23.02.2023

How not to win arguments

Counterfire is in upheaval over the trans issue. Paul Demarty calls for serious debate, not heresy-hunting

Word has reached us of a recent contretemps between two organisations of the Socialist Workers Party diaspora, concerning (what else?) trans rights.

The organisations concerned are Counterfire and Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (RS21). Both split from the Socialist Workers Party in the relatively recent past. Counterfire was born after the Respect popular front descended into acrimony. For good reasons, John Rees got the blame. He then found himself toppled as SWP top dog. Too much for an ego such as his, and he walked, along with Lindsey German, Chris Nineham and their allies. As for RS21, they too walked. This time after the SWP disastrously mishandled the ‘Comrade Delta’ rape scandal.

Counterfire has spent much of its time in existence trying to recapture the glory days of the anti-war movement that its core leaders, John Rees and Lindsey German, put together in the early 2000s, with little success. RS21, meanwhile, merged into the general formless swamp of what people were calling, 10 years ago, the ‘new left’. Its most recent ‘distinction’ is a social-imperialist line on the Ukraine war (Counterfire sticking to its social-pacifism).

Bad timing

The present fracas began with an article by comrade German a year and a half ago, entitled ‘Trans rights, women’s rights and open debate’.¹ It begins:

I want to raise some issues here about the whole debate on trans rights in Britain. Even to write that sentence contains the risk of immediate denunciation, but it is important that socialists can discuss contentious issues openly and honestly and with mutual respect. At the heart of the matter is the assumption that people can put forward positions … that others might profoundly disagree with, without being labelled as pariahs, banned from speaking at events, or even threatened with losing their jobs.

Lindsey affirms her commitment to fighting for trans rights, but stresses that this must not be counterposed to fighting for women’s rights, and where the two appear to conflict, comradely debate is necessary to work out a conclusion. She affirms the view that biological sex is important to the discussion of gender and rejects the view of sex as a spectrum, but makes the point that this does not preclude her from fighting alongside those who disagree, and urges that the same courtesy be extended in the other direction. It is mostly reasonable stuff.

Since then, Counterfire has attempted to host some kind of debate on the issue, but it is clear that at least some of its leading women members - including German and Elaine Graham-Leigh, another former SWPer, but recruited from the Green Party - have a ‘soft’, gender-critical, feminist position. Graham-Leigh contributed a basically approving review of a gender-critical documentary, Adult human female,² and it was a further article by one of the film’s directors, Mike Wayne, that caused the current crisis.

Wayne’s article condemns the left for coming under the “hegemony” of liberalism. After a mildly interesting ‘summarise Proust’ exercise in relation to Antonio Gramsci, his article essentially devolves into a series of “anti-woke” clichés. He complains about “critical race theory” and “its notion of an undifferentiated ‘white privilege’”; about the slogan, “sex work is work”, on the basis that “the left should be resisting commodification, not encouraging it”; and about the use of preferred pronouns, on the basis that it betokens a “wild-eyed idealism”, particularly the “notion that sex is a matter of personal choice rather than biological reality”.³

This piece was published, in what was presumably an oversight rather than a deliberate provocation, on the day that the murder of trans teenager Brianna Ghey was reported in the news. Against the background of the various other interventions of German and co, this moved RS21’s editorial board to write an article in protest. They castigated the Counterfire comrades for the timing, stressing that police were investigating a hate crime angle in Ghey’s case. It is

an article which does nothing to condemn Brianna’s murder or transphobia in general, but instead attacks support for trans people, such as using correct pronouns, as “rampant individualism and … wild-eyed idealism”. The article also attacks anti-racist organising, using the term, “critical race theory”, at a time when the American hard right is also attacking ideas which they label in the same way. Fighting oppression, including racism, must always be the starting point for socialists. The piece also makes ill-informed comments about sex worker activism.

They further note, presumably approvingly, that Adult human female was unable to be screened at Edinburgh University due to student opposition (Graham-Leigh laments this in her review). “We call on Counterfire to remove this transphobic article from their website,” the editors conclude, “and to re-evaluate their approach to trans liberation, which can only at present be described as transphobic and reactionary”, further noting that - in the absence of such a conversion to the cause - Counterfire members “should reconsider their continuing … membership in that light”.⁴

Perhaps heeding this call to arms, some admins on the Counterfire Facebook page went rogue, changing Wayne’s article headline from “The left needs to free itself from the dominance of radical-seeming liberal ideas if it is to offer a real anti-capitalist alternative” to “Counterfire needs to free itself from transphobic elements in its organisation if it is to offer a real anti-capitalist alternative”. Order was soon restored and comments locked on the piece. We do not know what has become of the Facebook rebels, but presumably they have taken up RS21’s invitation, and a split is in progress or already complete.

Eat your veg

It should be stressed that comrade Mike Wayne’s article is dreadful. He simply adopts vulgar rightwing caricatures of the ideas he criticises (for example, he uses ‘critical race theory’ (CRT) in exactly the same cynical way as a US culture warrior like Christopher Rufo - as a giant amalgam of ethnic studies academics, ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ consultants, annoying online woke types, and anyone else you want to throw in. CRT properly so called is not the origin of the idea of white privilege, which was circulating in the US left many decades before CRT even existed. It would, in other words, be a perfect occasion for a point-by-point critique from a group like RS21 that plainly accepts the ideas Wayne despises, whether due to liberal hegemony or not.

RS21’s response, however, is no such thing. It is, regrettably, a specimen of exactly the same method decried by the alleged “transphobic elements” in Counterfire.

Astonishingly, the description quoted above - of Wayne’s comments on sex worker activism as “ill-informed” - is the closest thing to an actual reasoned argument in the whole thing. Instead, we have merely the assertion that it is wrong to publish a critique of some aspect of the trans movement when something like Ghey’s murder has occurred, or of bourgeois anti-racism when there is an ongoing backlash the other side of the Atlantic; and further that points made in this and other articles are used by the right sometimes.

Thus the comrades rebuked the idea of “a supposed clash between ‘women’s rights and trans rights’, a framing that is a cornerstone of transphobic ideology in Britain”. Leaving aside the empirical question of whether it really is the ‘cornerstone’, this just is not any reason to reject it. Darwinian biology was the ‘cornerstone’ of eugenics and biological racism, and still is among the remaining calliper-waving degenerates of our own day. Do we therefore reject the theory? The reason biological racism is known to be pseudo-science is because morally serious scientists ate their vegetables and disproved it scientifically.

RS21’s approach is perhaps summed up in one peculiar feature of the article: while it is littered with inline links, not a single one points to anything RS21 is actually criticising - only to other sources that agree with them. We could call this cowardice or dishonesty, but we fear it might be worse even than that - the comrades may have fully internalised the preposterous idea that even linking to a ‘problematic’ article amounts in some mystical way to violence.

This whole mode of argument needs to be abandoned. The first and most pressing reason is that it has totally and obviously failed. We are at the end of a roughly five-year period when this sort of punitive anti-terf-ism spread out of the left to dominate various sections of the media and academic institutions. I stress the end. The right gleefully exploits the demise of the Tavistock Clinic, the downfall of Nicola Sturgeon and other debacles. All RS21 have to offer is more of the same medicine. It did not convince people then and it will not now; the left will be powerless to stop what is an increasingly bloodthirsty backlash against all those - trans, gay and others - who do not fit neatly into either available gender ‘box’. (The terfs have their own share of the blame for this, through their alliances with the right - though not, it seems to me, Counterfire, which has at least attempted to articulate a more nuanced policy.⁵)

The second reason, if I may be forgiven for moralising, is that it is ethically corrosive. Once a person has participated in one of these little campaigns of ostracism, the next is always more attractive. Because if, at any time, we begin to harbour doubts about this method, then the moral logic is always retroactive. If cancellation Y is not appropriate, then can cancellation X have been - and, for that matter, cancellations A through W? If not, have we merely put people through the hell of ostracism over nothing? It is a difficult prospect to face - the more so, the more energy we have put into this sort of activity. There is never going to be a better time than right now to drop it.

Patient zero

For all that, we cannot absolve Counterfire of criticism here. It is worth returning to the original Lindsey German article of 2021. One or two salient features jump out: firstly the condition she puts on her support for free debate. The unity of the oppressed, she writes, “cannot be done by no-platforming (which in my view should be reserved for fascists only, as they want to destroy the very means of debate and expression), and it cannot be done by moralistic diktat”.

In this context, the inevitable ‘except fascists’ clause is unusually stupid. It is categorically obvious that “destroying the very means of debate and expression” is not the private property of small groups of boneheads. Both the right and left wings of the bourgeoisie seek to suppress these mechanisms for different ends. Her very article is about the attempts of many to use taboos and laws against ‘hate speech’ to exclude certain feminist theories from debate.

The left’s fetishisation of no-platform tactics against fascists is ‘patient zero’ for cancel culture - the first context in which it became acceptable for members of the left to excuse themselves from their duty to engage with the ideas of their opponents and enemies. It introduced a temptation too strong for many to resist: once there exists a determinate group who must never be engaged with except by means of violent suppression, there will always be the urge to use smears and innuendo to paint others into that category - it is, after all, much easier to punch someone or wave a placard in their face than to plant doubts in their mind about deeply-held convictions. ‘Fascist terf’ is merely the ‘Hitlero-Trotskyite’ of our day. As a member and then leader of the SWP, whose various anti-fascist fronts fairly dominated ‘no-platform’ activism for a long time, Lindsey energetically promoted this policy, and thus there is a certain element of chickens coming home to roost in the present controversy.

The second point is a little more subtle. “It is a commonplace that social media debate can be toxic, and none more so than around the trans issue,” she concludes. “In all this it’s worth remembering that real change only comes from struggle and that there’s no better political atmosphere than when masses of people come together in a common cause.” Yet, while debate per se is not counterposed to intervention in mass struggles, it must be if we conceive of mass struggle as ‘real’ politics exclusively. Then debate becomes a merely scholastic distraction from the ‘real work’. The hyper-activist culture of the SWP, including under the leadership of Rees and German, certainly had this attitude at its core; the whole organisation was essentially designed to make debate impossible and ensure that initiative flowed from the centre to be imposed on the ‘conservative’ membership by full-timers answerable to the centre.

If the foolish intolerance of the anti-terf crusaders has taught Lindsey German the critical importance of debate to the correct orientation of the socialist movement, at this late hour, then I suppose it is some kind of silver lining. As for the RS21 comrades, if they care so deeply about expunging terf-ism from Counterfire, then may we suggest they submit an article, in the spirit of open debate - and a substantive one this time, rather than the shower of innuendo they put together last week? The same goes, naturally, for the Counterfire rebels - who should not walk out but demand the right of reply, and avail themselves of it.

paul.demarty@weeklyworker.co.uk