democratic societies and its remembrance continues to have a significant impact on world politics and international law . The importance of remembering and ‘working through’ the Holocaust is, of course, particularly acute in contemporary Germany, where historical responsibility and “a primal scene of guilt and shame” for the crimes committed against the Jews by the National-Socialist regime have become the core around which German national identifications and self-consciousness are organized. Indeed, Moses notes how, after the end of the Second World War, German foreign policy officials were acutely conscious that “the world will carefully watch the new Germany and one of the tests by which it will be judged and allowed reintegration into the ranks of ‘civilized nations’ will be its attitude towards the Jews and how it treats them”.

In 1949, the US High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, spelled out to Germans that: “What this Jewish community will be, will be watched very closely and very carefully by the entire world. It will, in my judgement, be one of the real touchstones and the test of Germany’s progress toward light”. Hence, ‘stigma management’ became Germany’s main occupation, leading to what Nolte has referred to as a ‘theater of remembrance’ in which the memory of the Holocaust became reified into a ritualized narrative of social transformation.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, then, Germany’s ability to confront its dark past served to legitimize Germany’s reappearance on the world stage, transforming the act of coming to terms with the past into a positive attribute of German society, a moral ‘uplift’ story of the human spirit against intolerance, and a mark of special moral qualifications.

By performing an explicit break with and a ‘moving on from’ the Nazi state legacy, however, Germany effectively positioned the Third Reich as the paradigmatic example of racist practice, effectively freezing racism in a very specific period in history. Lewicki & Schoolman rightly note how this narrative is highly selective in its sole focus on only one of race’s many incarnations and in its disavowal of colonialism as part of an ‘enlightened’ German history. Indeed, El-Tayeb notes how German colonial activities were often neglected as irrelevant to German society and to colonial history in general. This perception, according to El-Tayeb, requires correction, as German colonialism, and particularly their genocidal intent to annihilate the Herero in Namibia in 1904, put the race theories already dominating the public mind into practice on a broad scale, breaking down previously effective taboos with regards to racial massacres.

As early as 1942, Korsch, a German philosopher wrote: “The novelty of totalitarian politics… is simply that the Nazis have extended to ‘civilized’ European peoples the methods hitherto reserved for the ‘natives’ or ‘savages’ living outside so-called civilization”. In his Discourse, Césaire famously described Nazi brutality as a “crime against the white man” that applied to Europe already existing and widely applied colonialist procedures, and, in a similar vein, Hannah Arendt wrote that African colonial possessions became the most fertile soil for the flowering of what later was to become the Nazi elite and opened the door for “a totalitarian government on the basis of racism”.

A number of scholars have pointed out, in this regard, that the designation of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as the paradigmatic historical experience of racism, and the designation of ‘the fight for liberal tolerance’ as the ultimate benchmark for the ‘new’ German identity, not only salvages the ‘white mythology’ of contemporary Europe’s universalist claims to moral exemplarity, but paradoxically also ‘buries’ race. It fails to acknowledge that racialization and racially based inequalities are of a period that far precede the Holocaust and that its permutations continue to persist today.

The Externalization of Anti-Semitism to the Muslim Other

Bashir and Goldberg note how this ‘sorting operation’ is reenacted in the increasing use of the term ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ which, according to Topolski, is a “post-Shoah by-product of Western Christian dominance that serves as a symbolic apology for Christian anti-Semitism” and has been so normalized and naturalized as ‘long-standing’ that it is often mistaken as ‘secular’ . This normalized ‘secular’ stance, however, very much forms the dominant norm by which other groups are symbolically judged, classified, categorized and excluded from the ‘European project’. Indeed, Bashir & Goldberg note that in an immense act of negation and denial, the Jew suddenly stands by (secular-)Christian civilization against Islam, leading to a situation in which responsibility for the Holocaust is gradually shifted to a very specific Other: that is, the Muslim immigrant (2019, 87).

Indeed, in today’s plural European societies, the construction of a ‘racism without race’ by ascribing to certain bodies a combination of perceived unsurmountable cultural attributes that excludes them from what is constructed as an exclusively civilized realm, is, according to El-Tayeb, Mbembe and Wekker, particularly visible in the externalization of Muslim populations. Ozyurek notes how a public discourse now dominates in Germany primarily concerning the Muslim ‘importation’ of anti-Semitism and it is in this context that Alice Weidel, a German politician in the Bundestag for the right-wing ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ could contend that “of course we have a problem with racism; but it is not the [problem of] German citizens, but of those Muslim migrants that do not want to integrate and do not accept our values”.

Germany’s commitment to human rights and tolerance implied in the phrase ‘Never Again’ is now widely perceived as being besieged by alleged ‘Islamic fundamentalists and Muslim anti-Semitists’. The choc en retour of the disavowed lineage of Orientalist projections, then, is the violence embedded in the naturalization of Islamophobic sentiments under the banner of ‘the fight for tolerance’.

Romeyn and Younes note how in the new geopolitical realities after 9/11, the idea of Muslim anti-Semitism fitted perfectly with the scenario of a ‘clash of civilizations’: the discourse around the War on Terror was merged with the parallel idea of a ‘War on Anti-Semitism’ in the body and psyche of the Muslim Other. Indeed, at the anti-Semitism conference in Vienna in 2005, it was argued that “at the root of [today’s] anti-Jewish efforts is the same kind of extremist [i.e., Islamist] thinking that lies behind the international terrorism that is threatening our civilization” .

The Vienna meeting was followed up with another conference in Berlin. There, European governments agreed to allocate funds to combat this ‘new’ form of anti-Semitism, effectively leading to a situation in which anti-Semitism training for white Germans was being replaced –in monetary support, number and scope– with state-sponsored civil-society projects and educational programs for youths with a ‘Muslim background’ . It was alluded that anti-Semitism was brought over from unresolved conflicts in the Middle east –primarily the Palestinian liberation struggle– and thriving on the “social frustrations of new minorities established through migration into the many member states of the European Union”.

It is noteworthy, and even profoundly ironic, that in Vienna and in Berlin, birthplaces of the worst modern form of anti-Semitism, Muslim immigrants were accused of bringing anti-Semitism to a Europe imagined to be otherwise free of it.

Similar to the workings of ‘homonationalism’ and ‘femonationalism’, then, in which the alleged sexual freedom of queers and women is juxtaposed to the alleged oppression of these groups among the Muslim Other, the trope of a ‘new anti-Semitism’ has become a convenient way of projecting blame onto the Muslim Other for complex social issues that might blemish the mainstream’s self-image ).

Each charge –the charge of homophobia, of sexism and of anti-Semitism– characterizes Muslims as immoral perpetrators and excludes them from the fold of the ethically normative European/German community, under the banner of the defense of the universal ‘cultural values’ of freedom and equality. This effectively produces “an experience of intimate communal aversion against the barbaric, uneducated, and savage practices that we as a civilized nation cannot allow to occur within our borders”.

By the time that the calls for a ‘war’ on this ‘new’ anti-Semitism were made, however, Germany had already witnessed a decade of racially motivated attacks –including killings and manhunts– targeting other than Jewish minorities. Indeed, Younes shows how the incitements to public policy actually stood in direct contradiction to police and intelligence statistics: between 2001 and 2005, there were around 43.6 anti-Semitic physically violent attacks per year in Germany.

In 2016, there were 30 attacks and in 2017, there were 28 physical attacks, with around 95% of them committed by right-wing white German individuals. In comparison, there were almost 2000 attacks on refugees in 2017 alone, around 900 attacks on German Muslims, along with more than 100 attacks on refugee aid workers. Furthermore, in 2017, there were 205 politically motivated criminal acts against parliamentary politicians and aid-workers who worked to achieve a more egalitarian society. Given the statistics, then, the threat to democracy or Western tolerance and civilization is numerically located in the attacks on refugees, Muslims and people of color, rather than in Muslim anti-Semitism.

I concur with Ozyurek, then, that understanding anti-Semitism as a malignant ideology supposedly ‘brought back’ to Europe by Muslims merely works to produce perpetrators out of marginalized, racialized, and disadvantaged people, while preserving a ‘redeemed’ and ‘innocent’ German identity. The implication is that the origin of, and solution to the marginalization of minorities lies with their ‘failed integration’ and ‘deficient’ cultural values, rather than with racial, social and economic segregation and spatial containment at the hands of German authorities. When it is established that Muslims are anti-Semitic –and worse, refuse to atone for it– it becomes difficult to recognize their position as victims in relation to European racism.

The charge of anti-Semitism, then, is instrumentalized as a way to turn the gaze away from historically informed Orientalist projections and more continuous patterns of violence as it depicts Muslim Germans as dishonorable and undeserving residents (Topolski 2020, 313). In line with the argumentation of Yaspir Puar, then, who argued that the incorporation of queer and gay subjecthood into the biopolitical regime of the nation has been ‘condoned’ by multicultural, liberal societies only in so far as the establishing of the regulatory norm of “queer, liberal secularity” allows for a “parallel process of demarcation from populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death”, the figure of the Jew has been retrogressively instrumentalized to externalize racialized minorities on the basis of presumed cultural incompatibilities; to erase historical and contemporary racisms; and to subject minority populations to disciplinary securitization.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the outward projection of anti-Semitism to the Other enables the fabrication of an egalitarian, pure and post-racial self-image that stands in direct opposition to the violent and discriminatory actions that it justifies. In Germany, there is a growing confluence between the charge of anti-Semitism and the culturalization of race, in which colonialist racial categories persist, but are disguised in culturalizing rather than in biological terms. This process enables state actors, who embed Jews retrogressively in the European project, to externalize racialized minorities on the basis of presumed cultural incompatibilities; to erase their own historical and contemporary racisms; and to subject minority populations to disciplinary ‘integration’ techniques).

Racism is projected outward onto immigrant and primarily Muslim populations who are depicted as never having learned the right lessons from the Holocaust and thus remain external to the post-Second-World War ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization, while the significance of German racist crimes is effectively played down in the fantasy of multicultural societies as tolerant, hospitable, open-minded and innocent. This is the effect of the collusion between the figuration of the Holocaust as the monumentalized and standardized object lesson in intolerance with the disabled and disavowed history of colonialism and (continued) colonial violence.

I agree with Romeyn that if the Holocaust should continue to provide the moral compass of the ‘new’ Europe, its lessons need to be universalized and extended beyond the specificity of Jewish suffering to include all forms of exclusion, discrimination and intolerance. What we need is an emancipatory move that redirects attention from Muslim anti-Semitism to anti-Muslim xenophobia and to the exclusivist (white, Christian) strains within Europe’s dominant ‘secular’ and ‘inclusive’ self-image, subsequently providing an immanent and vital challenge to the core of European self-understanding as ‘tolerant’, ‘raceless’ and ‘colorblind’.

Further Reading

  • Brown, W. 2006. Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. New Jersey: Princeton University Press
  • Césaire, A. 1972. Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press
  • El-Tayeb, F. 2011. European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Post-national Europe. University of Minnesota Press
  • Lewicki, A. & Schoolman, Y. 2020. “Building a new nation: anti-Muslim racism in post-unification Germany.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 28
  • Mbembe, Achille. 2017. Critique of Black Reason. Durham: Duke University Press.
  • Wekker, G. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press
  • Bashir, B and A. Goldberg. 2019. The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History. New York: Columbia University Press
  • Ozyurek, E. 2016. “Export-Import Theory and the Racialization of Anti-Semitism: Turkish- and Arab-Only Prevention Programs in Germany.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58(1)
  • Ozyurek, E. 2019. “Muslim Minorities as Germany’s Past Future: Islam Critics, Holocaust Memory, and Immigrant Integration” Memory Studies 15(1)
  • Puar, J.K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke University Press.
  • Romeyn, E. 2014. “Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Spectro-politics and Immigration.” Theory, Culture and Society 31
  • Romeyn, E. 2016. “Liberal tolerance and its hauntings: Moral compasses, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.” European Journal of Cultural Studies
  • Romeyn, E. 2020. “(Anti) ‘new antisemitism’ as a transnational field of racial governance.” Patterns of Prejudice 54
  • Topolski, A. 2020. “Rejecting Judeo-Christian Privilege: The First Step Towards Semitic Solidarity.” Jewish Studies Quarterly 27
  • Younes, A. 2020. “Fighting Anti-Semitism in Contemporary Germany.” Islamophobia Studies Journal 5(2)

Solidarity with migrant hunger strikers in Belgium

Statement read out at the rally outside the Belgian embassy in Berlin on 10th July


12/07/2021

by Legalisierung Jetzt

German, French and Spanish versions follow

Today, 10 July 2021, we have called together as a legalisation campaign to stand in solidarity with the illegalised migrant who since 23rd May have been demanding from the Belgian state in their legitimate exercise of resistance and protest, in a hunger strike, their right to residence in order to have access to a dignified life, which has been denied even more during the pandemic.

Secondly, to demand that the Belgian state urgently respond to the demands of the compañeres (comrades) for their regularisation and that they be immediately granted medical services in view of their deteriorated state of health, only under the consent and conditions that the hunger strikers agree to.

Thirdly, to call on organisations, migrant collectives, anti-racist groups and any group sensitised to this situation, to mobilise in solidarity with the comrades to make visible the political act of resistance of the strikers in Brussels, as well as the situation of the illegalised community in their territories.

Down with the Belgian colonial capitalist state, down with borders, the European Union and the xenophobic policies of death.

Long live the strikers, long live their resistance and dignity.

Life, love and rebellion

#LegalisierungJetzt!

#DignitéPourToutes

#wearebelgiumtoo

German version

Heute, am 10. Juli 2021, haben wir uns als Kampagne “Legalisierung jetzt” versammelt, um uns vor allem zu solidarisieren mit den illegalisierten migrantischen Brüdern und Schwestern, die seit dem 23. Mai in einer legitimen Widerstands- und Protestaktion mittels eines Hungerstreiks vom belgischen Staat ihr Bleiberecht einfordern, um Zugang zu einem menschenwürdigen Leben zu haben, das ihnen während der Pandemie noch mehr verwehrt wurde.

Zweitens, zu fordern, dass der belgische Staat dringend auf die Forderung der Genossen und Genossinnen nach ihrer Regularisierung eingeht und dass sie angesichts ihres verschlechterten Gesundheitszustands sofort von den medizinischen Diensten behandelt werden, und zwar nur mit der Zustimmung und unter den Bedingungen, die die Streikenden festgelegt haben.

Drittens, wir rufen alle Organisationen, Migrantischen kollektive, antirassistische Gruppen oder jede Gruppe, die für diese Situation sensibilisiert ist, auf, sich zu mobilisieren und solidarisieren mit den Genossen und Genossinnen, in der Art und Weise, wie sie es für richtig halten, und den politischen Akt des Widerstands der Streikenden in Brüssel sowie die Situation der illegalisierten Migrant*innen in jede Territorien wo sie sich befinden sichtbar zu machen.

Nieder mit dem belgischen kolonial kapitalistischen Staat, nieder mit den Grenzen, der Europäischen Union und der fremdenfeindlichen Politik des Todes.

Es lebe die Streikenden, es lebe ihr Widerstand und ihre Würde.

Leben, Liebe und Widerstand/Rebellion

#LegalisierungJetzt!

#DignitéPourToutes

#wearebelgiumtoo

French version

Aujourd’hui, 10 juillet 2021, nous nous sommes réunis dans le cadre de la campagne legalizierung jetzt pour, tout d’abord, être solidaires des frères et sœurs migrants en situation irrégulière qui, depuis le 23 mai, réclament à l’État belge, dans leur exercice légitime de résistance et de protestation, par une grève de la faim, leur droit de séjour afin d’avoir accès à une vie digne, ce qui leur a été encore plus refusé pendant la pandémie.

Deuxièmement, exiger que l’Etat belge réponde d’urgence à la demande de régularisation des compagnons et qu’ils soient immédiatement pris en charge par les services médicaux compte tenu de la dégradation de leur état de santé, seulement sous le consentement et les conditions que les compagnons ont fixés.

Troisièmement, appeler les organisations, les collectifs de migrants, les groupes antiracistes ou tout groupe sensibilisé à cette situation, à se mobiliser en solidarité avec les camarades de la manière qui leur convient, en rendant visible l’acte politique de résistance des grévistes de Bruxelles ainsi que la situation de la communauté illégalisée sur leurs territoires.

À bas l’État capitaliste colonial belge, à bas les frontières, l’Union européenne et les politiques xénophobes de la mort.

Vive les grévistes, vive leur résistance et leur dignité.

Vie, amour et rébellion

#LegalisierungJetzt!
#DignitéPourToutes
#wearebelgiumtoo

Spanish version

Hoy 10 de julio del año 2021, nos hemos convocado como campaña legalizierung jetzt para en primer lugar: solidarizarnos con lxs hermanxs migrantes ilegalizadxs que desde el 23 de mayo están exigiendo al estado belga en su legitimo ejercicio de resistencia y protesta, mediante una huelga de hambre, su derecho a la residencia para con ello acceder a una vida digna, la que ha sido negada aún más durante la pandemia.

Segundo, exigir al estado belga se dé respuesta urgente a la demanda de les companeres por su regularización y sean inmediatamente atendidos por los servicios médicos ante su deteriorado estado de salud, solo bajo el consentimiento y condiciones que les huelguistas marquen.

Tercero, llamar a las organizaciones, colectivos migrantes, anti-racistas o cualquier grupo sensibilizado con esta situación, a movilizarse en solidaridad con les compañeres de la forma que crean conveniente, visibilizando el acto político de resistencia de les huelguistas de Bruselas así como la situación de la comunidad ilegalizada en sus territorios.

Abajo el estado capitalista colonial belga, abajo las fronteras, la Unión Europea y las políticas xenófobas de la muerte.

Que vivan los huelguistas, que viva su resistencia y dignidad.

Vida, amor y rebeldía

#LegalisierungJetzt!
#DignitéPourToutes
#wearebelgiumtoo

No, Trans Rights do not contribute to Women’s Oppression

Trans women are not being advantaged by identifying as women. And suggesting that they are only perpetuates right wing myths


11/07/2021

It is argued by gender critical leftists that there is a material biological component to women’s oppression. Does this mean that women’s oppression predates the rise of class society, and is therefore an insoluble issue?

I don’t see any reason society couldn’t be organised so women don’t bear the brunt of childcare. Indeed, that process was started in Russia following the Bolshevik revolution. Communal launderies, restaurants and nurseries were set up. In the UK, provision was made in wartime to enable more women to work. It was withdrawn rapidly afterwards. Indeed, magazines went from how to cook a quick meal to much more elaborate ones in the 50s. It was a conscious shift by the establishment to get women to feel their place was back in the kitchen and out of the formal workplace.

Other aspects of women’s oppression also take particular forms under capitalism. The media and social obsession with appearance, the commodification of sex, marketing of ‘beauty products’, obsession with motherhood etc. It’s only a few years since the advert with the slogan ‘that’s why mums go to Iceland [the budget supermarket]’ disappeared from UK TV screens.

Trans women do not gain advantages by identifying as women. Professor Joan Roughgarden, who transitioned at the age of 52 in 1998, recently wrote in ‘New Scientist’ magazine about the difference it made to her academic career. She had to fill out far more applications to get less funding. Questions from sponsors changed from presuming competency to not.

It has been suggested that men would use self identification (as a trans woman) to access women to abuse. But this ignores the fact that abusive men seem to access far too many women to abuse, without changing their legal gender identity. No country where legal self identification is the law, has seen an upsurge in trans women abusing non trans women. It’s reminiscent of the ‘gays are paedophiles’ lie that was widespread in the 1980s. Trans women, statistically, are at least as much as risk of abuse from cis men, as cis women are.

I still want to know how people who advocate excluding trans people from single sex spaces (and it’s almost always trans women that are mentioned) see this being done in real life. In Florida, I understand that legislation is now being passed that allows genital inspections to ensure trans exclusion. And those most likely to be inspected are women who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. Hardly liberating. The logic of this is the reinforcing of gender stereotypes. Or genital inspections for all women, or everyone entering a single sex space.

Of course, this ignores the fact there are intersex people. Are those against trans self identification ok with the surgical interventions on babies and children, who cannot consent, to try and ensure they fall more neatly into ‘male’ or ‘female’ categories? If they are against such surgical intervention (which I think all socialists should be) how can they demand that everyone be classified as male or female?

Athletics federations and sporting bodies are using hormone levels to determine gender identity. Again, in a misogynistic fashion – men aren’t all tested, and those missing the arbitrary hormone level aren’t ordered to participate in the women’s competitions.

This is the logic of an abstract position on trans exclusion – how will it be enforced? In practice, it reinforces gender stereotyping. People will have to conform to gender stereotypes in order to avoid being challenged.

People who don’t conform to gender stereotypes – ‘butch’ women, ‘effeminate’ men, and androgynous people – are already being abused and attacked by transphobes.

The presumption all humans fit exclusively into ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories isn’t scientific. ‘Biological gender’ is a spectrum with a primarily, but not exclusive – bimodal distribution.

This doesn’t mean that the social identification of gender identity doesn’t have real consequences, including oppression. As does the denial of an individuals right to determine their gender identity, as male, female, non binary, intersex etc.

The alternative to genital inspections and/or hormone (and chromosome?) testing would be ID cards. But then, someone would have to determine what gender was on the ID card…

I’d really appreciate it if people advocating trans exclusion could tell me how this would work in practice, without further oppressing women in particular. So far I’ve had abuse, but not a single answer.

Dutch Socialist Party Expels its Youth Section

As one of Europe’s biggest Left Social Democratic parties implodes, what are the lessons for the Left?


09/07/2021

The crisis in the Dutch Socialist Party (SP) has reached a new low after the Party Council ratified the leadership’s decision – taken in December – to cut all ties with ROOD, the SP’s now former youth organisation. According to the party leadership, the youth wing suffered a hostile takeover by ‘attic room communists’ who were plotting a violent civil war. The media were eager to embrace these wild accusations that were especially designed to connect to far-right conspiracy theories. The reality is very different however. The split between the SP and ROOD is a symptom of the deep crisis that has been developing in the party over the past years.

The SP, originally a Maoist party, made quick gains in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an anti-neoliberal force and as a left alternative to the GreenLeft (GL) and social democrats (PvdA) that had supported both neoliberalisation and NATO’s bombardments on Yugoslavia. At their high point in 2006, the party had over 50.000 members and won 16,6% of the vote in the parliamentary elections. The party’s hope of entering a coalition government were shattered as the neoliberal parties had no reason and no inclination to work with them.

The ‘trauma’ of 2006

As they were the only party outside of the broad neoliberal consensus in parliament, the outcome was predictable. The SP-leadership did not foresee it, however, and thus could not prepare their membership or their constituents for it. After the ‘trauma’ of 2006, the party entered a long period of stagnation. The movements against neoliberal globalisation and the war against Iraq receded while the SP tried to moderate its profile and to prove itself as a dependable partner in a future coalition government.

This meant that the party emphasised the reasonableness of their views in order to persuade other parties and their constituents that a government coalition with the socialists was a realistic possibility. The result was that the SP did next to nothing to distinguish themselves from other parties, even though they were still the only party on the left that was consistently opposed to neoliberalism.

The campaigns the SP organised focussed more and more on economic single issues, such as their campaign for a National Health Fund. These campaigns were organised by the SP alone, so they could be controlled from above, and they only served to generate publicity for the SP and their ideas. The only way the leadership could conceive of actually winning any of these demands was through government and so everything was subordinated to election results.

The result was that these proposals started to sound more and more utopian, as there was no realistic strategy to win. At the same time the focus on single issues meant that they didn’t figure in a broader leftist or socialist world view. A political critique of capitalism or even neoliberalism was at best only implicitly present in the SP’s politics and a positive vision of what socialism should be was altogether lacking.

The lack of a persuasive political narrative and political strategy was further emphasized by the fact that the party mostly ignored important political issues such as the struggle against oppression and climate change – Jan Marijnissen, the party’s historical leader, who led the party until after the 2006 coalition negotiations, even denies that climate change is caused by human behavior.

Social-democratised Maoism

An analysis of their stagnation was lacking however, which is in large part due to their political tradition, which does not view internal debate or even making political analyses as useful or legitimate. The SP did ‘de-Mao-ise’ from the late 1970’s onwards, but it retained some traits of Maoism that fit well with their reformism. One of them is a very monolithic and undemocratic internal regime. The SP’s highest decision making body is not their Party Congress, but their bimonthly Party Council, which consists of the chairpersons of local branches who lack a specific mandate. Internal fractions are strictly forbidden and none of the SP’s media even provides space for discussion or debate.

A second leftover from Maoism is an essentialist understanding of class, which means that political analysis is useless at best, because all knowledge comes straight from ‘the people’ and self criticism can only mean going into neighborhoods, talking to people and accepting their opinions. As the SP and the rest of the established left is hardly even present in ideological debates and doesn’t provide political answers from a left perspective, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the opinions they encounter are more and more influenced by the right.

The reasons given for the party’s bad results were threefold: the lack of charisma of the party leaders after Marijnissen; the ever insufficient discipline and work-ethic from the membership; and an insufficient focus on bread and butter-issues as opposed to ‘divisive’ political issues. Indeed, the SP even complained that they lost elections because ‘their issues’ (healthcare especially) weren’t on the political agenda, which is another way of saying they were not able to provide socialist answers for the political questions that mattered.

When Covid finally put ‘their’ issues in the spotlight, the SP decided they had to show their responsibility by fully supporting the government’s disastrous policy. For months the party kept quiet about underpaid and overworked health care workers who weren’t given PPE while the government was gambling with people’s lives with their ‘herd immunity’-strategy which had no scientific basis and was dictated by their commitment to corporate profits.

From stagnation to decline

When Lilian Marijnissen, Jan’s daughter, became party leader in 2017 hopes were high that her new energy and charisma, combined with a silencing of internal critics that supposedly undermined the party’s performance and an emphasis on a social-chauvinist rhetoric would yield results. What happened, perhaps unsurprisingly, was the exact opposite.

Marijnissen’s political vocabulary tried to appeal to the lowest common denominator, with abstract calls for ‘justice’ and naive indignation at the right’s antisocial policies taking centre stage. At the same time the party ramped up it’s nationalism, even sacrificing their previous opposition to neoliberalism in the process. For example, the SP opposed equal unemployment benefits for migrant workers. The party also supported the racist burqa-ban and took harsh actions against party representatives that dared to speak out against the far right.

For young people on the left, that become radicalised mostly around feminist ideas, antiracism and the climate movement and are looking for big ideas in order to better understand the tremendous problems the world and their generation faces, there isn’t much the SP has on offer.

On the other end of the spectrum, rather than winning back far right voters, the SP’s political line functioned as a bridge to the far right. Of the people that voted for the neofascist Forum for Democracy (FvD) in the national elections in March, no less than 8 percent had been SP-voters four years previous. They were the biggest group after those coming from Geert Wilders’ racist PVV, those that already voted FvD and previous non-voters. Only 5 percent came from the liberal-conservative VVD and 4 percent came from the conservative Christian-democrats (CDA).

In other words, relatively the SP in opposition lost almost as much to the neofascist right as the two most right wing parties in government combined. Other left parties and even progressive liberal parties only lost very few voters to the far right.

Electorally, the SP did badly, losing all their seats in the European Parliament in 2019 and falling back to just below 6 percent of the vote, or 9 seats in the parliamentary elections in March of this year – the lowest figure since 2002. The repressive internal regime; the lack of commitment to combatting racism, climate change, and the far right; and the abysmal results led many experienced members to leave the SP over the last decade. Despite a massive membership-campaign in 2019 and 2020 that reduced some of the damage, the party’s membership now sits just above 30.000, down roughly 40 percent since 2006.

The leadership has shown no signs of changing its course however. In spite of clear proof of the opposite, they remain convinced that their chauvinism, cheap moral indignation, and ever more modest demands will finally pay off, when all critical members are gone and those remaining will no longer be demoralised by their ‘negativity’.

Split

The problems of the SP’s political line are most clearly felt in the big cities and among the youth, which is why branches in urban area’s and ROOD were the parts of the SP that were most critical of the leadership. The problems within ROOD started in 2019. Arno van Veen had already been in the ROOD-leadership and was being prepared to be the youth wing’s next chairperson in 2019, when he spoke out at a Party Council meeting for solidarity with refugees, implicitly criticising the SP’s support for the murderous anti-refugee agreements between the EU and Turkey and Libya.

The party leadership immediately dropped all support for him. Arno was told by the screening commission that they rejected his candidature as he ‘did not know his place’. Arno still ran for chairperson and was elected, despite the party leadership going out of their way to mobilise inactive loyalists to vote against him.

This gave more space for discussion within ROOD, which played into the hands of a group called the Communist Platform (CP), that was already clandestinely active within ROOD. As the only organised group within the youth wing, they were quickly able to win over the majority of ROOD for their proposals that focussed mostly on democratisation of the party.

Part of their attraction was that they did try to provide socialist ideas and organised discussions around them. A year after Arno became chairperson, CP pushed forward their own candidates. The SP leadership then sounded the alarm and expelled the six CP members they could identify, including Olaf Kemerink who ran for chairperson. ROOD refused to yield to pressure from the SP-leadership and allowed the CP-candidates to stand. When CP-member Olaf Kemerink was elected as the new chairperson, the SP immediately cut ROOD’s funding, cut access to their website and publicly broke with their youth movement.

Show trial

Many critical SP members were appalled by the leadership’s conduct, not in the least because of the bizarre smears the leadership used to cause a scandal in the far right press. They were not able to mobilize a majority however. During the Party Congress in December, over a third of the attendees voted against the split.

The leadership almost immediately started preparing the founding of a new youth organisation, but in an attempt to appease parts of their membership, they issued an inquiry by a group of prominent members, led by Nine Kooiman, a former MP, who is now vice chairperson of the police union. As is to be expected, the commission’s conclusions are in line with the Party leadership’s views and their reasoning is downright laughable.

The report concluded that the split was irreparable. The leadership had made a mistake by not intervening in ROOD quickly enough. The biggest problem, however, was structural. The fact that ROOD was even allowed to make their own decisions was a design-flaw. ‘In retrospect, the decision, made at the time, to place the youth organisation completely outside of the party’, i.e. to allow it to make its own decisions, ‘has been an unfortunate one’, the commission concluded. The new youth organisation should therefore be organised ‘within’ the party. In order to prevent the youth from reading dangerous literature, their education will have to be the responsibility of the SP’s central leadership.

However, the commission writes unironically, the new youth organisation will also have to be ‘autonomous’. While they won’t be able to make any decisions or take political positions, they will receive the right to choose which points from the party’s programme they will build their campaigns around. The new chairperson will also gain a seat in the national leadership, but because the leadership acts as a bloc within the party, in practice this only means that the national leadership will gain direct control over them. At the Party Council in June 87% of the members agreed with the commission and sanctioned the expulsion of ROOD.

No quick death

The break with their youth underscores the SP-leadership is willing to go to extreme lengths in order to insulate themselves from criticism. The SP had never been good at educating cadre that’s able to make analyses and to think critically and the present leadership is certainly proof of that. But by cutting themselves off from young people who – despite everything – have tried to turn the SP into something better, they now also cut themselves off from their last hope of regeneration as a socialist party. Young people that remain in the party will be driven by political ambition and will be exclusively judged according to their loyalty.

That doesn’t mean that the SP’s role is completely played out. The party will probably play a role in parliament and in elections for years, perhaps even decades to come. They will however have more and more trouble differentiating themselves from the traditional social-democrats, especially as the memory of the social-democrats in office fades. When it comes to cheap leftish demagoguery, social-democrats are after all much more experienced than the SP.

And there is also BIJ1, a new antiracist party that, though it is focussed primarily on parliamentary work, not on extra-parliamentary struggles, is doing an admirable job at taking a principled left stand on many issues that the established left has remained silent on, such as the government’s Covid policy, racism, and the rise of the far right. Though their social-economic profile isn’t as strong as the SP’s once was, for people craving a principled left, BIJ1 is far more attractive.

Where next for ROOD?

The future of ROOD is more difficult to predict. ROOD, and especially CP, have been very much focussed on the SP itself, they haven’t taken up their place in the social movements and other struggles and only rarely take up positions in current affairs. Some remaining left SP-members are now trying to get elected in the national leadership under the banner of the ‘Marxist Forum’, which has not been expelled from the SP, but might well follow. The chances of their attempt succeeding – even if they’re not expelled before November, when the elections take place – are slim if not nil.

ROOD seems to want to stay in the SP as much as they can, as more critical branches will still tolerate the youth and most ROOD-members have not been individually expelled from the SP. The focus on trying to change the SP from within, even now that it’s hardly even a theoretical possibility anymore, can only lead to the disintegration of ROOD as it will stall their development as an independent organisation with their own standpoints and their own political praxis. This is exactly what the SP-leadership is gambling on.

The continued orientation on the SP is pushed by the Communist Platform. CP is a Kautskian organisation that believes the only way to make any progress is to turn the SP into a ‘Party-Movement’ that will make all other parties and movements obsolete. This they see as a necessary prerequisite for basically any political struggle. Existing social movements they denounce as small and insignificant. But their rejection of building social movements is based on politics as well.

Party like it’s 1891

CP, for example, believes climate change can easily be stopped by switching to nuclear power and especially thorium. They therefore support the nuclear lobby in favour of building the climate movement. Completely ignoring the development of the women’s movement over the past century since universal suffrage was won, the CP rejects feminism as a bourgeois phenomenon, insisting that ‘the women’s question’ (as they call it) can only be solved through an independent proletarian struggle for women’s liberation, which in turn requires some mythical Party-Movement. Whether by coincidence or by design, the CP’s standpoints in regard to current struggles always come down to a ‘radical’ renunciation of ‘class collaborationist’ social movements and struggles with a view to ‘real’ struggles in the distant future.

The CP itself will sooner or later have to revise their dogmatism when their last hopes to reform the SP are finally shattered. Then it will either have to join the struggles that they now ridicule or they will have to proclaim themselves as (the nucleus of) the new Party-Movement so as to allow themselves to continue to combine verbal radicalism with practical political passivity.

The fact that CP is the only organised force within ROOD and therefore influential does not change the fact that many ROOD-members have chosen to stand firm against the SP-leadership precisely because they were fed up with the SP’s isolation and rejection of social movements and are eager to finally put their weight behind them. It is possible that they will try to give ROOD a political orientation focussed on working with others to build the movements and the struggles that are now being built and fought. This is far from guaranteed, however, and it is perhaps more likely that many of these members will simply vote with their feet.

Can Proportional Representation save Labour? And would that be a good thing?

Proportional Representation (PR) should not be the Left’s main demand; a “Progressive Alliance” would be terrible. But a new voting system could help the Left


28/06/2021

The discussion around Proportional Representation (PR) is gathering steam among part of the Labour Left. The Independent reports that three-quarters of Labour members now support PR. 228 Constituency Labour Parties have signed a call for electoral reform. The call for PR has even been taken up by the left-wing faction Momentum. The current discussion has been provoked by two recent incidents.

First is the leadership election for the UNITE trade union, following the retirement of left-wing general secretary Len McCluskey. After leftist Howard Beckett withdrew, there are now two candidates from the left of the union – Steve Turner and Sharon Graham. This leads people to worry that the right-winger Gerard Coyne will slip through and win the election on a minority vote.

This is not the place to discuss the intricacies of the UNITE elections, but the election shows the danger of the First Past the Post (FPTP) system. The person with the most votes takes all, even if they are disliked by a majority of the voters. This is why many UNITE activists are calling for a Single Transferable Vote (a form of PR) in future elections.

Slump of Labour vote under Starmer

But the main reason for all the PR chatter is in reaction to “Sir” Keir Starmer continuing to lead the Labour Party into political oblivion. Two years ago, under Jeremy Corbyn, the party suffered unprecendented attacks from the press and sabotage from many people working for the party. Starmer supporters followed Tony Blair in sneering that “with any other leader, Labour would be 20 points ahead”. The results since Starmer took over have been derisory.

Just last month, there was the Hartlepool by-election, caused by the resignation of sitting Labour MP Mike Hill following allegations of sexual harassment and intimidation. Hartlepool is a working-class seat which has had a Labour MP since 1964. Any Labour candidate should have won easily – even Starmer’s choice, the Saudi-loving sexist Paul Williams.

It is very unusual for a ruling party to win a by election in a constituency that it lost in the previous general election. By elections tend to show protest votes against the incumbent government. Before Hartlepool, the government party had only ever retaken a seat in a by election 17 times – and only 5 times since the Second World War. Yet Labour still managed to lose Hartlepool to the ruling Tories.

Hartlepool was followed by Chesham and Amersham. Starmer’s apologists had said that Labour could not possibly have won Hartlepool, because prime minister Boris Johnson was benefiting from a “Covid bounce”. Yet the Liberal Democrats won Amersham with a 25% swing. Labour won only 622 votes – reportedly 2 more than the number of Labour party members in the constituency. It may be worth noting that in 2017, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Labour won 11,374 votes.

Since the election debacles, a number of people who should know better have been gleefully welcoming the defection of former Tory MP John Bercow to Labour. It should be pointed out that while Bercow has criticised Boris Johnson, he has not issued a single statement to say that his own politics have changed.

At the same time, these same people wilfully ignore the facts that: some Labour activists are leaving the party; others are staying in for the while but are withdrawing from activity; while other socialists are still being expelled on trumped-up charges. Even Jeremy Corbyn is still not allowed to sit as a Labour MP.

Time for a “Progressive Alliance”?

This is the background to a swath of articles in the left-leaning media, calling for a “Progressive Alliance”. This is where Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and maybe the SNP agree to stand down in elections, to enable a single anti-Tory candidate. Neal Lawson from Compass wrote in this week’s Guardian “there is no other way to stop a record fifth straight Conservative election victory, and the slide into a one-party state, than through a progressive alliance.”

Lawson’s example of a successful Progressive Alliance is the “remarkable relationship” (his words) between Tony Blair and former LibDem leader Paddy Ashdown. He also argues that “the societal challenges we face – of climate, culture, care, technology, ageing and inequality – simply can no longer be met by any single party.”

The campaigns for a Progressive Alliance and for PR are closely connected. In an editorial supporting a Progressive Alliance, the Guardian argued “Proportional representation is a way of redistributing power more fairly and encouraging consensus to be built across party lines.” Similarly, the organisation Reboot GB argues that PR “is an anchor for any Progressive Alliance”

A Progressive Alliance seems to have two main types of supporter on the Left. First there are the deluded, who believe that Lib Dems will break with the habit of a lifetime and support a full socialist platform. There is absolutely no reason to believe this. Remember that as recently as 2010-2015 the thoroughly neo-liberal Liberal Democrats were eagerly propping up a Tory government. And yet they would have the power of veto over any Progressive Alliance.

As for the social democratic nationalist parties, it is not long since Labour joined the Conservatives in the Better Together campaign aimed at preserving the Union and blocking Scottish independence. There is little evidence that Labour has moved from this position. Why on earth would the SNP or Plaid Cymru sign up to that?

Wouldn’t anything be better than Boris Johnson?

Then there are the desperate, who believe that Boris Johnson’s Tories are so qualitatively bad that anything must be better than this, even neo-liberalism lite. This view has the advantage that it acknowledges the reality of who the Lib Dems represent, and what they stand for. Note that it is no coincidence that Amersham is the 531st least deprived of England’s 533 parliamentary constituencies.

How things have changed since the heady days of Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn’s 2017 election manifesto was both radical and popular. Labour Party membership tripled to 550,000 and between 73% and 83% of voters supported his plans to nationalise water, electricity, gas and the railways.

Even this manifesto was only possible in the face of opposition and even sabotage by a large number of Labour Party workers and a majority of Labour MPs. The idea that the Lib Dems would campaign for such a manifesto, or even allow it to come into being is a fantasy. Any Progressive Alliance depends on Labour having a programme which promises no fundamental change.

So what we are left with is a set of bland statements promising nothing more than “at least we’re not Boris Johnson”. In other words, the unsuccessful policies that Starmer has been following since he became party leader. This has not just led to a haemorrhaging of support for Labour. It also means that the many activists who were keen to campaign in 2017 will not be inspired next time round.

A “Progressive Alliance”, which handed power to the Tory enablers in the Lib Dems would reproduce the worst experiences of Starmerism, without offering voters any positive reasons to vote Labour or even giving party members a good reason why they should campaign. This will damage Labour’s vote even further.

Why now?

The current obsession with PR and “Progressive Alliances” is, at least in part, a hangover from old discussions about Brexit. A large part of the liberal-Left believed Brexit to be the most important political idea of the day. That meant that their conversation shifted away from the progressive demands in Corbyn’s manifesto.

It also caused many Labour members to seek alliances with a Liberal Democratic party, whose leader was not sure whether Gay sex was a sin, and whose 2019 election manifesto was described by the BBC as being more austere than the Tories’. This may have gone down well in the middle class clubs attended by Labour’s movers and shakers, but appalled working class voters, particularly in the North of England.

Allying with the Lib Dems was always a mistake. When Brexit was being pushed by the media as the only story that mattered, it was at least understandable. Now that Brexit no longer dominates political discussion, Labour has a chance to return to the class-based politics which caused people to enthusiastically campaign for a Corbyn government. Or, on the other hand, it can continue to cozy up to the Lib Dems.

Notwithstanding any criticism we may have of Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, tens of thousands of people were enthused to go out on doorsteps to campaign for a manifesto which promised to change the world. Could we seriously expect similar excitement for an election campaign which has been approved by the Lib Dem’s hapless leader Ed Davey?

Does this mean that PR is a bad idea?

I used to be a fervent supporter of the FPTP system. We were living in slightly different times then. The Conservatives were clearly the party of Capital and bigotry. Labour – in part through its links with the trade unions, and often despite its political practice – was the party of the working class. The other parties didn’t stand for much at all, and rarely had any serious link with progressive politics, let alone class struggle.

This meant that it was generally a ‘Good Thing’ that elections were contested by the parties which represented – however vaguely – the two sides of class struggle. Even though Labour rarely implemented serious change (and when they did it was more likely to be restricting immigration than fighting racism), a Labour victory was seen as a win for ‘Our Side’. This was something which positively affected workers’ confidence to fight back.

Then a number of things happened. Perhaps most important is what has been called the Pasokification of European Social Democratic parties. This was most noticeable in Greece, but was a trend in most European countries. “Pasokification” involved social democratic parties like Labour shifting to the right as a reaction to falling votes.

In Britain and Germany we saw the Blair-Schröder paper attacking the rights of workers and the unemployed. Britain also experienced Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for the Gulf war. That led to a decreasing number of working class people identifying Labour as being “their” party. Even my mother – a lifelong Labour member – asked me who she should vote for now.

Partly as a result of this, some nationalist parties – like the SNP and Plaid Cymru – which had traditionally had fairly right wing programmes, started positioning themselves as social democrats. They overtook Labour on the Left. Other parties – like Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party or Respect – emerged, leading to the hope for a serious left-wing challenge to Labour. A main reason for their lack of success was FPTP.

Will PR save Labour? I hope not

The main argument currently used for PR seems to be that it is necessary to revive the Labour Party. Only under PR, the argument goes, will we have a chance of a Labour government – albeit in coalition with the Lib Dems. Without PR, Labour will never govern again. As Polly Toynbee argued in the Guardian, “If Labour doesn’t fight our broken electoral system, it could be out of power for ever.”

My argument for PR is quite the reverse. I want PR because I want to destroy Labour and replace it with something better. The last year under Starmer has proved the party to be unfit for purpose. Even under Corbyn, there were too many unelected functionaries who were able to block progress. Even the great 2017 manifesto was seriously flawed, with promises like 10,000 extra police.

I want a party that is more democratic, more anchored in social movements, more socialist. The problem is that, because of the electoral system, it has proved impossible to create such a party from scratch. The closest we have come to this was with the formation of the Respect party, and the election of the first MP left of Labour since 1950.

There were 2 problems with these developments. First, that MP was George Galloway, whose politics can be politely described as inconsistent. He made some great speeches against the war, but has more recently been seen palling up with Nigel Farage and urging Scottish voters to vote Tory to preserve the Union. His defence of Julian Assange against rape charges was that “not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion”.

Second, there was no serious break from Labour. Galloway was the only leading figure who moved from Labour to Respect. Most other people who opposed the war either stayed in Labour or moved into inactivity (often both). Respect aspired to be more than an electoral party. And yet its inability to win elections (with one exception) meant that it lacked the basis to become a mass party.

PR alone is insufficient

Under PR this could be different and we might see the basis for the emergence of a British SYRIZA, Podemos, or even die LINKE. We must attach several caveats to this statement. Firstly, the recent experience of all these parties shows that the formation of a new Left party is not a cure-all. Radical formations can still quickly descend into parliamentary cretinism and compromise.

Secondly: PR will not automatically benefit the Left. There is a reasonable argument that one reason that the next French President may be an outright fascist is the PR system. And in Britain, Ell Foran from Stats for Lefties estimated that UKIP, which won just one seat in the 2015 general election, would have won 79 seats under PR.

So, it would be a great mistake to advocate PR as a way of solving all our problems. PR opens an arena in which the Left can gain exposure and support. But it opens the same arena to more pernicious and dangerous forces. Merely changing the voting system is insufficient without political change at the basis.

A new party which unites the people who joined Corbyn’s Labour with the radical Left outside the party would be a massive step forward inside British politics. Yet, while I believe that parties are important for bringing activists together, without activity at the basis of society, Left parties are impotent. This means that any campaign for a different voting system must be secondary to action from below.

How can we change society?

The key thing lies in understanding how we can change society. Only this week, we have seen the unprecedented conviction of policemen responsible for the racist murders of George Floyd and Dalian Atkinson. This is testament to the ability of movements like Black Lives Matter to effect change. Similarly, the fact that the environment is on the political agenda is the result of the international mobilisations by Fridays for Future.

Even parliamentary reform is dependent on extra-parliamentary struggle. In 1974, Tory prime minister Ted Heath called a general election under the slogan “Who governs Britain – the unions or the government?” Striking miners and other social movements showed Heath that it wasn’t him. The reason that Starmer’s Labour is in decline is to a large extent because it no longer has any organic link to movements outside parliament.

So, a campaign for progressive politics should not start with a demand for PR. This is not least because the implementation of PR would depend on the votes of a Tory government which is perfectly happy to profit from the current system. The best way to challenge the Tories is not by moral outrage but by building social movements which challenge everything they stand for.

If we build up these movements, other changes will follow.

Thanks to Hari Kumar, Carol McGuigan and Anna Southern for comments on an earlier version of this article.