02.03.2023

Effective collectivity is key

Mike Macnair argues that we all - not least trans people - need democratic decision-making to ensure common actions and common goals

This is the fifth article in my series on trans rights issues, triggered by the Tory veto of the Scottish government’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill.

As I write, the Tory culture-wars offensive continues unabated. Dominic Raab has announced a new ban on placing in women’s prisons trans women who have committed sexual or ‘violent’ offences, irrespective of pre-operative or post-operative status - classic overkill with a view primarily to press spin. The actual guidance issued by the Prison and Probation Service gives merely a presumption that the offender will go to a men’s prison - understandably, since placing a post-operative trans woman in a men’s prison would be pretty clearly “cruel and unusual punishment” contrary to article 10 of the Bill of Rights 1689.¹ Even so, the ‘violent’ offences include harassment, which under Equality Act 2010, section 26, is so widely defined as to include vigorous disagreement which the recipient finds “offensive”.²

And the Tories having probably ‘taken down’ the SNP (with two out of three candidates to replace Nicola Sturgeon opponents of gender recognition reform), the focus now moves to Labour, with the Daily Express on February 20 headlining an article: “Angela Rayner claims ‘it doesn’t matter’ that trans rapist has penis”. The political salience of this issue is not about to go away.

In this article I finally move to political proposals; and I do so by starting from outside both the trans-rights issue as such and the question of what demands to place on the existing capitalist state, before coming back to these questions. I would ask readers to have some patience with this approach, which, I promise, will turn out to be relevant.

As I said in previous articles, this is no more than a hypothesis of a possible approach. I hope to be corrected as far as is necessary. And, as I have said in previous articles, the line of this series is merely my individual responsibility - not a CPGB (or Provisional Central Committee) position.

Species

I begin with the point that we urgently need to develop effective, democratic decision-making for collective action. The ‘we’ here is, on the largest possible scale, and at the largest end of the problem, humans as a species. On the smaller, immediate and more immediately ‘actionable’ end of the problem, ‘we’ is the working class as a class, the workers’ movement - and the left as a component of that movement.

That humanity as a species needs to develop effective decision-making for collective action flows from the present threats to the habitability of the planet: from human-induced global warming; and from the USA’s apparent strategy to deal with it, by deindustrialising the rest of the world by military force (starting with Russia - but China will be next and, after China, Europe) in order to preserve the carbon emissions-intensive ‘American way of life’. The US approach threatens to lead to a generalised nuclear exchange, leading to a ‘nuclear winter’ - or at best (if it succeeds) the ‘Somalification’ of the whole world outside the US.

It is perfectly clear that these problems cannot be solved within the framework either of the existing global system of states, whose competing economic and geo-strategic interests prevent effective action on climate; or within the framework of capitalism as such, which both requires the system of competing states and also requires random ‘growth’ (which in turn requires assuming the absence of natural limits) as its underlying ground of legitimacy.³

Humanity therefore needs - globally, and soon - to develop effective forms of collective decision-making which can allow planning of our common productive activities in ways consistent with human needs and with the natural limits that have become obvious thanks to human-induced global warming. It needs to develop them in such a way that we can supersede or limit both capitalist markets and the regime of multiple, competing, bureaucratic-coercive states.

What the political class and the advertising-funded media currently call ‘democracy’ is neither the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle’s version (“a constitution in which the free-born and poor control the government - being at the same time a majority”⁴) nor Abraham Lincoln’s (“government of the people, by the people, for the people”). It is a plutocratic oligarchy, in which “the people” have an occasional opportunity to vote between two gangs of bribe-takers or to register a protest by voting for outsiders. And even this is subject to veto powers in the control of agenda-setting speech by the press barons, in the sale of private access to ministers and elected representatives by lobbying firms, and in the sale of justice by the free market in legal services. This regime (and the capitalist class rule which it expresses) is responsible for the threats of global warming and, in the alternative, of global war.

Trying to restore the old Stalinist regime (or the social-democratic forms which capital allowed to the front-line European states in the cold war in order to stave off Stalinism) is not a serious alternative. The memory of what these regimes were really like is lost to the younger generation, with the result that there is a degree of nostalgia around for them - understandable, given the disasters that have followed 1989-1991. But it is important to remember that the Soviet bureaucratic leadership itself decided to collapse the regime and to restore capitalism: and that its constitutional regime meant that neither the enserfed ‘eastern’ working class nor anyone else was able to resist this collapse.

It collapsed the regime because of the plain irrationalities of its own system, in which bans on parties and factions, and controls on speech and communication, meant that no-one could contradict the self-serving lies of the officials and the managers with a view to keeping their jobs. Hence ‘planning’ was dominated by ‘garbage in, garbage out’ decision-making, ending with the workers’ joke that “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”.

‘Planning irrationalities’ of this sort, though in a less extreme form, can be found in every regime which gives managers levers to control flows of information, enabling them to cover their arses: there are plenty of examples in the British public sector, in which press-driven ‘target’ regimes, combined with ‘marketisation’ and ‘cost centres’, have produced combinations of market and planning irrationalities. Bureaucratic regimes in the workers’ movement, including its left, similarly produce planning irrationalities through the officials clinging to their jobs, and hence refusing to admit mistakes - leading to the degrading of decision-making and the dumbing-down of the memberships.

Movement

Neither rule-of-law constitutionalism (falsely called ‘democracy’) nor bureaucratic-managerialist regimes are practically useful for solving the problem of planning human beings’ common productive activities - which we urgently need because of the dynamics of the 21st century. The same is true with equal force of the problems of the workers’ movement and the left - and this is something to which the left as a whole could by voluntary choices make an immediate difference.

The present strike wave in Britain clearly displays the potential of working class solidarity. But it is starting from a very low baseline and consists, at present, of mainly protest strikes rather than ones which really threaten to force concessions. To overcome this problem requires a higher level of mobilisation of members of the unions; and this, in turn, requires them developing in their localities a sense that the union is really ‘their’ organisation, whose decisions they ‘own’, and which they can use as a vehicle of their own creativity.

In politics, we have seen with Corbyn a mass movement (hundreds of thousands joining the Labour Party in the hope that it might offer an escape from the stifling embrace of ‘sensible’, centre-ground politics) which ran very rapidly into the sand. It did so because the mass of Corbynistas placed undue trust in their top-table leadership. And these leaders were determined to preserve an alliance with the Labour right (which had the knives out for the left throughout) and for that purpose crushed any prospect of broad self-organisation of the new members through bureaucratic control of Momentum.

Further left, the norms of top-table-dominated rallies, together with the forms of bureaucratic controls of communication and bureaucratic procedural manipulations learned in the student unions and trade unions, dominate the political practice of the far left both inside and outside the Labour Party. The effect is - as with bureaucratic control in the trade unions and Labour itself - to demobilise and to diseducate the ranks. This outcome serves capital.

There is, then, a strong practical need for alternative decision-making procedures, which can involve everyone and allow local and sectoral self-government - in contrast both to rule-of-law constitutionalism and bureaucratic management.

This is an interest which is shared by trans people and, broadly, everyone else. That is so because trans people are as much at risk of death due to global warming or global war as anyone else; because trans people are as much in need of collective action round wages and conditions, and so on, as everyone else; and because trans people are as much in need of a political alternative to the politics of the centre ground as anyone else - and perhaps even more so, since the political centre ground’s proposal for ‘trans emancipation’ through ‘gender recognition’ leads up the garden path to ... defeat and enhanced witch-hunting.

The idea that the interests of women, black people and so on (and hence equally of trans people) are radically separable from the interests of the working class as such, so that the oppressed should refuse common action unless their demands are ‘taken first’, was always one sedulously promoted by lawyers acting for capital and by the Chicago economists.⁵ It had a certain plausibility in the later cold war period, when capital continued to make substantial economic concessions to preserve its rule, and the labour bureaucracy, east and west, promoted ‘shutting up about’ race and sex issues (in contrast to the pre-1914 socialist movement). But there was always an element of ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’ about it, and today, after decades of stagnant or falling wages, declining public services, deepening climate degradation, growing dynamic towards war and so on, this self-defeating character should be obvious.

Principles

The underlying aim is, as I said above, of universal involvement and mobilisation, and hence of the possibility of local and sectoral self-government.

This in turn implies that:

• Everyone should have a voice or freedom of communication with others;
• Everyone should have a vote (and manipulative devices to prevent votes being taken must be rejected); and
• Everyone should have freedom of association: that is, to organise with others to discuss and present common proposals, to endeavour to persuade others and so on.

But, conversely, no-one should have a veto. And no-one should be entitled to pay for an ‘amplified’ voice, other than by way of freedom of association. Further, though we unavoidably need leading committees, etc to prepare agendas and proposals, as well as to organise implementation of decisions, these bodies should be liable to have their proposals rejected in broader meetings - there should be no special standing. Bans on factions, or on ‘permanent factions’, have to be rejected outright. They are merely bans on all factions except one - the full-time apparatus.

I have expressed these principles in terms of the organisations of the workers’ movement and its left, because this is where our decisions could make an immediate difference. But the principles themselves can be transposed - not without complications, but while remaining the same in principle - to the society as a whole.

At this point we arrive at two of the contentious issues: that of no-platforming, and that of ‘caucuses’ of oppressed groups. The ‘terfs’ have been arguing for women’s caucuses without trans women; and this background claim is one of the grounds which leads the trans activists to advocate no-platforming ‘transphobes’.

We will have to return later to the question of freedom of communication, because there is a second ground for no-platforming ‘transphobes’, which is connected to queer-bashing hate crimes and to the ‘gender recognition’ paradigm as a proposed solution to this problem. But for the present it is necessary to reassert the points just made about the effect of regimes of speech and communication control: that they can be seen from recent experience to be immensely destructive and demobilising. To this must be added the fact that the left promotion of such regimes legitimises the imposition of speech and communication controls by the right - visible in Ron DeSantis’ Florida attack on freedom of speech at universities;⁶ visible, equally, in the state-sponsored fraudulent campaign in this country to no-platform anti-Zionists as supposedly ‘anti-Semites’.

There is another side to this coin. The rightwing of the labour bureaucracy, and those who accept its claims to ‘speak for’ the (allegedly socially conservative) silent majority of the working class, put considerable effort into silencing or marginalising speech and communication to the left of their projects, on the ground that this speech may ‘put off workers’ or ‘put off voters’. The evidence of the socialist movement before 1914 is that this claim is false: considerable social radicalism did not put off masses of workers and voters. The ‘right to voice’ implies that trans people do have a right to fight for the workers’ movement and the left as such to voice opposition to their oppression - not to shut up about it for fear of disturbing the voters.

I add to this a point made at the end of the last article.⁷ To resist the advertising-funded and state media’s fear campaigns that fraudulently use exaggerated numbers cannot practically be done within the framework of single-issue campaigning which seeks unity with the liberals. But a serious Communist Party and a party media - by bringing into play all the ‘similar-fact evidence’ of press fear campaigns, using exaggerated numbers in other fields - could effectively undermine such campaigns.

Caucuses

In relation to caucuses within the workers’ movement, I have just proposed freedom of association, no vetoes and no special statuses as essential to organisational principles promoting universal involvement and self-government. That implies that there should be the right for oppressed groups to form caucuses; but that these caucuses should have no official standing, and no more rights than any other faction, because that is what, in substance, they are.

Further, a caucus speaks only for those it organises or who are prepared to vote for its proposals. A women’s caucus does not speak for all women; a ‘black and ethnic minority’ caucus does not speak for all black and ethnic minority people. Such claims to ‘speak for’ the silent are always arguments for the right wing - as Richard Nixon claimed to speak for the ‘silent majority’; as Neil Kinnock claimed to speak for the unrepresented masses against the party’s activists; and as John Rees in Respect claimed to speak for the unrepresented masses against people who proposed policies to the left of those the Socialist Workers Party was prepared to see adopted.

Once we see that a women’s caucus (or a black caucus, or whatever) should have no more rights than a faction, it follows that freedom of association implies they have the right to disassociate. There is no freedom of association without the right to split. Under these circumstances, it is completely anti-democratic for trans activists to take steps to prevent terfs organising a trans-exclusionary women’s caucus. But, conversely, if other women choose to organise a trans-inclusionary women’s caucus, such a caucus would have neither more nor less standing than the trans-exclusionary women’s caucus. Their weight would come merely from the numbers they organise and the persuasiveness of their proposals to the wider general membership or citizenry.

It may be guessed that, once we strip out the ‘official standing’ of caucuses of oppressed groups - and carry on an explicit and routine press campaign against media fear campaigns that use exaggerated numbers - it would turn out that the ‘trans-inclusionary’ women’s caucus organised more women than the ‘trans-exclusionary’ one. That guess is a wager on the ability of women to take rational political decisions, and a wager on the ability of trans women to accept that they are a minority rather than insisting disruptively on ultimatums and vetoes. But then communism and socialism in general - and democracy in general - are wagers on the ability of working people themselves to take rational decisions ...

In substance the identical issue arises on the scale of the society as a whole in relation to women’s sports. Unlike gender-segregated prisons and toilets, various women’s sport organisations and events were created by women as a response to the idea that sport ‘belonged’ to men.⁸ And there are some sports (broadly, ones in which male skeletal architecture is an advantage) in which some trans women (broadly, those not on hormones or whose transition is after completed puberty) would have an unfair competitive advantage if allowed to compete in women-only competitions (not all sports, and not all trans women). The assertion that women’s sport events may not exclude trans women is to deny freedom of association in favour of judicial control. As with the question of freedom of speech, it is guaranteed that this support for extending the judicial power will later be used against you.

This is not the end of the story: it is merely concerned with how we take decisions for common action. And it is primarily a negative argument against forms of sectionalism - both no-platforming and the excessive weight given to caucuses of the oppressed in left practice. In the final article in this series, I will argue that the politics of solidarity, properly understood, provide grounds both for a possible future without the oppression of trans people and for limited reform demands under capitalist rule, which do not lead into the political cul-de-sac of those forms of sectionalism, not to mention ‘gender recognition reform’.

mike.macnair@weeklyworker.co.uk

1. ‘Female prison ban for trans inmates comes into force’ The Times February 27. See also www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-care-and-management-of-individuals-who-are-transgender#full-publication-update-history. The Bill of Rights 1689 article 10 cannot be taken to be impliedly repealed by later statutes: see J Mcgarry and S Spence, ‘Constitutional statutes - roots and recognition’ Statute Law Review Vol 41, pp378-94 (2020).↩︎

2. Also included are “assault without injury on a constable” - an offence commonly charged for what is actually disobedience to a police officer; and “procuring illegal abortion” (see ‘Women accused of illegal abortions in England and Wales after miscarriages and stillbirths’ The Guardian July 2 2022), so that the offence is actually of assisting ‘cis’ women - the opposite of posing a threat to women.↩︎

3. See, for example, M Roberts, ‘Capitalism is the cause of, not the solution to, runaway climate change’ Weekly Worker October 18 2018 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1223/capitalism-is-the-cause-of-not-the-solution-to-run); J Conrad, ‘Climate change and system change’, September 5 2019 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1265/climate-change-and-system-change); and numerous other articles in this paper, as well as a mass of literature elsewhere.↩︎

4. E Barker (translator) Politics 1290b, Oxford 1948, p193.↩︎

5. There are references in my article, ‘Intersectionalism, the highest stage of western Stalinism’ (Critique Vol 46 (2018) at pp554-56.↩︎

6. C Mudde, ‘What is behind Ron DeSantis’s Stop-Woke Act?’ The Guardian February 6.↩︎

7. ‘Gender, class, capitalism’ Weekly Worker February 23 2023 (weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1431/gender-class-and-capitalism).↩︎

8. See, for example, www.sportanddev.org/en/article/news/tracing-challenging-history-womens-participation-sport (March 2021). J Williams A contemporary history of women’s sport (Abingdon 2014) sees more links with the capitalist development of leisure markets in part one: Sporting women, 1850-1960.↩︎