Monthly Archives: August 2026

Jason Arday and his great and unfortunate things

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Torchbearer Jason Arday carries the Olympic Flame on the Torch Relay leg between Sutton and Merton, in London, July 23, 2012. (Joe Giddens/LOCOG/PA via AP)

Much of the left take a very moralistic view of the world and its struggles, made up of good people who are oppressed and bad people who are the oppressors.  This means the oppressed – identified by their class and race etc. – must always be right, and the oppressors – including their allies on the right of the political spectrum – must always be wrong.  There are absolute moral values that can determine who is supported and is right and who is damned and wrong.  What is wrong with this has been illustrated by the case of Jason Arday, the young black Cambridge professor who was accused first of plagiarism and then of fabrication of his life story that got him into Cambridge in the first place.

If you see the world through the lens of moral absolutes it requires that a world of moral absolutes looks back at you.  Otherwise, what is revealed is a world that confounds these neat binaries, one that exposes the contradictions of the world and in views and opinions that have no room for them.

The first response I read to the Arday story, and repeated elsewhere, was the claim that in academia lots of people plagiarise other work – why pick on him?  The answer from the left was – because he was black!  He received a vastly disproportionate pile-on by the right wing media that was largely fuelled by racism and that would not have been carried out had he been white.

Various other arguments stated that he wasn’t guilty of plagiarism at all, that he hadn’t vastly exaggerated his life story, or if he had it wasn’t to the extent claimed, sometimes with the additional claim that in any case it was in some way excusable because of his declared autism. 

Arday was a victim of racism – what side are you on?  His interrogators were the right wing press feeding off a ‘race-realist’ that posited the general inferiority of black people.  His death, presumably by suicide, was a form of murder.  It was necessary to name the criminals who, as one site put it, metaphorically tied him up and flogged him so that, it must reasonably be assumed, they were a significant contributory factor to his death.

As so stated, this is a fairly clear-cut situation, even if one might recoil from the proposal that the state should step in to censor such media treatment: giving the state more powers of repression is never a good idea, we should know in whose interests it does this for and who it does it to.

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What’s wrong with this narrative?

The assertion – Why pick on Arday? is first of all not a defence.  It’s like being caught robbing a bank and excusing yourself by saying you didn’t do it by yourself.  It invites responses such as Why not? Are we to cover it up, ignore it, claim it doesn’t matter, or even claim it didn’t happen?  But what if there are powerful forces prepared to do none of this?  Do we persist in making these moves and therefore making ourselves complicit, opening ourselves up to ridicule and similar charges of dishonesty?  Is the cause worth the price?  What would we be defending?

When the right wing press piled onto Arday’s case, was it disproportionate to other cases of plagiarism that were not so copiously treated?

Arday’s case was different, different because it combined his extraordinary and unbelievable claims about his life, which it is unnecessary to repeat here; his elevation to such a prestigious position when he was so woefully underqualified and patently inadequate to it; the acclaim as “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do” by his boss at Cambridge, Hilary Cremin; by his notoriety outside academia, including though prominent media appearances, a lucrative book deal, honorary doctorates and other awards, and places on various committees for the great and the good.  He propelled himself into these as much as he was pulled.

Above all he became a totem; representing more than himself, which he voluntarily promoted and which the right wing press wanted to destroy. He presented himself as someone who through his own will could overcome a poor background, disability, and racial discrimination to reach the lofty position that he did.  He set an example to everyone who were the same.  Except, by lying so outrageously he betrayed those he presented as inspiring.

Socialists don’t believe that poverty, disability and discrimination can be overcome individually as an act of will, and ironically Arday proved it.  He was not someone to emulate even if he had not fabricated his life. Watching the story unfold I was reminded of the famous quote by John Maclean, the Scottish revolutionary socialist –”Rise with your class, not out of it.” 

The aim of socialism is not to have the same proportion of black people in poverty, or in high position, as white people.  It is not to have equality of exploitation and oppression or of privilege, wealth and power.  It does not support identity politics that replaces class emancipation with equity in class oppression, but that is the meaning of the totem that Arday became, and that he celebrated.

So, should we defend him by covering up or excusing him? -No! Is his cause worth the price that would be paid? – No!  Does that mean we ignore or endorse the right wing media that piled on? – No!  Do we fail to recognise racism when we see it? No!

What we do is what so much of the left seems inherently incapable of doing – taking an independent position of opposition to identity politics separate and opposed to the opposition to it from the right. We oppose it for very different reasons, and we fight it in very different ways: not to further the division of the working class but to further unite it.

We do so by recognising the real world, without ignoring the bits that don’t fit a preconceived moral narrative.  We don’t elevate the subjective feelings and views of the oppressed as something to subordinate our own politics to (with its basis in objective reality), which means we can’t mute ourselves in case the feelings of some in oppressed groups are hurt or engage in self-harm, even less to threats to do so.  Being ‘kind’ is not a political prescription or one of the moral absolutes we started this article with.

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Inevitably, every new narrative will now be read backwards from Jason Arday’s death, but this does not mean it can be narrated forward such as it had above all to be avoided.  We can take no responsibility for the actions of the right wing press or think there is now some simple step that can stop it in future.  His death was tragic, but the tragedy had many antecedent sources. 

When it was reported I recalled attending a funeral of a young woman.  Her family suffered not only limitless grief but a yawning void where an explanation for her action might be, one that perhaps might have provided some point of reference that would allow their loss to be slightly more bearable.  The question why? remained unresolved.  It seemed to me that she had taken an ultimate act of control in circumstances in which she had no control.  There were no answers.

One discussion of Arday’s presumed last act stated my own view more precisely.  It arose when ‘the relationship between the self and society is off kilter, preventing a healthy sense of meaning, purpose and connection’. Connection to the world that Jason Arday helped construct for himself, validated by those he thought were for him, and which defined who he was, was gone.  He now had no control over the relations that he had within society, that gave his life the meaning he had so assiduously sought, and the purpose to which he had put his life.  It would seem he could find no other.

Self-emancipation of the working class

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Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 83

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels stated that ‘the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.’ (The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p495). They argued that ‘modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.’

‘Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.’

This, however, is only one tendency of capitalist development, albeit the most important, in that capitalism has spread across the globe, ironically, as many who have considered themselves Marxists have argued the decisive importance of the obstacles to the development of capitalism (and therefore of the growth of the working class).  This has come in the form of the purported regressive effects of imperialism, set out, for example, in the ideas of dependency theory within which it is supposed to develop underdevelopment. Without this development of capitalism however there could be no talk of the proletariat becoming the ‘independent movement of the immense majority’ or of ‘society . . . more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps . . . Bourgeoisie and Proletariat’. 

If this were not the case then Marx’s view, expressed in The Communist Manifesto would not be correct; that ‘the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society . . . Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . . ‘

This constant revolutionising of the conditions and relations of production makes and remakes the working class, creating and destroying the material bases of its life, its organisation and its class consciousness.  As we noted in the previous post, it does not sweep away all previous ‘venerable prejudices and opinions’, which continue to weigh on the consciousness of the working class and oppressed, but develops new ones that are newly ‘venerable’ and sacred but equally inimical to the development of working class consciousness.  Politicised religion still plays an important role in many countries, including, for example, Christian fundamentalism in the US and Islamic fundamentalism in the Muslim world.  New theories of identity have been developed whose effect is to erase the importance of class and class struggle and divide the working class, often proposing impossible claims; for example that humans can change sex.

Marx and Engels grew up and matured when the process of worldwide capitalist development was beginning to create an industrial working class in only a few countries in the world and when this class was relatively small in some of them.  They never, however, broke from the central principle that the emancipation of the working class was to be achieved by the working class itself, even when its lack of development required alliances with other classes and forces in tasks that did not immediately and directly involve their full emancipation.  Had Marx based his politics on the worst oppression of the by far biggest class at the time, he would have advanced the politics of the peasantry. 

Engels noted that the proletariat, as it ‘evolved itself from these propertyless masses as the nucleus of a new class, as yet quite incapable of independent political action, appeared as an oppressed, suffering estate, to whom, in its incapacity to help itself, help could, at best, be brought in from without or down from above.’ (Anti-Duhring Part 3 Section 1 Historical)

After Marx’s death, and nearing the end of his own, he reviewed their joint experience, concluding that ‘the time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are fighting for, body and soul.’

‘The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work that we are now pursuing, and with a success which drives the enemy to despair.  (Engels 1895 Preface to The Class Struggles in France)

In this, he restated views that Marx had come to early in his political development in which he rejected the abstract universality of the state as simply the ‘political heaven’ of the atomistic individualism entailed in private property.  The state presents its members as ‘equal in their heaven of their political world, but unequal in their earthly existence of society’ (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, Collected Works Vol 3 p79). At this point in 1843 Marx had yet to identify the proletariat as the universal class and the means to end the alienation entailed by bourgeois private property, but he had already rejected the state as the means of doing so, ironic, as I have said so many times, that many of his self-declared disciples today take precisely this view.

His general approach at this time was set out as follows: ‘we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.  The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. (Letters from Deutsch-Französische Jahrbüche, Collected Works Vol 3 p144).

The politics that Marx and Engels developed did not therefore consist of moral claims that are ahistorical and forever categorical, or other timeless principles divorced from existing society; it did not comprise of virtuous panaceas or utopian schemes that should be imposed from outside, but were rather to be developed from the existing struggles and from within the society of which they were expressions.  Today, we might also add that it is not based on subjective experience, of the reaction of oppressed groups to their own oppression in, for example, various forms of identity politics, but in an understanding of their position within the relations of production and how their specific oppression is related to them.  From this their role in overcoming this oppression as part of a movement to transform these relations can be developed out of their own struggles.

‘All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.’ Politics and struggle which is incapable of presenting such a perspective is incapable of promising emancipation.  Still less are those who, whether consciously or in effect, see other workers as the ‘privileged’, with their ‘privilege’ as the font of oppression, and therefore the enemy to be defeated

The first public statement of their general politics in The Communist Manifesto, as Engels much later explained, was therefore based not on a set of ready-made ideas, which instead they developed throughout their lives, but on the current reality and history of existing classes, struggles, and movements:

‘Yet, when it was written, we could not have called it a socialist manifesto. By Socialists, in 1847, were understood, on the one hand the adherents of the various Utopian systems: Owenites in England, Fourierists in France, both of them already reduced to the position of mere sects, and gradually dying out; on the other hand, the most multifarious social quacks who, by all manner of tinkering, professed to redress, without any danger to capital and profit, all sorts of social grievances, in both cases men outside the working-class movement, and looking rather to the “educated” classes for support.’

‘Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist. It was a crude, rough-hewn, purely instinctive sort of communism; still, it touched the cardinal point and was powerful enough amongst the working class to produce the Utopian communism of Cabet in France, and of Weitling in Germany.’

’Thus, in 1847, socialism was a middle-class movement, communism a working-class movement. Socialism was, on the Continent at least, “respectable”; communism was the very opposite. And as our notion, from the very beginning, was that “the emancipation of the workers must be the act of the working class itself,” there could be no doubt as to which of the two names we must take. Moreover, we have, ever since, been far from repudiating it. (Preface to the Fourth German Edition of the Communist Manifesto, 1890 F Engels, Marx and Engels Collected Works 27 p59-60)

Back to part 82

The scope of self-emancipation. Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism part 82

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2017 Women’s March in Washington, DC. (Flickr/Vlad Tchompalov)

Socialism is possible because of the socialisation of production through the growth of the productive forces.  Only one agent can accomplish this socialisation such that it is a cooperative and consciously planned development, and is the instrument of the actual producers themselves, the working class.  As these producers are the main productive force in the world the object of the process is the development of the producers themselves, of human development itself.

‘This appropriation is further determined by the manner in which it must be effected. It can only be effected through a union, which by the character of the proletariat itself can again only be a universal one, and through a revolution, in which, on the one hand, the power of the earlier mode of production and intercourse and social organisation is overthrown, and, on the other hand, there develops the universal character and the energy of the proletariat, which are required to accomplish the appropriation, and the proletariat moreover rids itself of everything that still clings to it from its previous position in society.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p88)

No other agent can carry out this endeavour, so that only the working class can abolish bourgeois private property through revolution.  This cannot be the more numerous (until very recently) peasantry; some combination of petty producers and peasantry; some combination of women, petty producers and peasantry or of oppressed nationalities, ethnic groups and races etc.  As such, these play no role in the existing relations of production such that they could create a new cooperative society.

As the oppressed their struggle against their subordination must transcend their particular oppression and only as constituents of the working class can they take hold of the means of production to transform class relations, end their own oppression and abolish exploitation.  Only acting as a class can they abolish class in general and rid the world of the material want that lies behind the social inequality of all kinds that provides the basis for continuing social conflict and oppression.  Divorced from class struggle their opposition to their oppression will not ensure its ending, while a class struggle that ignores their oppression cannot promise universal emancipation because the working class would not then be united as a universal class.

The working class is made up of many oppressed forces, including the female half of humanity, so that its struggles must embrace the specific interests of these oppressed groups in order that the working class is united, not as allies but as equal participants in self-emancipation.  Marxism provides the basis for the necessary unity that can overturn racism etc. and not just modify it, for example through equality of races among the capitalist class and elite layers of society, and within the working class itself.

We have explained in many previous posts how human productive activity is central to human development and is key to all social liberation – to the relations between individuals and cooperative control of society; to the growth and transformation of civilisation; freedom from want, removal of alienation and social inequality as the basis of social conflict e.g. sexual oppression and racism; and replacement by social cooperation, the creation of free time that allows for the development of each individual and the creation of a realm of freedom as the grounds of human flourishing.

From all this follows that the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself – the bedrock principle of Marxist politics upon which all else is built. Marx even suggests that unlike previous revolutions in the form of private property, for example from feudal to bourgeois, the appropriation of this by the working class will be easier!

‘The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.’ (Marx Capital Vol 1, Chapter 32)

When the working class puts itself forward as the new ruling class it must make its interests the interests of the new society in general: ‘For each new class which puts itself in the place of one ruling before it is compelled, merely in order to carry through its aim, to present its interest as the common interest of all the members of society, that is, expressed in ideal form: it has to give its ideas the form of universality, and present them as the only rational, universally valid ones. The class making a revolution comes forward from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society, as the whole mass of society confronting the one ruling class.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p60)

Marx goes on to say that ‘Every new class, therefore, achieves domination only on a broader basis than that of the class ruling previously; on the other hand the opposition of the non-ruling class to the new ruling class then develops all the more sharply and profoundly. Both these things determine the fact that the struggle to be waged against this new ruling class, in its turn, has as its aim a more decisive and more radical negation of the previous conditions of society than all previous classes which sought to rule could have.’ (Marx & Engels Collected Works Vol 5 p61)

In this way the struggle of the working class is more difficult.  We see this in the innumerable struggles of oppressed or subordinated groups who seek their own liberation or emancipation not as a part of this general movement of emancipation but as particular claims, separate and often opposed to the general and universal objectives of emancipation that lies within the working class struggle to abolish capitalism and establish socialism as the rule of the associated producers.

This is illustrated not only by the partial struggles against discrimination and domination that do not seek to go beyond equality within capitalism – of nations, races, and sexes etc. – but also of those supposedly class struggles, in reality economistic struggles, that determinedly do not go beyond particular claims within the bounds of capitalism.  Within the latter the universal (and political) character of the struggle of the working class is consciously rejected by typically reformist politics that nevertheless often presents itself as socialism.

It is no accident that these ‘pure’ working class struggles – over employment or higher wages etc. – often look not to the power of the working class but to the capitalist state as their saviour, so that the state is certified as the universal representative of society; against which proposition Marx began his search for an alternative that became his journey to working class emancipation.  This tendency, existing as a function of capitalism and the state itself, was enormously strengthened by the history of the working class movement. As Marx noted in The Communist Manifesto The proletariat goes through various stages of development . . . If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies . . .’

The development of capitalism has demonstrated that this subordination of the working class, and its movement, to the bourgeoisie is repeated again and again.  On the war in Ukraine, for example, many ‘socialists’ have lined up behind their bourgeoisie and state on behalf of the cause of one of its constituent allies (Ukraine) on the basis of fighting the enemy (Russia) of its purported enemy (its own bourgeoisie.)

The underdevelopment of the working class led to the early attempts to establish a socialist society failing and inevitably falling back on the state in circumstances in which the class was a minority and only the state could impose any sort of ‘universality’, as in the direction of society and the bending of social and economic arrangements to achieve it.  This is the summary story of the Russian revolution and the ‘model’ of state socialism that it proclaimed, and which further contributed to the view of the state as the carrier of the universal interests of the working class.

These became the ‘digressions, the temporary and local aberrations’ that Engels mentioned the day after Marx died, which were ‘inevitable’ but which, upon his death, ‘will now proliferate.’  And proliferate they have. Even the most radical interpretations of the first state-wide attempt to create a new socialist society often fail to recognise the lesson that it is not even a healthy workers’ state that will avoid the bureaucratic deformities and degeneration experienced and then celebrated as Stalinism.  It is the working class directly controlling society’s social and economic arrangements with the role of the state to defend them – not constitute them – that will do so.

Capitalism involved the general destruction of feudal and other constraints that rendered people unfree not only socially but also legally so that in both ways they were bereft of individuality.  It permitted the idea of individual freedom and thus the idea of its realisation, even if its social arrangements effectively circumscribed it and strangled its development.  It has shown that it cannot yet eradicate all ‘the ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions’ inherited from previous medieval societies that Marx proclaimed in his sweeping anticipatory judgement in The Communist Manifesto.

It also, however, created the grounds not only for the perpetuation of various forms of existing social oppression but also the possibility of recognising them and struggling against them.  This is the basis for new ideologies and movements of oppressed groups that realise that the possibility for ending their oppression now exists.  In themselves they have no universal aims because they seek only sectional liberation, but their existence not only implies that the universal emancipation promised by the working class must account for them but that it must encompass them or the emancipation that the latter claims is not universal.

Back to part 81

Forward to part 83