A Free Left Blog

This article was posted yesterday, 10th June 2020, on the SDPtalk website. Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a masterpiece of political marketing. It’s a slogan with a campaign attached, linked to some pretty heavy racial ideology and propaganda.  None of it can be criticised without appearing to oppose the idea that black lives do indeed matter. BLM is a classic and effective piece of rhetorical blackmail. Either get on board or you’re a racist: that is the logic of it - a logic driven by fear. It’s the perfect slogan, as befitting the powerful alignment between progressive liberal-left politics and the PR, media and advertising industries across the Anglophone world. There’s an immediate and powerful social block on even questioning this movement just from its name. One of the great successes of the campaign is how it has got many institutions in our society applying this block themselves, promoting the organisation and even punishing insiders who publicly question and criticise any a...

One of the curious things about this curious Labour Party conference for me looking from the outside has been the self-congratulation on display. The first thing I saw when I switched on BBC Parliament on Monday was a local party delegate from North London boasting about beating the Lib Dems during the last election, praising how amazing everyone was and saying what a terrible state the economy is in due to austerity. (i.e. ‘We’re great and right, that lot the public preferred over us are wicked and evil’, and ergo said public – except for the righteous denizens of North London – are wicked and evil too). That’s maybe a bit harsh; after all you can’t expect ‘hardworking’ ordinary Labour folk to turn up to a conference in an expensive town like Brighton to moan and be negative and have a crap time telling each other how deluded they are. Nevertheless, the self-congratulation looks a bit off given Labour’s successive election defeats to a Conservative Party which is ...

Equality is one of the most problematic and even dangerous notions in politics, yet it retains a particular appeal and is well worth exploring. Gottlob Frege, the founder of modern mathematical logic, asked a basic question at the beginning of his work Sense and Reference : “ Equality gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer. Is it a relation? A relation between objects, or between names or signs of objects? ” Frege favoured the latter; that equality is a relation between names or signs of objects rather than between things or beings as a whole. In this way, we can see equality occurring between aspects of things rather than the things themselves. After all, if an object or being (a human being for example) is absolutely equal with another, then it would be the same thing. It’s like Wittgenstein said in his Tractatus: " Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is...

This article was first published by Labour Uncut on 13th March 2012 as the second of a two-part series on identity politics - under an awful alternative title that I made up to follow on from the principal theme of the first part: All Women Shortlists in the Labour Party. This second part is more general, exploring the nature of identity and challenging dominant narratives on the Left about it. In Life and Fate , his epic novel of family, Stalingrad and totalitarianism, the Soviet-era journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! The only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for l...