Episode 16: WTF Happened to the Left?! pt. 2
1 hour, 11 minutes long. Link to audio file. Link directly to this episode.
We discuss the disintegration of the UK Left from the 2010s onwards and how that decline led to space for postmodern ideas to take hold. The ensuing existential crisis over dwindling numbers led to an unwillingness to challenge postmodern ideas as they gained popularity. The Left began to liberalise as a reaction to its marginal status. It viewed Transgenderism opportunistically as a social struggle to reignite a civil rights 'fight' that could make them relevant again. Because of the Left's lack of genuinely emancipatory sexual politics - at least in the Global North - there still exists a strategic oversight that has ensured the Left continues to lose credibility: namely, that the working class is ever going to think men entering spaces with women and children is acceptable. By taking on the ideology of the PMC, of which gender identity is just one part, the Left has consigned itself to being attractive to either individuals from the middle-classes playing rebel, or oddballs who take part in politics to experience social contact.
The so-called post-Left and post-socialist conclusions of American Marxists are increasingly shared by us here in the UK. Unless we revamp materialism and popularise a structural analysis, somehow, against all odds, we will only be left with nostalgia for better times past where class struggle was once possible.
This understanding threads through out the discussion as we cover much more ground across a litany of feminist and Marxist questions, tell of our own experiences, argue political labels are almost useless today, that tribalism is anti-politics, and so on.