The imperialist war against Iran

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Before looking at the ceasefire in the imperialist war against Iran, including its breaking just announced as this is written, we should note the hypocrisy.  The Israeli attack on Iran was a flagrant breach of international law for which Russia has been widely and repeatedly condemned, with the horrendous war supported and prolonged by massive injections of weapons and funding from western imperialism to Ukraine.  The unprecedented sanctions imposed on Russia have significantly impacted on the living standards of the working class in Europe, which has committed to massive rearmament that brings us closer to an even greater conflict.

In Gaza, the attacks by the imperialist proxy involve genocide while imperialism has defended Israel’s actions as self-defence and provided the means to implement it.  Opposition to genocide has been criminalised across Europe and the US and equated to terrorism.

The attack on Iran by Israel and then the United States has been defended by posing the issue as Iranian possession of nuclear weapons it doesn’t have, which Israel does. Iranian aggression is condemned while ignoring Zionist aggression in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and now Iran.  Immediately after the Israeli and US attacks the leaders of the European Union called for restraint, de-escalation and for Iran to enter negotiations; ignoring that Iran had never left them, that Isreal and the US had torpedoed existing talks, and that both had just escalated attacks that were against the sacred international law the European leaders said they were defending in Ukraine.  While media focus was on Iran Zionism continued its genocide in Gaza.

There would seem no reason to believe anything the imperialists say, except of course part of the left has accepted their rhetoric in relation to Ukraine, fully supporting the imperialist proxy and the provision of massive financial and military resources.

These wars are hardly unconnected and it is widely understood, even to the consumers of the dumbed-down coverage of the BBC and RTE, that behind them lies the growing conflict between the United States and China, also expressed in the trade war by the US intended to weaken China and its allies and further subordinate its allies in Europe etc.  The eruption and now sudden attempt at ending (or rather suspension) of the war against Iran is inexplicable without understanding this.

This has not prevented sections of the left taking the side of one camp or the other in the inter-imperialist conflict while still claiming either to be against ‘campism’ or against all imperialism.  The really stupid find themselves both supporting the actions of Western imperialism while verbally denouncing it for not doing enough in Ukraine and doing too much in Palestine and Iran.  Apparently imperialism can play a progressive and reactionary role at the same time. Some reached the bottom with their opposition to the dictatorship of Assad leading them to welcome the victory of a new dictatorship of western backed Islamist terrorists.

The attack on Iran was thus one consequence of this conflict with the support of US imperialism vital for Israeli action against its regional rival, which is aligned with Russia and China, if not in the formal or tight relationship that the West has with Israel and Ukraine.  Of course, Israel has its own agenda but it is subordinated to that of US imperialism, with differences mainly arising over secondary issues of method and presentation.

Left supporters of Ukraine among the left will share in its defeat by Russia, having abandoned an independent position, while the left supporters of Russia and China have suffered their own through the defeat of Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Assad in Syria and the weakening of the Iranian state, again without signalling a socialist position in relation to them.

The attack by Israel, agreed and supported by the US, was intended to remove the potential for Iran to recoup some recent losses to its ‘axis of resistance’ and to degrade its position so that it could no longer present as a potential rival hegemon in the region.  Having done this it might be possible to enable regime change, or more likely simply wreck and ruin the country.  The pivot to China, which has been declared as US policy would thus go through west Asia.

US interests require that war with Iran should be a stepping stone and way station to pressing on China and not an obstacle, while for Israel the point about Iran is that it is its immediate and main rival.  The interests of the US and Israel are not therefore identical.  For the US, weakening Iran weakens the alliance that encompasses Russia and China, in doing so revealing its lack of coherence and strength, but Iran is not a threat to the US and there is no principled reason that an accommodation could not be found with it, where Iran to accept its role as a subordinate to the United States.

It is quite possible that the US strike on Iran’s nuclear sites have not achieved the complete success claimed by Trump but that this is less important than the Israeli weakening of Iran’s overall military capability and the deterrence to further escalatory response by a chastened regime.  Claims have been made that the US attack took something of the same form as the retaliation by Iran on US bases – that they were telegraphed and performative to prevent escalation but enough to allow Trump to claim victory while Iran could claim to maintain the credibility of its military deterrence.

The initial attack by Israel achieved significant effects but it has not neutered Iranian capacity to strike back, while the Iranian response has been to demonstrate this capacity while seeking not to provoke a US intervention.  The difficulty is that Israel, just like Ukraine, has an incentive to seek such escalation in order to further involve the US in the war; so we are left with the media obsession with the decision making process of the moron that is Donald Trump and his administration about what exactly it intends to do.

Iran is a very large country with nine times the population of Israel.  That Israel can attack it is solely due to its client status of the US.  While the US could provoke a war with Russia by using the bodies of Ukrainians, Israel cannot invade Iran and neither can the US, not without a war on a scale dwarfing that of Iraq.  Even a campaign of missile strikes and bombing would weaken the US in relation to the resources it can leverage against China.

In this dynamic the unambiguous losers are the people of Iran, oppressed by a brutal theocratic regime, and assailed from outside by imperialist sanctions, missiles and bombs.  They had no say in starting the war or in responding to it but, like the rest of us, can immediately only seek to protect themselves and seek a way to deal with their own ruling class and its state.

The responsibility of socialists is to oppose the imperialist attack on Iran and to demand that their own countries stop supporting it, including the ending of all support to the Zionist state.  This is true in the US, UK, and EU; and also in Ireland where the weasel words of the Irish government are simply a different flavour of hypocrisy to the rest of the imperialist bloc it belongs to.

The point of solidarity with Iran is not to support the reactionary regime and its state but to protect its people and to create the conditions in which the Iranian working class can carry out its own regime change.  Only the working class around the world has a united interest in ending imperialist war, which cannot be done by supporting any of the rival capitalist powers, which in doing so surrenders its political independence. Ending the war through such a movement would have very different consequences to a temporary reprieve arising from any imperialist imposed ‘peace.’

Engels and republicanism

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Marx’s materialist understanding of history identified the contradictions of capitalist society, the struggle of classes and the alternative of working class rule.  Republican critics of communism rejected all of this with criticisms that have been repeated ad nauseum since.  The Italian republican Mazzini damned it for reducing man to existing in “the cold, dry, imperfect theory of economists, nothing more than a producing machine,” while the German republican Karl Heinzen stated that “humanity is not always determined by ‘class’ or the size of their wallet”. (Quoted in Citizen Marx p265)

Both Engels and Marx criticised Heinzen, and not just from a theoretical perspective but with a view to the political consequences of his approach, which opposed the materialist analysis that was the foundation of their politics.  Engels accused him of not appreciating where the political struggle was starting from and what should therefore be done:

‘Scarcely had the way back been cut off for him when he declared the necessity of an immediate revolution. Instead of studying conditions in Germany, taking overall stock of them and deducing from this what progress, what development and what steps were necessary and possible, instead of obtaining for himself a clear picture of the complex situation of the individual classes in Germany with regard to each other and to the government and concluding from this what policy was to be followed, instead, in a word, of accommodating himself to the development of Germany, Herr Heinzen quite unceremoniously demands that the development of Germany should accommodate itself to him” (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p292-293)

He criticised his argument about the nature of the revolution that was required, whether a purely political one or also a social one was necessary:

‘He declares the princes to be the chief authors of all poverty and distress. This assertion is not only ridiculous but exceedingly damaging. Herr Heinzen could not flatter the German princes, those impotent and feeble-minded puppets, more than by attributing to them fantastic, preternatural, daemonic omnipotence.  If Herr Heinzen asserts that the princes can do so much evil, he is thereby also conceding them the power to perform as many good works. The conclusion this leads to is not the necessity of a revolution but the pious desire for a virtuous prince, for a good Emperor Joseph . . . the exploitation by the landowners and capitalists is after all surely responsible for nineteen-twentieths of all the misery in Germany!’

The role of the revolutionary party (understood as a general movement) was therefore different:

‘Its task is to reveal the oppression of the proletarians, small peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie, for in Germany these constitute the “people”, by the bureaucracy, the nobility and the bourgeoisie; how not only political but above all social oppression has come about, and by what means it can be eliminated; its task is to show that the conquest of political power by the proletarians, small peasants and urban petty bourgeoisie is the first condition for the application of these means’. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 pp292-293, 294)

The republican demands of Heinzen, including his social ones, were therefore inadequate, not least because for him they were ‘not a means but an end.’   In fact, as we saw in the previous post, in so far as these arrested economic development – ‘free competition’ – without seeking to go beyond it they were reactionary:

‘All measures, therefore, which start from the basis of private property, and which are nevertheless directed against free competition, are reactionary and tend to restore more primitive stages in the development of property, and for that reason they must finally be defeated once more by competition and result in the restoration of the present situation.’

What made the demands of the communists appropriate was their arising from existing social conditions and their role within a continuing working class struggle (while those of Heinzen represented petty bourgeois politics, of the peasantry, for example).  This included that they necessarily had to be considered in an international context:

‘Herr Heinzen—one of the most ignorant men of this century—may, of course, not know that the property relations of any given era are the necessary result of the mode of production and exchange of that era. Herr Heinzen may not know that one cannot transform large-scale landownership into small-scale without the whole pattern of agriculture being transformed, and that otherwise large-scale landownership will very rapidly re-assert itself.’

‘Herr Heinzen may not know that a country as industrially dependent and subservient as Germany can never presume to undertake on its own account a transformation of its property relations other than one that is in the interests of the bourgeoisie and of free competition.’

‘In short: with the Communists these measures have sense and reason because they are not conceived as arbitrary measures but as consequences which will necessarily and of themselves ensue from the development of industry, agriculture, trade and communications, from the development of the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat which is dependent on these; which will ensue not as definitive measures but as transitory ones, mesures de salut public arising from the transitory struggle between the classes itself.’ 

Engels therefore condemned the republican demands of Heinzen for being arbitrary arising from ‘obtusely bourgeois visions of putting the world to rights; because there is no mention of a connection between these measures and historical development’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 296)

Engels quotes communist criticism of Heinzen that they ‘have made fun of his sternly moral demeanour and mocked all those sacred and sublime ideas, virtue, justice, morality, etc., which Herr Heinzen imagines form the basis of all society.’  He criticises politics based on morality instead of recognition that this morality arises from society and that it is the material reality of this from which one must start. (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 6 p 301)

We are left with the seeming incongruous republican politics of a call for immediate revolution based on a limited democratic programme that, in so far as it seeks to go further, is out of kilter with the state of German development and what it can likely support.  Engels acknowledges the latter by stating that:

‘. . . the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures.’ (The optimism involved in this is take up in a future post)

Engels goes on: ‘Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat.’ (Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 10 p 299 and 304)

The reality of working class struggle and revolution in less developed capitalist societies that in themselves are not ripe for socialism, not least because they have a relatively small working class, has thrown up enduring controversy and countless debates.  In relation to them, this early article by Engels retains its relevance through its general approach compared to an earlier revolutionary republican – not socialist – alternative.

Part 63 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism

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Part 1

Marx and Republicanism

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A recently published book has examined the influence of republicanism on Marx’s politics and explained that it was the main rival to socialism for the allegiance of the developing working class for much of the 19the century.  (Citizen Marx: Republicanism and the formation of Karl Marx’s Social and Political Thought, Bruno Leipold) It explains that socialism at this time was largely anti-political, in that it thought political struggle was irrelevant to the emancipation of the working class, and that it was Marx (and Engels) combination of socialism with political conceptions from republican political thought that propelled them to elaborate their politics, including the fight for the political rule of the working class (see Marx’s own statement of what he considered his own contribution to be).

In doing so they superseded both non/anti-political socialism and radical democracy that did not seek the overthrow of bourgeois private property.  Marx condemned those republicans who see “the root of every evil in the fact that their opponent and not themselves is at the helm of the state.  Even radical and revolutionary politicians seek the root of evils not in the nature of the state, but in the particular state form, which they wish to replace with a different state form.”  As Leipold notes, Marx thought that ‘Workers thus needed to move on from seeing themselves as “soldiers of the republic” and become “soldiers of socialism.” (The King of Prussia and Social Reform, Marx quoted in Citizen Marx p161 and 163).

It would therefore be a mistake, in acknowledging the contribution of republican thought to Marx, to give it a centrality to his politics that it doesn’t have, which danger depends of course on what might be claimed for it.

It should be noted that Marx was to develop his ideas on the political power of the working class and the state considerably from 1844 and also that the vast majority of what is called socialism today, including the claims of many ‘Marxists’, wholly propagate what Marx criticises here, often professing to agree with him while doing so.

Leipold argues that Marx moved beyond republicanism after coming to an awareness of the shortcomings of existing republican revolutions in America and France; from meeting prominent socialists and social critics in Paris, including reading the writings of his future friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels; and meeting French and German workers in their various underground communist worker organisations. One result was Marx’s identification of the role of labour in human flourishing, rather than overturning the exclusion of workers from full political participation, which was the centre of republican politics (see the previous posts on alienation).  The emancipation of the working class was not only its alone since “in their emancipation is contained universal emancipation”. (Marx, quoted Citizen Marx p175).

This did not mean the exclusion of the fight for political rights, which Marx and Engels both thought was vital to and for the political development of the working class, but that democracy ‘had become completely inextricable from social issues so that “purely political democracy” was now impossible and in fact “Democracy nowadays is communism”’ as Engels put it in 1845. (Citizen Marx p 172).

This new political commitment led to disputes with republican revolutionary thinkers even before Marx and Engels’ writings on the nature of their communism had been fully published and made known.  Many of the criticisms made by their opponents are still common so the responses to them are still important to a presentation of their politics today.

Their political opponents at this time also consisted of a diverse group that they termed “true socialists”, who substituted moral claims for class struggle, and eschewed the fight for political rights that Marx considered “the terrain for the fight for revolutionary emancipation” even if it was “by no means emancipation itself.”  (Citizen Marx p190).  These rights included trial by jury, equality before the law, the abolition of the corvée system, freedom of the press, freedom of association and true representation.” (Citizen Marx p213).

Through this approach Marx and Engels were able to rebut the criticism of radical republicans that they were effectively on the side of reaction in the political struggle against autocracy.  In turn they denounced republican revolutionaries as petty bourgeois who demanded a ‘social republic’ or ‘democratic republic’ that did not “supersede [the] extremes. Capital and wage-labour” but “weaken their antagonism and transform them into harmony”. (Marx 1851-52, quoted in Citizen Marx p222).

Republican politics was petty bourgeois because it did not reflect the potential collective working class ownership of the forces of production, which required such ownership because of their increased scale and division of labour, but instead sought the widening of individual property ownership. This reflected the still large number of artisan workers whose individual ownership and employment of their own labour was being undermined by expanding workshop and factory production.  For Marx, to seek to go back to craft production was a harkening to a past that could not be resurrected and was thus reactionary.

The grounds for Marx and Engels criticism of revolutionary republicans and non/anti-political socialists was their materialist analysis of existing conditions (which various forces were opposed to) and which included identification of the social force – the working class – that was to overthrow these conditions and inaugurate the new society.  In the previous posts of this series, we have set out how these conditions were to be understood – centring on the developing socialisation of the productive forces – and the necessary role of the working class.  These grounds required the prior development of capitalism and the irreplaceable role of the working class in the further development of the socialisation of production.

The alternative to capitalism developed by Marx was therefore an alternative to capitalism, not to some prior feudal or semi-feudal society; not dependent on some overarching moral ideal or future model of society, and not on the basis of the degree of oppression suffered by different classes or parts of the population under existing conditions.

In the first case there would be no, or only a very small, proletariat as a result of underdeveloped forces of production, which would limit their existing socialisation and therefore preclude collective and cooperative production.  In the second, Marx and Engels were averse to ideal models arising from individual speculation about the future form of society, and were aware that the application of moral criteria to the construction of a new society was subject to the constraints of the existing development of the forces of production and attendant social relations.  In the final case, there were more oppressed classes than the working class, the peasantry for example, which until recently was also much more numerous, and more oppressed layers of society, including women, and working class women in particular.

Their ideas and politics were therefore not crafted to be superficially appealing but to be appealing because they corresponded to reality, one that was to be humanised by a class that itself had to undergo as much change as the society it was called upon to transform.  As Marx and Engels noted in The German Ideology:

‘Both for the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness, and for the success of the cause itself, the alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary, an alteration which can only take place in a practical movement, a revolution; this revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.’

In his book ‘Citizen Marx’ Leipold notes that the implications of this were “a hard pill for workers to swallow.” (p243): 

‘But we say to the workers and the petty bourgeois: it is better to suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by its industry creates the material means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you all, than to revert to a bygone form of society, which, on the pretext of saving your classes, thrusts the entire nation back into medieval barbarism.’

Part 62 of Karl Marx’s alternative to capitalism.

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Forward to part 63

Part 1 here

Visiting Munich and encountering Palestine

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My first walk in Munich city centre from Sendlinger Tor U-Bahn station led me to the town hall in Marienplatz from which three banners hung, all upholding Western imperialism.

The first was the flag of Israel, the Zionist state carrying out the most visible genocide in history now promoted by the city authorities where the Nazi party was founded and where it maintained its headquarters until 1945.  Where Hitler launched his beer hall putsch in 1923 and the first concentration camp was created at Dachau.

The second was the flag of Ukraine, home to the most violent neo-Nazi movement in Europe, once recognised by the Western liberal media but now buried by that same media and celebrated as a leading section of the Ukrainian ‘resistance’ which Western liberalism now parades as the vanguard of the fight for democracy.  The banner of Ukraine hangs appropriately beside that of Israel as its President Zelensky has hailed the Zionist state as a model for Ukraine to emulate.

The middle banner was promotion of Mayors for Peace, which neatly parades the hypocrisy of Western imperialism and its liberal pieties.

Of course, Germany is not defined only by its Nazi past or the proclivity of the German state to sanction genocide.  A couple of recent opinion polls record that a majority of Germans oppose arms exports to Israel and oppose the genocide, with nearly 60 percent also opposed to supplying Ukraine with Taurus missiles.  Even Munich has a different history, having been home to a short-lived workers revolution in 1919.

There is more than one Germany and I was pleased when I later came across a Palestine solidarity stall on Sendlinger Straße on my way to Marienplatz again.  The Palestinian woman at the stall told me how difficult it was to carry out campaigning – “up in court” all the time – and that there was a demonstration later in the afternoon.

The rally had around 500 people, which isn’t large for a city the size of Munich, with a large number being what I took to be Palestinian.  A number of speeches were made, all in German except for one in English by a young man of Palestinian extraction who appeared German by his accent.

He gave a powerful speech condemning Western imperialist responsibility for the genocide and condemning the settler colonial Zionist state based on his own family’s story of dispossession.  He condemned the demand that the Palestinians resist along the approved lines of Western liberals and stated accurately that asking politely for their rights would make no difference.  He called for workers, their unions and students to take action.  He also declared that all types of resistance were justified.

Some people can speak powerfully with emotion without losing the ability to articulate their argument and he was such a speaker.  His anger was palpable but so was the feeling that he spoke with a degree of desperation. This is not a criticism, since the plight of the Palestinian people is desperate.  It is not possible to argue that what they are enduring is genocide with no sign of it ending soon, without acknowledging that their situation is urgent and tragic.

The most recent muffled admonishment of Israel by the likes of Starmer and Mertz is even more nauseous than their previous hypocrisy for it signals that not even the grudging and muted acceptance of the reality of genocide will see them take any relevant action.  The speaker’s knowledge that it is Western imperialism that is ultimately responsible makes such awareness unavoidable, which is why he called for an anti-imperialist struggle.

Unfortunately, no anti-imperialist struggle is currently taking place.  Some think one is being carried out by Russia (in Ukraine) and by China but their indifference to the suffering of the Palestinian people simply illustrates the reactionary character of these capitalist states.  That some fake socialists think Western imperialism can actually play an anti-imperialist role (in Ukraine!) demonstrates the bizarre and crooked character of their ’anti-imperialism’.

Liberals have criticised Netanyahu because he has not set out a plan for the day after – when his war aims have been achieved.  The problem is that the issue is not Netanyahu and what we are looking at is not a war but a genocide. The Zionist ‘solution’ is not what comes after genocide but is genocide. In this sense there is no ‘day after’, which will simply be expulsion of those who haven’t been killed, however arranged, however comprehensive and to whatever timeline adopted.

The speaker in Munich understood that the meaning of genocide was the end of any pretence to a two state solution.  Of course, this has never been a solution and has been employed by Western imperialism as an alibi for colonial aggression, but the genocide also signals the death of a one state solution i.e. an imperialist imposed bourgeois state encompassing both the Jewish and Palestinian people.

The speech, for all the truth it contained, left two nagging doubts.  The first was the criticism of the reactionary Arab regimes that have done less than nothing for the Palestinian people, where he called out three states.  This included Morocco and the UAE with one other that I can’t recall.  It did not include the biggest – Egypt – or Saudi Arabia or many others.  Yet liberation of the Palestinian people is inseparable from the liberation of the working classes of all these countries, through the destruction of all the rotten regimes and the capitalist states that they sit upon.

The second was the statement that all types of resistance are justified.  But justification is not effectiveness and approval of all is a sign that there has been no identification of which one is central, what strategy lies behind it and how it should be pursued.

Back in Ireland I returned to read about the latest pronouncement of the gobshite Bono who managed to make Israel the victim (of Netanyahu) while calling for peace.  Less gross, but in reality worse, is the hypocrisy of the Irish bourgeoisie promising yet again to take the miniscule action they have promised for years and which is now so obviously damning in its pathetic inadequacy.

The responsibility of Western imperialism for genocide with this support and its hypocrisy on display in Munich and also the opposition to it, drives home the international character of the struggle against imperialism.  Too often, however, this is not against all imperialism, is not against capitalism – which is often treated as something separate – and does not identify the force for change and the socialist politics that define it. The popular opposition to genocide among the population of Europe alongside the widespread complicity of European states shows that a struggle is required against these states and not just the war and genocide abroad that they are complicit in.

Left reaction to the ‘discovery’ that a woman is an adult human female (4) – questions and answers

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Of all the misconceptions and egregious nonsense in the responses of the left to the UK supreme court judgment the most irrational I have seen comes from the Fourth International and its British organisation Anti-Capitalist Resistance.

The former asks a number of questions as if these on their own expose the falsehood of the court decision but which really require only straight forward answers from anyone not immersed in gender identity ideology.

“What of the practical impacts that this ruling will have on cis women?” it asks.

The impacts are that single sex spaces will be open only to women and exclude men.  This means no men in women’s prisons, no men in women’s refuges, and no men in women’s sports etc.  Something taken for granted in the previous century during which no one was claiming that this involved women’s oppression – quite the reverse.

“What do we tell our young women when we say, ‘a woman is only biological sex’, that a man is also only biological sex?” 

Who is claiming that any woman or man is only a biological woman or biological man regardless of their other qualities, experiences and achievements?  What Marxists affirm is that, just like the assumption in the question itself, humanity is made up of women and men, and most will know that the distinction between them arises solely from their biological difference.

This reality does not at all mean, as this organisation seems to claim, “that because of a man’s biological sex, he is right to partake in oppressive structures of male hierarchy? That his desire to rape and sexually assault women is justified because of his biology?”  The biology of men does not mean that “oppressive structures” and “desires” are inevitable and if the Fourth International thinks the biological reality of humanity necessitates such structures, how then is it going to negate this biological reality and destroy these structures?

Does it think that gender identity is the answer to such ‘structures and desires?’  Does it seek to compel or convince everyone to adopt a gender identity that dispenses with their knowledge of their biological nature?  Would this not be an admission that it is they who wish to narrow young women and men’s understanding of themselves to a ‘gender identity’ that many reject they even have?

Anti-Capitalist Resistance states that trans “existence directly challenges the social order, which is structured by gendered power relations”, but fails to explain how identifying as the opposite sex (regardless of what that really means) actually changes “gendered power relations”, unless the gendered identities adopted are not those of real existing men and women that it currently argues constitute these “oppressive structures.” In other words, in their world in which sex is unimportant, but gender is decisive and in which we still have gender oppression, how will such oppression be ended simply by some (or all) identifying as the other (irrelevant!) sex?  Unless, that is, transmen aren’t actually identifying as men with all their claimed oppressive desires and transwomen aren’t really identifying as women with all their experience of oppressive structures.

Anti-Capitalist Resistance further claims that feminism seeks to overcome the view “that biology is destiny”, but only the adherents of gender identity ideology are arguing that biology is destiny, which is why they attempt the false claim that it can be dismissed.

Biology isn’t destiny in the way they claim – that it necessarily involves social oppression – but it is reality.  Biology is reality and if biology is physically and socially unimportant why does gender identity ideology base itself on being able to identify into the other sex with whatever physical changes that an individual believes they can make (with or without medical and surgical intervention)?

If these ideologists really want to stick to the claim that biology is not destiny I have an additional concept for them – death.

This organisation further claims that feminism opposes ideas “that bodily autonomy is socially dangerous” and “that organising social reproductive work on gendered lines is “natural”.  Yet the foundation of human reproduction is biological – one hundred percent of people reading this blog will be born to a woman.  The claim to autonomy is meant to evoke the rights of women to abortion but this autonomy – this independence and freedom – refers to the right to choose, which then requires the recognition by others for its effective exercise.  Trans people, as autonomous individuals, can think of themselves in any way they like but they cannot by this alone compel the world to accept their view of themselves and act upon it without violating everyone else’s right to the same autonomy. 

The Fourth International asks some more straight forward questions even more simply answered.

“How do you balance sex characteristics with gender reassignment characteristics?”  – Since these are separate characteristics, no balancing is required, the latter does not alter the essential nature of the former. 

“How do you prove sex discrimination when you are not recognized as that sex?”  – You can’t.

The Fourth International states that without this ideology we would have “an absurd ahistorical view of the working class as a homogenised lump that apparently never had gender queer people, or gay people or drag queens among its ranks.”  It sticks out a mile that women are absent from the list but yet another category of men pretending to be women is included.  That the history of the Marxist movement, going back to the man himself, has recognised the special oppression of women, and sought their organisation, is lost.  Instead, we have the truly ahistorical view of the working class in which we have something called ‘cis women’, and trans women whose very existence somehow “directly challenges the social order.”

For a Marxist the issue is also the claim that “There will be no revolution without trans liberation!”  Except, if this were true it would require the erasure of the female sex as a separate part (half!!) of humanity with all their specific oppression and need to organise.  It would also require abandoning any critical thought, with acceptance of the claim that ‘transwomen are women’ with no debate allowed over what are palpably untrue claims because of hyperbolic rhetoric and juvenile name calling.

Marx once said that ‘the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’  The left supporters of gender identity ideology think they can change it by reinterpretation but since the real world is a stubborn thing it cannot be changed by declaration, and it cannot even be reinterpreted by incantation of inane slogans or without debate.  The attempt to silence opposition by naming the gender critical left as ‘fascist’ or ‘transphobic’ is another illustration of denying reality and attempt to close down challenges to its imagined world of changing sex and many genders.

The demonisation of opponents however is only a device to buttress a position already acquired because adherents have accepted that gender identity ideology is ‘progressive’; to stand against it would see individuals also stand against those they would normally stand beside.  Support for the ideology no longer depends on rational argument because it is simply considered to be the ‘left wing’ position; it is left wing because I/she/he/we are left wing and therefore so must it.  It is circular reasoning, and a form of identity politics inoculated from reality by a form of solipsism.  The exploitation of their mistake by the right is then held aloft as ‘proof’ of their position’s left credentials.

The phenomenon of a political position being held up as left wing because so much of the left supports it has been seen before; as previously much of the left capitulated to Scottish nationalism and is now capitulating to western imperialism through support for Ukraine, both of which are their unlikely candidates as beacons of ‘democracy’ for the world.

It’s a case of political gangrene that occurs ‘as a result of an injury, infection or a long-term condition that affects blood circulation’.  The defeats of the working class and its movement are the injury; the infection is petty bourgeois politics, and these long term factors have affected the circulation of critical thought and Marxism.

Concluded

Back to part 3

Left reaction to the ‘discovery’ that a woman is an adult human female (3) –  a far-right victory?

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Alex Callinicos from the Socialist Workers Party writes that the ‘latest attack on trans people in Britain is part of a global offensive driven by the far right.’  Having created the narrative that only the far right opposes gender identity ideology he starts off his attack on the supreme court decision by claiming that For Women Scotland is a far right movement!  I suppose if your whole position rests on a refusal to recognise reality you find it easier to just keep on going.  Where would the gender identity left be without the claim that the recognition of the reality of being a woman is a far right programme? 

But this is just the first fiction in what is a very short article.  The most amusing is when Callinicos states that ‘Judith Butler puts it very well’! – apparently when she says that the transphobes seek “the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order”.  So, the erasure of the separate identity and reality of women, with all their rights and claims, by men is a strike against patriarchy!

The most becoming fiction for a professor who has written many books on Marxism is the following slippery circumlocution: 

‘The intellectual core of Marxism is historical materialism. It doesn’t in the slightest ignore our variable biological constitution but integrates this into the broader historical process through which human beings form and are formed by their societies.”

This involves a reference to a Marxist term, including the word “materialism”, followed by a sentence that doesn’t have the courage to say what it means – that men can become, or already are, women.  So instead, we are to swallow that our biology is “variable” and we are integrated into history and “formed” by it.  All very true, except our biology is not so variable that it means men are or can become women, or is it the case that “the broader historical process” has or can (trans)form men into women.

It is not necessary to believe that “women’s oppression” can be “reduced . .  to biology” to recognise that it is biology that makes women separate from men (and vice versa) in the first place.  Without these biological differences there would not exist the grounds upon which oppression could be built.  Women’s liberation will not remove biological differences, but Callinicos presents a view that oppression can exist without them.

His article is testament to Brandolini’s law that the amount of energy (and words) needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it. He repeats, for example, the nonsense that the supreme court decision fails to bring “clarity and confidence.”  He has both forgotten the previous ease by which men and women could find the appropriate facilities, such as toilets, while also forgetting about the confidence the ruling gives women who might enter a facility to find a man who may or may not be trans (since she cannot read minds) and may be apprehensive about their presence whether trans or not.

As I mentioned in the first post, the rights of women are invisible to the left that adheres to gender identity ideology.  Even if every woman somehow identified as a man, they would still be prey to sexual assault, still experience childbearing and still face sexism despite some new name for it having to be invented.  Whatever new name would need to reflect reality and to exclude men identifying as women since they would not experience it.  But then, even this would be seen by the gender identity movement as discriminatory and lessening the ‘womanhood’ of transwomen. 

In an example of a recurring characteristic of the movement – that the allegations of gender identity ideology are actually admissions, Callinicos argues that “the far-right drive against “gender ideology” is aimed at reinstating the traditional heteronormative family.’” This charge is one he would presumably level at everyone who denies the veracity of gender identity ideology, including socialists who recognise the centrality of human biology to human existence and potential.  In fact, this argument against heteronormativity rebounds on the supporters of gender identity ideology.

In so far as the term has any positive content – that it privileges heterosexuality by denigrating same sex attraction – it is gender identity ideology that turns sexual stereotypes into the measure of humanity through self-identification and through, for example, permitting men identifying as women to claim to be lesbians.  In effect, same sex attraction is abolished to the extent that sex is rendered irrelevant or subsidiary to gender identity.

In a final example, he claims that “supporting trans+ liberation therefore has nothing to do with “identity politics”.  As I noted before, if gender identity ideology, self-identification, and men becoming women by identifying as one is not identity politics, nothing is.

Back to part 2

Forward to part 4

Left reaction to the ‘discovery’ that a woman is an adult human female (2) – the ‘usurpation of Parliament’

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After accounting for all the explanations for the success of gender identity ideology on the left – opportunism, moralistic politics, petty bourgeois influences etc. – it is still difficult to fully comprehend its success.  It is one thing to make a mistake and to find it uncomfortable to reconsider and change one’s view, partly because of the censorious culture of tans activism summed up in the demand “no debate.”  It is quite another to come out with the nonsense polemics that characterise the attempts to defend it.

It invites the thought that if some left groups can justify this (including to themselves) they can justify anything.  Mistakes are common, refusing to learn from them is fatal, and the series of factors that are explanations for the mistake are revealed as permanently conditioning.

If we look at some of the reactions to the UK supreme court decision, we can see evidence of gender critical feminists’ repeated observation that for some, contact with this issue seems to turn their brains to mush.

One ideologue of the British Weekly Worker made a presentation in opposition to the supreme court decision in which he essentially says that the court usurped the prerogatives of parliament when it interpreted the meaning of sex in biological terms, in effect re-interpreting the conscious decision of parliament when it passed the 2004 Gender Recognition Act.  Sex, in legislation, has different meanings depending on its purpose and does not require a single ‘coherent’ definition as argued by the supreme court, or so he says.

While he recognises sex as biology, for example in relation to the difference in the incidence of breast cancer in men compared to women, and in women compared to men in prostate cancer (in women’s Skene’s glands), he disagrees that sex is defined by biology or that there are only two sexes. In justification he points to intersex people, ignoring that differences/disorders in sexual development (DSDs) are a biological phenomenon and people with DSDs are either male or female and not a third sex.

He also fails to notice that intersex is irrelevant to the issue because no one is self-identifying as intersex but as a woman or man; even as they deny the biological nature of these terms men identifying as women fetishise elements of female biology.  It cannot be escaped that to identify as a woman is to identify with their biological character, often in stereotypes of secondary sex characteristics; through delusional ‘experience’ of menstruation or menopause, or artificially replicating female functions such as breast feeding.

He is left with the problem of justifying self-identification with any of the other innumerable genders invented by the ideology, which can only have one ‘definition’, and it isn’t biological sex.  What purposes are these to be legitimately legislated for, and if none, what does this imply for the validity of gender self-identification in toto?

In relation to the question of usurpation of parliament by the reinterpretation of the meaning of sex, he ridicules the view that the word ‘sex’ can be subject to interpretation based on its ‘ordinary meaning’.  He claims that this leads only to an “arbitrary and unsatisfactory decision” (a “dodgy” decision) and is precisely what is to be decided, not assumed. 

It is, however, the case that the word ’sex’ does have an ordinary meaning and that it would be extraordinary that it should have a another one so radically different yet dependent and parasitic upon it. Given, on top of this, the novelty of self-identification as a route to defining a woman, and that it would therefore have an unstable meaning such that it could include men as a particular sort of women – a transwoman – it is difficult to claim that an interpretation based on the age-old ordinary meaning is “arbitrary” or “dodgy”, even if supporters of gender identity ideology think it is “unsatisfactory.”

In this case “unsatisfactory” pertains to the consequences of the decision, which involves the surrendering of claims by men so as to be able to assert the rights of women.  The problem the gender identity left has is that the latter is invisible because they have accepted the invisible justifications of the claims of certain men.

As for the integrity of parliament and the rigour and cogency of its decisions! Backbenchers of the Government will generally vote whatever way is in the interests of their career, which is with the government.  Whatever they thought they were doing with the concept (and real world consequences) of “sex”, I don’t recall any mandate for changing it in 2004.  As for today’s argument, it would appear that even the Labour Party’s ‘LGBTQ+’ MPs are not keen to proclaim that transwomen really are women.

The exceedingly legalistic lecture gives the impression of hitting the target of the supreme court adjudication but missing the political point.  It is argued that the reasoning employed by the court is appropriate only for a parliament when what needs to concern him is not the integrity of the division of powers in the British state – the executive branch breaks the law every day – but what reasoning should be applied to what purpose by the working class to determine its own principled position.

How does it benefit the working class for half its membership to accept that their history of oppression and continuing disadvantage in multiple spheres of life – arising from their existence as the distinct female part of humanity – is to be erased by a group of men claiming a special oppression through claims to their membership?  How are men and women to unite to rid themselves of the sexual oppression that exists if ‘for some purposes’ this sexual division doesn’t exist, ceasing to exist by the simple declaration of men?  There is no liberation to be found in men colonising the existence of women.

Back to part 1

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Left reaction to the ‘discovery’ that a woman is an adult human female (1)

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Reactions to the decision of the UK supreme Court in Britain can be put into two camps; those that dealt with the case decided – what is a woman – and therefore about the rights of women, and those for whom it is really about trans.  The media generally took the latter approach while the government has been compelled, simply because it is the government and is responsible for acting on the actual decision, to take up the former.

Reactions among the defenders of gender identity ideology, whether they see themselves in this way or not, made various claims – that this was a terrible threat to trans people, with the hyperbole everyone is long used to; that nothing had really changed and transwomen would be permitted to access women’s single sex spaces on a sort of case by case basis; or that trans activists would ‘break the boundaries’ and just access them as they saw fit.  There were also very learned claims from legal figures that the judges had gotten the law wrong.  For some, they were bigots and transphobes.

None of these will succeed.  The law has changed, attempts to pretend it hasn’t won’t cut it, and moves to challenge it will be more difficult than defending their previous claims.1 The demonstrations will not achieve their demands because the prior success of gender identity ideology did not lie in mass public support but on widespread ignorance and policy capture of state and private bureaucracies by trans activists.

The demonstrations have a limited appeal and exhibit too much anger and aggressiveness, with too much misogynistic and fetishist behaviour to win any friends, although all these appear to be completely invisible to their self-identified left supporters.  The ideology does not fare well in open debate, which is why the mantra ‘no debate’ was more than a choice by trans activists.  The movement demanded that its claims be swallowed whole, and while some supporters now admit that this was a mistake, claiming the untrue and impossible, alongside a catalogue of male entitlements, means it has no internal dynamic for restraint.  Hence the ridiculous hyperbole that heightens fear in the most vulnerable people within its own ranks.  The movement offers less than nothing to many of its own supporters.

The widespread claim that the court’s judgement was flawed because it didn’t hear from trans people ignores the failure of the multiple trans lobby groups to openly argue their case, again not a glitch  The legal representatives of the Scottish Government and Amnesty International put it for them and they failed, the whole process was not inferior to the one that put the ideology into law in the first place.

The Labour Government and SNP have had their fingerprints all over the imposition of gender identity ideology and now hope that the whole issue will subside.  Their opportunism involved complete disregard for women’s rights, while appearing completely unaware that this was what they were doing.

The state bureaucrats responsible for HR policies in their organisations will therefore also be keen not to embarrass their political masters or expose their own position. They may be expected to generally implement the decision of the court while delaying where they can and doing as little as they can get away with .  This will not prevent gender identity activists continuing to push men into women’s and girls’ spaces but the road to stopping them is clear.  

This process can be expected to be repeated more or less in the north of Ireland where, of the two governing parties, the DUP is opposed to the ideology in principle and Sinn Fein doesn’t have any.  The media will be under pressure to drop its reverence for the ideology and is already under more obligation to acknowledge the opposition to it. In the Irish State, liberal and left opinion is even more wedded to it and the movement opposing it is weaker.  The façade of Irish liberalism faces increasing economic and political threats from Trump and the growth of anti-immigrant movements – fanned by the governing parties – so the right is therefore in a much better place to take the lead in opposing the ideology, facilitated by the stupidity of the left in defending it.

This left should consider the media spotlight thrown on certain British Green politicians who have embarrassed themselves in attempts to oppose the court judgement.  It has generally tail ended the most radical trans movement and thus swallowed whole and complete its demands, partly from the same opportunism as the main parties and partly from the moralistic character of its politics, where emotive claims to oppression substitute for argument and the politics of subjective identity substitutes for material reality.  

This is the politics of the petty bourgeoisie, which can come in either right or left variants. For those on the left, progressive politics arises from oppression (real or perceived) and not from the social and political power of the working class with its potential to create a new society as an alternative to capitalism.  This politics can go no further than seeking equality under capitalism and amelioration of the worst social conditions.

In the case of the Irish left in particular, it reflects their de facto accommodation with the trade union leadership and increasing deference to NGOs and their liberal progressivism.  It’s why the gender identity left are blind to the real nature of gender ideology and the reactionary manifestations of it in public demonstrations. It is why it is claimed that this identity ideology and its policy of gender self-identification, by men who claim to be women because they ‘identify’ as one, is not a form of identity politics!

1 Technically the law hasn’t changed and a woman has always been legally an adult human female. However the effect of the judgement is to make this clear and therefore, among other things, provides a robust legal route to defend single sex spaces or rights on the basis of women understood in this sense.

Forward to part 2

An exchange of views on Palestinian solidarity and Hamas

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Sráid Marx has received a comment on the series of posts that were written on solidarity with Palestine from Socialist Democracy, having linked to one of its articles in my second post. I include their comment below and a brief reply.

* * *

A critique of our position on Gaza solidarity.
Are the politics of Hamas a defining issue?

Over the course of the ongoing genocide in Gaza Socialist Democracy has distributed thousands of leaflets and newsletters commenting on the struggle and the movement in solidarity in Ireland. The aim of that work has been to provoke a response and to support a debate in the movement about it’s future direction.


While we have had a number of interesting conversations, there has been no organised response, so it is with some pleasure that we read a commentary by Sraid Marx on their blogspot, especially as we are given a C‐ for our most recent publication.


However we have some difficulties in responding. The comrade does not mention our name or give a full account of our position, so we are being invited to reverse engineer to understand the comrades own position.


Essentially we feel that the Sraid Marx position is too formalistic, whereas our approach is more contextual.


A chief point in the ongoing offensive is the constant demand that we condemn Hamas. We are familiar with this approach from the troubles and constant demands to condemn the Republicans. The demand now is that we blame Hamas for the violence, ignore the Israeli and US previous drives towards genocide and agree that history started with the Hamas breakout.


We can’t agree, because that concedes to the imperialists. We can’t endorse the action because that would tie us to the strategy of Hamas. The answer is: What do you expect when you imprison millions in an open air concentration camp and constantly humiliate and murder them?


Much of the critique is given over to the nature of Hamas. We think that beside the point. The source of the violence rests with the US and Israel. The UK is a willing participant in genocide and Ireland a consistent facilitator and opposition must start from there.


A useful criticism of Hamas lies in the context of the Gaza outbreak. That was the Abraham accords, drafted by the first Trump regime and aimed at erasing discussion of Palestinian rights and winning endorsement of Israel by the Arab regimes. When Hamas launched the Al-Aqsa flood it was appealing to the Arab regimes on the basis of nationalism and to the Muslim world on the basis of religion. An immediate tactical aim was to do what they had done in the past – seize prisoners to use as bargaining chips and win concessions from Israel.


They were profoundly mistaken. Arab nationalism no longer has a progressive content. Imperialism is poised to establish complete control of West Asia, founded on establishing the absolute military primacy of the US and Israeli axis and the capitulation of the Arab regimes. Genocide is an acceptable cost of victory and dissent is to be crushed. The imperialists have scored remarkable but still incomplete victories. The final task is to crush Iran, but there are doubts about the military capacity of the US alliance and its failures in Yemen which are holding it back from regional war.


The Irish movement does not discuss politics. It remains fixed on Free Palestine and individual acts of BDS. Demands for government action do not lead to a consistent campaign against the government.


This political weakness has a material base. Much of the leadership is the decayed remnant of the anti-imperialist left. It is in alliance with Sinn Féin, who wanted to suggest anti-imperialist positions without breaking with imperialism. Sections of the trade union movement pose as defenders of Palestine without breaking their partnership with Irish capitalism. The core of the Palestinian diaspora are linked to the collaborationist Palestinian Authority and their ambassador to Ireland and are hostile to Hamas.


A new inflection came with a current associated with the group Rebel Breeze. They criticised the solidarity campaign for inaction and failure to target the US, Israel and the Irish government. We supported the criticism but did not support their position of uncritical support for the Palestinian resistance. We attempted to engage with them but they did not reply. So the current situation is that the solidarity movement is weak and has no mechanisms for national debate.


In relation to Sraid Marx we would be critical of the formalism which led to the analysis of the CounterPunch position. We see no reason to give credence to their analysis of Hamas and their Irish solution of a Palestinian Good Friday Agreement is risible.

These positions arise less from political theory than from a long tradition of opportunism. They are not a serious attempt to plot out a revolutionary position, more an attempt to align with a relatively non-political base.

Changes are taking place. The genocide in Gaza is related to the drive to war in Europe and the trade war with China. The UK is to the fore in urging warfare not welfare. The Irish government is every day taking measures to integrate with NATO and with European militarism. This feeds a growing outlawing of protest and use of state force.

The liberal virtue signalling of Irish leftism and of the NGO world will fade away like snow from a ditch. A genuine socialist and anti-imperialist movement will arise from recognising the role of local ruling classes as representatives of the imperialist world order.

* * *

You ask the question “Are the politics of Hamas a defining issue?’” to which the answer you give is presumably ‘no’ although that depends on what the issue is to be defined.  I was careful to define the issue of solidarity with Palestine in terms of the responsibility of the Irish state in collaborating with imperialism and the Zionist state in the first part of my series of posts; the general approach of socialists to solidarity in the second part and in relation to Hamas in particular in the third part.

This means that in order to rebut the legitimacy of criticism of Hamas you need to engage with the arguments of the second post and you have not.

Progress has been made, however, in that you are no longer claiming that ‘denunciation of HAMAS is simply a mechanism for supporting genocide’, which I pointed out in my second post.  Instead, you indicate that although you cannot endorse the actions of Hamas the correct response is to say “What do you expect when you imprison millions in an open air concentration camp and constantly humiliate and murder them?”  This may be a point to make in response to imperialist calls to condemn Hamas but it is woeful as a position in relation to how imperialism is to be defeated.

It would appear however that you do believe that criticism of Hamas is valid – “A useful criticism of Hamas lies in the context of the Gaza outbreak.”  This criticism includes Hamas’s reliance on reactionary Arab regimes “on the basis of nationalism and to the Muslim world on the basis of religion.”  You also concede that its tactical plan was a strategic disaster, so that “the imperialists have scored remarkable but still incomplete victories.”  As you say, Hamas “were profoundly mistaken” and “Arab nationalism no longer has a progressive content.”

You have therefore moved considerably but remain still a bit confused.  You argue that the critique of Hamas, specifically its nature that would account for and explain ,for example, all the criticism you make yourself, is “beside the point.” You are keen to argue that the political weakness of the Irish solidarity movement “has a material base” but do you not also believe that this is true of Hamas?

If you take your critique seriously you are obliged to advance the arguments that a working class alternative armed with socialist politics is required to help advance not only the solidarity movement but also the struggle of the Palestinian people against genocide.  This is what I attempted in the second post.

A penultimate point about trying to further debate in the solidarity movement.  You state of my posts, and their reference to the analysis of two authors in Counterpunch, that you see “no reason to give credence to their analysis of Hamas and their Irish solution of a Palestinian Good Friday Agreement is risible.”  

I make my own criticism of the authors references to Ireland clear, while it gets you nowhere to claim that their criticisms of Hamas should not be discussed because I should not “give credence to their analysis.”  If you think they are categorically wrong, you need to say why and where they go wrong.  Otherwise, dismissive comments are but another example of the refusal to engage in debate for which you criticise others.

A final point. You write that a “genuine socialist and anti-imperialist movement will arise from recognising the role of local ruling classes as representatives of the imperialist world order.” It will also require a political struggle against nationalism and fundamentalism and rejection of the petty bourgeois moralism that preaches that the leaders of oppressed groups are beyond criticism.

UK Supreme Court decides a woman is an adult human female

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Although this is how the decision of the supreme court has been interpreted, the actual decision is the narrower one of what the GB Equality Act (EA) of 2010 means by ‘sex’, which it has decided means biological and not certified sex.  It has therefore been hailed by ‘gender critical’ activists as a victory for common sense and by certain trans activists as an attack on their human rights.

An alternative potential judgment – that the term ‘sex’ and thus sex itself – is determined by a certificate demonstrates how bizarre an alternative decision would have been.  In effect, it would mean one’s sex as far as the state is concerned was determined through its award of a certificate.  This would not have represented the continuation of the status quo, with the advances already achieved by the gender identity movement, but would have provided the grounds for a further attack on the rights of women, and then men.  If sex was certified, what obstacle would exist to certification being required?

The judgement of the court dealt with the problem of pretending that there were two types of women with all the incoherence that this would involve. Anyone from the left lamenting the judgment, and state interference in matters that do not belong to it, should consider how we got to this position through gender recognition certificates and how the scope for its massive inflation would have been prepared by the alternative decision some seem to have wanted.

The court ruled that ‘Any other interpretation would render the EA 2010 incoherent and impracticable to operate’, and rejected ‘the suggestion . . . that the words can bear a variable meaning so that in the provisions relating to pregnancy and maternity the EA 2010 is referring to biological sex only, while elsewhere it refers to certificated sex as well.’  (para 265) In doing so the court rejected the deliberate ambiguity and confusion of trans arguments presented by the lawyers for the Scottish government in which use of the words ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ can alternatively be employed as synonyms and as different concepts as suited their purposes.  I have looked at this sort of confusion before by what, for example, is meant by the word ‘gender’?

The court judgement stated that in getting a gender recognition certificate ‘there is nothing to suggest that undergoing such a process changes a person’s sex as a matter of law. It does not. Indeed, a full process of medical transition to the opposite gender without obtaining a GRC has no effect on the person’s sex as a matter of law.’ (para 200) It is also the case that this is true as a matter of fact, while the gender identity movement obviously thought the imprimatur of the law would allow them to claim this.

However, as the judgement stated: ‘a strong indicator that the words “sex”, “man” and “woman” in the EA 2010 have their biological meaning (and not a certificated sex meaning) is provided by sections 13(6), 17 and 18 (which relate to sex, pregnancy and maternity discrimination) and the related provisions. The protection afforded by these provisions is predicated on the fact of pregnancy or the fact of having given birth to a child and the taking of leave in consequence. Since as a matter of biology, only biological women can become pregnant, the protection is necessarily restricted to biological women.’ (para 177)

As the court notes ‘Put another way, if the acquisition of a certificate pursuant to section 9(1) of the Gender Recognition Act 2004 applies to these words, so that biological women living as trans men (with a GRC in the male gender) are male, they would nonetheless be excluded from protection when pregnant notwithstanding a continued capacity to become pregnant . . .’   So, some women (identifying as men) would lose the rights that come with pregnancy were sex to be defined by the gender recognition certificate they might have.

The court ruled that ‘We can identify no good reason why the legislature should have intended that sex-based rights and protections under the EA 2010 should apply to these complex, heterogenous groupings, rather than to the distinct group of (biological) women and girls (or men and boys) with their shared biology leading to shared disadvantage and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group.’ (para 172)  ‘Moreover, it makes no sense for conduct under the EA 2010 in relation to sex- based rights and protections to be regulated on a practical day-to-day basis by reference to categories that can only be ascertained by knowledge of who possesses a (confidential) certificate.’ (para 173).

Media reaction, and almost all previous media attention to the issue, has framed the judgement as one primarily impacting on trans women, much less on trans men (i.e. biological women), while some on the left that we have addressed before have repeatedly referred to the ‘small numbers’ (of trans people) involved, as if this meant that their feelings could be accommodated by any ‘solution’ regardless of any changed meaning to the word ‘women’, and thus the rights of half of humanity.

For all the faux left denunciations of a reactionary court by gender identity supporters, its recognition of the material reality of the sex class of women and of the shared ‘disadvantage, and discrimination faced by them as a distinct group’ shows it has a better grasp of reality and how to address it than some self-identified Marxists.

I am reminded of a tweet by the bête noir of the supporters of gender identity ideology, JK Rowling, who noted that she doubted Marx would have supported them:

‘Ironically, I can’t see Marx having any truck with gender ideology at all. He believed women were oppressed on the basis of their sex and I doubt he’d embrace a highly individualistic ideology that offers fertile new marketing opportunities for the capitalists of Big Pharma.’

The court seemed impressed by another argument that left supporters of gender identity ideology have failed to understand:

“Arguments concerning the definition of a protected characteristic are never simply  manifestations of individual claims. They are always group orientated. The claim that one is a woman is a claim to be included within a particular category of persons and to be excluded from another. It is also a claim to include some persons and to exclude other persons within the group that one is a part of. This matters especially for aspects of the Equality Act 2010 which require duty-bearers to be cognisant of how their conduct might affect those who share a protected characteristic or where there is an obligation to account for the distinct needs and interests of those who share a particular characteristic.” (para 142)

This blog has repeatedly criticised the moralistic politics of much of the left, which has departed from class analysis based on an understanding of objective reality to moralistic claims divorced from this reality.  So, their support for the supposed moral value of ‘inclusion’ means the inclusion of men in the category of women along with appropriation of their specific rights and prerogatives, regardless of women’s own views.  In fact, if challenged some of these men claim that as women they are the best defenders of such rights!

All this is based on purportedly unverifiable subjective claims that this left makes no attempt to verify or validate.  It thus accepts or acquiesces in all the most outlandish nonsense the radical trans movement throws out.  The claim to the impossible – to be, or to be able to change to, the other sex – defies reality and thus rational debate but becomes an assertion that is to be accepted without question or to be asserted and imposed.

This is the significance of the compelled use of the ‘right’ pronouns on others and the ‘crime’ of ‘misgendering’, which can demonstrate acceptance of, if not agreement to, the tenets of this ideology.  What is involved is not the exercise of rights but compulsion to unagreed social norms.  In capitalist society the state stands over the boundaries and content of many social norms and this defeat for gender identity ideology not only sets duties and responsibilities on state institutions and private bodies but frees up restrictions on social intercourse that the gender identity movement has been so successful in imposing.

The court noted the argument of Sex Matters that ‘many organisations feel pressured into accepting de facto self-identification for the purposes of identifying whom to treat as a woman or girl when seeking to apply the group-based rights and protections of the EA 2010 in relation to the protected characteristic of sex. The result in some cases is that certain women-only groups, organisations, and charities have come under pressure (including from funders and commissioners) to include trans women and policy decisions have been taken simply to accept members or users of the opposite biological sex . . .’ (para 203)

Judge Lord Hodge from the court said the ruling should not be seen as a triumph of one side over the other, but it is.