A Marxist reviews a Marxist: Minority Rule by Ash Sarkar

Now that the dust of the Twitter beef has settled, what should we make of Ash Sarkar's debut book 'Minority Rule'?

I sometimes imagine what it would have been like to be a contemporary of Socrates. I suspect I'd have thrown my chiton in the ring and would have had a frequent presence in the public debates of the agora. Instead, I have to settle for Twitter. It's a far cry from the intellectually rigorous exchanges of Ancient Greece, but beggars can't be choosers. Before digging deep into the book, I want to get my thoughts about the Twitter debacle that surrounded it out the way.

Twits, Tweets and Outrage

At the centre of Ash's book is a critique of the reproduction and exchange of ideas, and how this sustains elite minority rule. The method? The culture war. Both traditional and social media have been captured, Ash argues, to dismantle progressive solidarities that could threaten minority rule; creating instead a fractured and fragmented working class unaware of its own collective strength, and therefore unable to create a better world for itself.

Given this, there are a couple aspects about the pre-launch media tour that were disappointing. The interviews used deliberately provocative titles and thumbnails that were plucked directly from the right-wing playbook: ‘Woke is dead’, ‘Woke is over’, ‘Get a Grip’, ‘The Left's Toxic Victimhood is Corroding Solidarity’. Video shorts with sensational stories of white supremacist salad spinners were plastered on Twitter to generate engagement. At times it felt like a resurrection of the old red-scare decrying 'loony lefties'. Having written against neoliberal identity politics, I would be the last to say we should withhold critique of those in our ranks. But it’s about how, and to what end, we do it.

In the book Ash points out that nuanced, long form oratory is no longer a staple of political communication. Politicians and pundits competing for (and manipulating) our attention communicate by repeating short, emotionally evocative messages. This is what sticks. If you have an obsessive interest in dissecting and understanding the culture wars you might have stuck around to the end of her interviews. But let's be real; most people don't consume content in this way - and they certainly don't see a Twitter row and think ‘I must make a special effort to understand the nuance here’. They'll see the thumbnail, watch the short, and conclude one of the left's most prominent and talented journalists is now anti anti-racism. Having read the book I don't believe it needed any of the click and rage bait: it can succeed off the strength of its arguments (and wit).

A second, related point: in my view the choice of interlocutors was wildly unbalanced, at best. They seemed to lack a serious understanding of identity politics and social movements beyond their own irritations with it. Aaron Bastani appeared reluctant to acknowledge Ash’s experiences of sexism and sexual harassment at student occupations and the idea that this kind of behaviour, at least in part, helped fuel some of the worst elements of neoliberal identity politics’ structuring of interpersonal relationships. Lewis Goodall at points conflated neoliberal identity politics with liberation politics in general, and appeared suspicious of any politics with a focus on race, gender, or sexuality. It would have been great to see Ash engage with people embedded in and leading social movements, as opposed to touring through the studios of journalists who, at times, gave off the aura of a bitter man.

Alright, now that's over let's get into the book.

The Revolutionary Class

Ash uses Marx and Engels as the starting point to explore her understanding of what it means to be working class. This is a refreshing detraction from mainstream obsessions with accents and avocados, as it foregrounds the revolutionary potential of the exploited classes under capitalism:

…the development of capitalism meant that the next revolution, a real revolution, would be of the majority class, the working-class proletarians, rising up against the minority bourgeoisie ownership class.

Later in the book Ash expands her ideas on class through the concept of rentier capitalism. She asks:

How much do you really own? Take a moment to think about it. You have a roof over your head, but is that because you’re paying rent to a landlord? If your name is on the deed, is that because you own your home outright, or are you paying off a mortgage? If your home could be repossessed if you ended up in arrears, are you that much different from a renter?… Do you own the data, and not just the content, that you generate for Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram or TikTok? We live in an age where we have a lot of the items that used to indicate wealth… but we own remarkably little.

The nature of capitalism means the vast majority of us are being squeezed, more aggressively and completely, to line the pockets of the ruling elite. This means despite the fragmentation of neoliberalism, there remains a material basis for collective, working class solidarity. The elite, she argues, might tussle over the detail of their minority rule but when push comes to shove they know which side they're on. Our side seems much more confused about who our enemies are, and that nullifies our ability to resist the deterioration of our lives.

As Marx said there is a world to win. But neoliberal identity politics on both the left and right, Ash poignantly argues, only serves to maintain the status quo:

Creating social capital out of suffering means that we have a perverse incentive to hold onto our victimhood, rather than work together to change the conditions that created it. It’s an inherently minority endeavour, breaking us down into the most powerless political unit of all: the lonely, frightened and untrusting individual.

Where Ash doesn’t go far enough is in exploring what the idea of the working class as the revolutionary class means for her understanding of, and relationship to, electoral politics. Working class unity means squat-diddly-poop in the current electoral landscape. Labour, Conservatives and Reform all rely on different versions of corrosive neoliberal identity politics to succeed, and they’re all invested in breaking off sections of the working class to form electoral coalitions that serve their fundamentally elitist politics. By centring the idea of working class unity, the book often feels like it’s ushering us towards a different politics, a new configuration of some kind. But Ash never quite spells out what that is.

Rise of the White Working Class

One of my favourite parts of the book is when Ash traces the transition in how the media propagandised about the working class before and after the 2011 riots. The 2011 riots were multi-racial, working class and cross-country; sparked by the police killing of Mark Duggan. Prior to the riots, derogatory, cruel, lurid, and hostile depictions of working class people dominated. From the cultural landscape, such as Little Britain's Vicky Pollard, to the political and media landscape the idea of the backwards and undeserving ‘chav’ was used to justify working class exploitation and anti-working class policy.

This shifts some time after 2011 when it becomes clear working class anger, fuelled by austerity, was creating solidarity across racial difference. In response, we start to see the rise of the much more sophisticated ‘white working class’ amongst the media and political elite. It’s proponents argue there are specific grievances only experienced by the ‘white working class’, and these alone should be taken seriously. But implicit in this is a further, more pernicious idea: the grievances of the so-called white working class are not caused by the ruling elite, but are caused by other members of the working class - those who happen to be of a different shade, or religion, or heritage.

This formulation - of an aggrieved white working class whose interests are opposed to the black and brown working class - is the bed rock of today’s right wing identity politics. Ash decisively lays out how this new white victimhood is intended to indulge an experience of injury - brought about by economic and political decline - by manipulating and redirecting it along racial and cultural lines. Right wing identity politics creates a smoke screen that shrouds elite minority rule in mystery. This wasn’t by accident, it was a conscious shift in strategy. As Ash explains:

Something funny began to happen after 2011. After years of media pearl-clutching about multiethnic ‘urban savages’, ‘chavs’ and made up inner-city accents, you just… stopped hearing about it. Something dramatically shifted. No longer were politicians and pundits talking about the ‘perverse failure’ of ‘losers’ and ‘no hopers’ to succeed in life. Anger was no longer the violent result of feral urban youth being hyped up by hoodies and hip hop. Instead, a new group had appeared, armed with reasonable concerns and well-grounded grievances… Conceptually, the idea of the white working class displaced the chav. Using a simple Google Ngram search, you can see that use of the terms ‘chav’ and ‘chavs’ collapses just as use of the phrase ‘white working class’ absolutely skyrockets.

What adds currency to Ash’s analysis of the ‘white working class’, but that she doesn’t directly engage with, is work that shows how the idea of ‘white working class’ grievance is in many ways the rallying cry of a white middle class in decline. For example, it’s often thought that Brexit was driven entirely by a disgruntled white working class, when in fact the dominant block was the squeezed petite bourgeoisie.

Nevertheless, Ash puts a necessary spotlight on how neoliberal identity politics isn’t just the hobby of an idle left, but is the entire terrain on which contemporary politics operates. This raises a question: can we escape the culture war? Neoliberalism fundamentally changed how society is structured - is it the case we can entirely abandon the identities and the new subjectivities that emerge, as some on the left conclude? Or as Jonas Marvin writes, should we start to conceptualise what a viable identity politics looks like, instead of jostling for the best left wing version of being ‘anti woke’? I think so. In this way, Minority Rule poses critical questions about the way forward, but doesn’t necessarily answer them.

Cycles, Loops, Roundabouts and Novara Media

Ash dedicates a significant chunk of the book to an exegesis of the ‘media industrial complex’, and how journalists behave within it. Here Ash’s writing felt at its boldest and most incisive. To secure interviews with Piers Morgan and Dominic Cummings, as well as getting insider insights from journalists at the Guardian, and in the Lobby (who are given privileged access to Parliament), is impressive.

Ash has a critical foot without, and an informed foot within, the core of the mainstream media. This allows her to level a powerful critique of the incestuous "revolving door" of politicians and journalists - both in terms of who gets the jobs, and how they buoy each other’s interests. Her tell-all analysis drives home how power is concentrated in the hands of a small, elite cabal; puppeteering our attention, emotions, and the very ideas in our heads to suit the voracious needs of the capitalist elite.

Ash observes with suitable scorn how the mainstream media news cycle operates in the increasingly competitive attention economy:

The job of a producer isn’t to think about how you might put together a panel of speakers and a line of questioning which can illuminate various facets of a particular topic: it’s to theatrically stage an argument that’s already taking place online, which itself has been fuelled by media coverage, which has been driven by social media engagement, on and on forever in a feedback loop of content and outrage. The result of all this is that the threshold for what constitutes news has dramatically lowered - and reaction to that ‘news’ - the arousal of angry, impassioned attention at a speed that bypasses audience awareness - plays an outsize role in shaping the news cycle instead.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book has a pretty noticeable gap where a critique of Novara Media should be. I often watch Novara Media’s news segments to catch up with what's going on in the mainstream media, without having to listen to right-wing charlatans drone on. On these shows you consistently get a slightly more left wing read on whatever is in the news that day; regularly hear from critics of Labour and Keir Starmer; and much more importance is given to ideas like economic inequality. But there is very little from Novara Media’s news output - in terms of what they determine is newsworthy - that differs from the agenda set by the mainstream media; an agenda, Ash argues, is rigged to serve minority rule. Ash doesn't seem like she's quite arrived at a level of vulnerability where her critique of the left includes her workplace and colleagues.

For me, the Solace Women's Aid indefinite strike in Tower Hamlets was breaking news: it was the first strike in the history of the women’s sector, and is an example of a politics that unites feminism with a solidly working class theory of change. Women’s sector workers are coming together and levelling a challenge against their minority rulers. The case of the Manchester 10, and the three boys who fought against racist ‘gangs’ convictions, was breaking news. Three working class Black lads and a bunch of relentless and courageous abolitionist campaigners fought their minority rulers, and won. These are precisely the material struggles Ash urges should be central to the left, yet they are never central to the news reporting of the country’s most successful left wing media platform.

The Final Verdict

It’s a good book, I recommend you read it. How I described it to friends over a few pints at the Beehive is: if you don’t like how politics works, but you're not in radical left wing circles you might find this book profound. If you are, there might not be much in it that is completely novel, but it collates fantastic insights and reflections on how we got here in one place. In both cases, it's worth a read.