Editorial
From Planet 231
by Emily Trahair
Last year on YouTube, I stumbled across a clip from the 1985 documentary The Dragon Has Two Tongues, where the Marxist Welsh nationalist Gwyn Alf Williams bellows out his narrative from a helicopter and from within a coalmine: ‘To my mind the questions we need to put [about history] are the ones that serve the majority, the ordinary working men and women of Wales who throughout those 1500 years carried the rest on their backs, their generally bent and exploited backs.’
His allusion to ‘the majority’ rang out like a bell, sounding both liberating and dissonant. It felt so resonant because socialism had recently become mainstream again, via both UK Labour and Plaid Cymru; with Corbyn’s call for a government ‘for the many, not the few’, channelling widespread, cross-party anger against the ‘1%’ who were hoarding wealth and power. However Williams invoking ‘the majority’ in such an unabashed fashion felt archaic as so much emphasis nowadays within progressive discourse is on oppressed minorities and women. Naturally, in their distinctive ways, Leanne Wood and Jeremy Corbyn have at the core of their politics an understanding that far from being mutually exclusive, forging an egalitarian politics for everyone (variously Wales- and UK-wide) should be inextricably bound together with redressing injustices against particular groups. And, of course, Gwyn Alf Williams, as a member of a people subjugated over centuries by its dominant neighbour, would also have understood this profoundly.
Rather, Williams’ underground polemic provoked in me a melancholy reflection on the extent to which a vital ‘unity in diversity’ is now jeopardised, while being so desperately needed as inequality, misogyny and xenophobia continue to rise. This editorial mainly focuses on women’s rights: firstly as this happens to be relevant to many articles in this issue; and secondly as issues around feminism are becoming especially fraught this year, due to the #MeToo phenomenon and uncertainty around the tragic death of Carl Sargeant, and a backlash in some quarters against Leanne Wood’s feminism.
Fourth-wave feminism now seems so widespread in the media that it is worth reminding ourselves why it is so vital. As with other struggles for equality, it is inherently about the particular ways in which lives are devalued. Sexism can take the form of how a woman’s value is gauged (and lost so young) according to how attractive she is to men; the constant degradation through sexual harassment; the numbers of women killed by men in their families; the lower average pay for waged work; and the unpaid, invisible labour of childcare and care for the elderly.
As a white, straight, middle-class person of English origin, I’m more privileged than many women (‘intersectionality’, for all its faults, is useful for understanding this). However, one of the ways in which women like myself have been conditioned by society to see themselves as inferior to men, goes to the very tissue of what it means to be human, and what it means to be a citizen. I remember the first time I heard the sound of my own raised voice in a political context – it may have been at a protest, or simply when debating something among friends. I recoiled at what was echoing in my ears – it sounded strident, bossy, silly, weak. I kept quiet after that and, deep down, although I would never have admitted it, I wished I had a man’s voice – it would sound more dignified somehow, more authoritative. The very timbre of politics remains masculine. If a woman historian launched into a polemic on television at the same volume as Gwyn Alf Williams in The Dragon Has Two Tongues, she would still be seen as hysterical. Our world still feels divided into deeply gendered ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ zones, the former more superior than the latter, and if a woman ventures into a ‘hard’ subject (politics, economics, science) she still often feels like an imposter tuned to the wrong pitch.
In an era when women’s rights seem so mainstream, the scenarios of gender inequality I have outlined above might seem to belong to the past. However, not only has Trump recently been elected, but cranks like Jordan Peterson, with his pseudo-scientific stance against ‘political correctness’ and for masculine superiority and ‘self-authoring’, are gaining cult-like appeal across the West among young men (including in Wales). Some elements of Peterson’s philosophy arguably have their echo within two new groupings in the Welsh national movement which have emerged as a challenge to the socialist, feminist leadership of Plaid. Ein Gwlad is a new party which, like Peterson, claims to be neither on the Left or Right, but one of its most high-profile members, the blogger Jac o’the North, has endorsed the views of Steve Bannon on Twitter, and the party is canny at plugging into discontent with identity politics. Propel Wales is the new movement for ‘individual, community and national sovereignty for Wales’, started by Neil McEvoy following his expulsion from Plaid. McEvoy is particularly vocal in his support for men’s rights, and one of Propel’s principles is that ‘individual rights will not be sacrificed in the name of groupthink, dogma and those who are easily offended’.
The threat to a vital ‘unity in diversity’ comes partly from the alt-Right and politically ambiguous groupings which are undermining attempts to make politics more egalitarian. However, this threat partly derives from left-wing identity politics itself. There is much within contemporary identity politics which is liberating. Fundamentally it contributes to the long struggle to restore lost value to the lives of those who are not privileged by society according to race, gender etc. It also enables people to see the inherited privilege behind their assumptions. It seeks to redistribute representation within powerful institutions and mainstream political discourse. It exposes the narrow nature of many forms of traditional leftist ‘universalism’, i.e. politics on behalf of the ‘ordinary worker’ who was so often implicitly male, white and straight.
However, there is also growing dissatisfaction about the direction of identity politics among many who in a general sense subscribe to the principles above. People of many diverse backgrounds are feeling alienated by the ways in which these principles are so often hardening into dogma. Intersectionality diagrams and lists of dos and don’ts for how to engage in dialogue; ever-mushrooming terms such as ‘whataboutery’, male fragility, man-/able-/straight-splaining, micro-aggressions, privilege-checking, ‘yielding the floor’, gas-lighting, derailing, cultural appropriation, ally-ship, ‘calling out’, can be useful in making people aware of myriad forms of oppression, but this language-policing can become controlling to an almost cultish degree. Intersectional politics has developed a vocabulary of sinning as intricate and arcane as in a Calvinist seiat, but with no concrete vision of salvation.
Some manifestations of identity politics can also be damagingly irrational. In common with postmodernism there is a rejection of the existence of universal truth existing independently of subjective experience. However, contrary to postmodernism, within intersectionality there is often an assumption that certain designated oppressed groups have an essence of rightness, an exclusive access to truth, and whose opinion should be deferred to on topics that relate to their oppression. The practical consequences of this are myriad, and there is little space to detail them here; but they often lead to organisations becoming riven with painful division about whose opinion is representative of an oppressed group, which group is the most oppressed, thus whose truth is the definitive truth, which is tearing apart many activist groups just when we need them the most, and creates humiliating and futile online exchanges which are causing many people to disengage from politics.
However, many of the factors that threaten to make identity politics toxic do not emanate from this politics itself, but are external to it. Identity politics involves sensitive dialogue which goes to the very marrow of our selfhood. When this is mediated via de-humanising social media platforms designed specifically to enhance individual self-promotion in the ‘attention economy’ (and thus raise profits through advertising algorithms) it can be disastrous for the kind of collaborative effort required to build unity in diversity.
Another external factor tainting the reputation of identity politics – feminism in particular – is the appropriation of ‘diversity’ within hierarchical, neoliberal organisations. Private, public and third sector governance now has a particular emphasis on diversity and gender balance in the context of leadership. This is undoubtedly important – the presence of people like yourself having a powerful presence in an organisation can be inspirational, to an extent. However, there is far more emphasis on the ‘glass ceiling’, who is heading up organisations and what women CEOs earn, than on the huge potential lost from the great mass of women who cannot afford childcare, or care for their elderly relatives, or on wage inequality and lack of unionisation among women more generally: factors which affect whole households and communities as well as women themselves. It is also far from inevitable that women bosses will have a kinder, more altruistic essence which will ‘trickle down’ from the top (even if some do). I’ve heard from many young feminists their profound disappointment when confronted with a boss who is little more than Norman Tebbit in a Boden dress. Albeit, more disturbingly, a Tebbit who while undermining the rights and wellbeing of her employees is also fluent in the latest vocabulary of identity politics. Feminism, and diversity more generally, is also in danger of appearing deeply cynical in an austerity context when the presence of women and minorities within an organisation becomes a matter of ‘good optics’ in order to extract cash from funding bodies in competition with rival organisations.
How then, to demonstrate that a politics which respects diversity doesn’t have to be dogmatic, elitist or cynical? And that it can, ultimately, benefit everyone? As calls get louder for Plaid Cymru to mute its support for causes such as trans rights, feminism and anti-racism in order, it is argued, to gain more electoral support; as Welsh Labour struggles to nominate any woman as a leadership candidate, it is vital that this is asserted more strongly than ever.
This needs to entail a renewed politics of the majority, a universalism which isn’t emblematised by the white, straight, male. One that is rather the strength in numbers of diverse groups collaged into a formidable majority, that is supported by the mutual aid of solidarity, the idea that we can’t be free unless we are all free. Articles in this issue that examine the ambitious concepts of what Welsh citizenship could be like, how to revive Welsh social democracy, make these questions less hazy. What would its palaces of culture look like? Its welfare state? Its national curriculum? Its immigration policy?
Rather than promoting them in isolation, progressive parties and broad-based activist movements need to conjoin women’s and trans rights repeatedly to universal principles of equality and freedom; and endorse extra provision for particular groups expressly in conjunction with defending universal public services against ever-deeper cuts. The concrete benefits for the majority of free childcare and social care, for immigration, and for not engaging in racist, neo-imperial wars need to be reiterated again and again.
Qualities such as freedom, rationality and pride can be reclaimed from the Right. It can be demonstrated that anyone can feel proud of their culture, even straight, white men. The most creative elements of gender politics – the freedom to re-imagine yourself, to feel less alienated from the self you have to present to the world every morning – can be harnessed for everyone. The inspiring way in which BAME, LGBT+ and women’s histories are now being told for the first time can help rekindle interest in people’s history more generally, and how the histories of the masses are densely woven into these other histories. While intellectuals and activists have rightly cautioned against complacency about Wales’s complicity in white privilege, a sense of pride and collective ownership should still be fostered about belonging to a culture which could again become characterised by solidarity with the oppressed here and overseas. Progressive politics should not in the end be about essences which need to be deferred to, but about transformative values that anyone can adopt. Ultimately we should be planning for a future when, among other achievements, a man can passionately bellow a polemic at the volume of Gwyn Alf Williams and not be anxious about mansplaining; and where a woman can do the same without being cast as a banshee.
