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I started out to read Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War with a certain amount of trepidation. The blurb gave the idea that Sarkar was going to challenge identity politics and some of the puerile practices of discussions on the left. But she was part of much of what it seemed she was going to challenge and criticise. I feared reading it would be a complete waste of time and like another reviewer I would have to take up daytime drinking just to get to the end of the book. I didn’t, though there are parts that would have been easier to read under the influence and others for which I am thankful I had a clear head.
Sarkar sets out her stall and her left-wing credentials early on, informing us that like my good self she first read the The Communist Manifesto at the age of 13, describing it as a “slim, breathless pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto was intended to be passed from hand to hand amongst workers.” Something that alas many left wingers forget. The purpose of writing is to communicate, not to always produce a text you need a PhD to understand and which is written for some obtuse intellectual elite. She states:
Sorry to the Oxford debating nerds out there, but it’s not a battle of bons mots in the marketplace of ideas. Instead, Marx and Engels theorised that social transformation happens when an economic class becomes strong enough, or big enough, to overthrow the one above it.
In other words, you have to organise, you have to put your flowery prose into action with the mass of the population.
This is the crux of the matter. She claims the book is going to show:
But it wasn’t just the media and political class that did that. Many on the left, including those, who like Sarkar, style themselves as Marxists contributed to it and continue to do so, engaging in Cancel Culture, social and economic ostracisation, harassment of those they disagree with, even when it is only one disagreement on one point and there is agreement on practically everything else.
She gives numerous examples of this throughout the book, as well as some of what Jonathan Haidt described in his book The Coddling of the American Mind i.e. the I am offended brigade and the shrill shriek of liberal students trying to shut down debate on the filmiest of grounds. She amusingly points to being taken to task by a student for not referring to the characters in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as African-Americans. Sarkar had described them as black, the student blissfully and ignorantly unaware that the novel is set in the Congo, not the USA. She doesn’t labour this point, but my own experience is that much of the debate on the left has all the intellectual gravitas of the idiot who challenged her, the gift that keeps on giving to the media and the right.
She challenges identity politics, but only up to a point and much of the later part of the book is taken up with how the right have taken advantage of identity politics discourse and weaponised it rather than looking at what the left can do to stop tearing itself apart over the issue. And there is one identity, I will deal with later, that she won’t let go of, even when talking about other things like racism. She is at her best when talking about race, and challenging individualistic notions of identity politics, a term she reminds the reader was invented by a group of black women in the 1970s seeking to reach out to other oppressed groups, including the working class. She makes great play of the 2011 riots following the murder of Mark Duggan by police as an example of unity by blacks, Asians and whites. She talks critically about the idea of white privilege but underestimates just how pernicious the whole notion is. She ridicules the idea proposed at conference she attended to abolish all organisations that were not 51% non-white in an 80% white country. But says of just how far this nonsense goes that “I don’t think that you’d see someone arguing in real life that Anne Frank had white privilege.”
Actually, you would. There was a debate on that exact issue on Twitter (which perhaps is not real life, though Sarkar herself says it is where the political and media class spend a lot of their time), leading many commentators and even Jewish organisations to respond to it. In fairness, at Novara Media they dismissed it as a silly discussion and dismissively attributed it to someone who was probably a 14 year old.[1] I am not so sure. In Ireland the leader of the Social Democrats, Catherine Murphy, stated in the Dáil (Irish parliament) that “While it is true that the Irish have known our fair share of oppression, the reality is that during that oppression we still maintained our invisibility cloak of white privilege.”[2] To be clear, our oppression included a famine that left 1.5 million dead and many more forced to emigrate, whilst the British exported food from the country. Identity politics is nuttier than she thinks, and more divisive - and Murphy was no 14 year old.
There are parts of the book that are worth reading, if only to read about examples of the right weaponising nonsense, faking reports and creating moral panics around a whole host of issues. She takes many of these stories apart, including one involving people complaining about asylum seekers behaving terribly, cashing cheques in the local post office etc. Except of course the area in question hadn’t a single asylum seeker, but had lots of people on hand to give first-hand accounts of exactly that which puts it on a par to alien abduction stories, with all the lurid details and credibility of someone reared on too many sci-fi films. In fighting racism we have all come across such ridiculous stories and “eye-witnesses”.
But the book does not do what she said it set out to do. The weapons the left forged that are now being used against it are barely mentioned. Zionists have weaponised Hate Speech legislation to ban Palestinian marches in many parts of Europe. From the river to the sea is classified as hate speech. People have lost their jobs over tweets made on their own personal twitter account. Sarkar is aware of this and recently wrote an article on the use of identity politics by Zionists to silence pro-Palestinian voices.[3] She does deal with this in the book as well. Though, Zionists are not weaponising identity politics they have the copyright on it and Cancel Culture as well. It was they who set out to limit speech on campus, invoke offence in order to shut down debate and challenge people over their language. Many of the weapons stridently raised in discussions, such as being offended, needing a trigger warning, microagressions etc, are all on display in the media over Palestine. These are the weapons the left argued for and got, ones the state was only too happy to give them. They are not a Zionist aberration, they are the flip side of the same coin many on the left, including herself were only too happy to play.
Not just in Britain either. Recently a French TV journalist Jean Michel Aphatie was suspended for comparing Nazi massacres in France to French massacres in Algeria.[4] Anyone who knows anything about Algeria would know that such a statement is not only true, but blindingly obvious. Yet, he caused offence and had to go. Identity politics was never just a left-wing thing, the right did not weaponise it as Sarkar claims, but rather it is a reactionary idea that the left borrowed from the right. It would seem that Sarkar with this book is trying to put some distance between herself and some of the more stupid examples of left identity politics. But it is difficult to believe her. She seems to want to have her cake and eat it too.
The one identitarian issue she is determined to keep pushing and is given a pass is that of trans. She claims she does not want to shut down debate on this issue, though some of her pals at Novara and her mixed doubles partner Owen Jones could not say the same. Jones is a particularly vile creature, having repeatedly embraced and stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back, with such frequency and fervour, you could be forgiven for thinking he was rehearsing for an audition for the role of Brutus in Julius Caesar. She has described those who raise legitimate concerns as bigots, including in relation to the safety of women in prison (a place she is unlikely to ever see the inside of, now that she is firmly ensconced in the middle class). She acknowledges that some male inmates have been violent towards women, such as the sex offenders Karen White and Isla Bryson, but goes on to argue that where trans serve their sentences should be decided on a case-by-case basis, ignoring that both White and Bryson were decided on that basis and that Bryson’s transfer to a women’s prison was one of the issues that brought down Nicola Sturgeon. To be clear, Bryson a.k.a Adam Graham is a double rapist. Around the same time Andrew Burns a.k.a Tiffany Scott was also due to be transferred to a woman’s prison. He is a man so dangerous that he “is one of only some 100 offenders in Scotland subject to an Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR), meaning he will only be released when he is no longer considered an "unmanageable risk to public safety".[5] In the name of identity politics Sarkar is willing to brush these concerns under the carpet.
I have neither the energy nor the inclination to go over much of the dishonest debate she has engaged in on the issue and repeats in the book. But in her appeal for unity on the basis of class, who is included and excluded? Are left-wing gender critical feminists included? It is not clear, though we should be thankful she did not mention how right-wing gender critical feminists rushed into the arms of Tommy Robinson and those that didn’t, like Julie Bindel, are busy defending Zionism. I suspect that on many of the points raised in the book, Sarkar will flip further down the road. She is a pundit and has probably sensed which way the wind is blowing and seen some writing on the wall. But the book is unconvincing in its message. The one issue that has lead to people losing jobs, been excluded, harried and harassed and even physically assaulted is the trans issue. She is dismissive of the idea of Cancel Culture, even though Zionists cancelled Norman Finkelstein, a man I would like to think she admires. Many lesser-known people have been cancelled on this issue, even pro Palestinian Jews have been excluded from Palestine solidarity events because they are gender critical. So, if it not clear whether women who raise concerns and objections on this issue are included, it is not clear whether Sarkar’s appeal at the end of the book to take back our sense of comradeship with one another is real.
Are there any issues or circumstances in which comrades could be cancelled, silenced, excluded? There are left organisations who will have nothing to do with anyone who does not agree 100% on the trans issue with them. Dissent is tolerated on any issue except this one. They will not engage with them on any level and this includes issues as far removed from trans as climate change. You fall foul of them on that one issue you are toast. Are there any other issues? We don’t know. She doesn’t say.
What is in doubt is her sincerity. You get no sense of any self-criticism on the issues she looks at. She was part of it all, but the book reads like she was a fly on the wall the whole time. It is hard to trust someone who won’t own up to their mistakes, criticism is fine, but self-criticism is better. If a book review were written like a child’s school report it would say “Good effort, must try harder.”
There are better books that deal with the issues raised such as Haidt and Lukianoff’ book The Coddling of the American Mind, Asad Heider’s Mistaken Identity and Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come To It. Times are tough, spend your money wisely.
This is the crux of the matter. She claims the book is going to show:
…how culture, politics and unequal stakes in the economy combine to fragment, weaken and inhibit working-class power….
…if you can’t see the world clearly, you can’t change it. I’ll show you how the media and much of our political class collaborate to make identity-driven conflicts – the so-called ‘culture wars’ – the most prominent issues of the day.
But it wasn’t just the media and political class that did that. Many on the left, including those, who like Sarkar, style themselves as Marxists contributed to it and continue to do so, engaging in Cancel Culture, social and economic ostracisation, harassment of those they disagree with, even when it is only one disagreement on one point and there is agreement on practically everything else.
What we’ll see… is that the left unwittingly forged the political weapons being used against it by our political opponents. We created an inverse hierarchy, where those most recognised as victims wield the most power. But the problem is we defined a victim as being anyone who claimed that status, rather than agreeing on any kind of material unit of measurement. Without meaning to, the left opened the door for powerful people to tactically present themselves as victims – and tie us up in the knots of our own obsession with grievance.
She gives numerous examples of this throughout the book, as well as some of what Jonathan Haidt described in his book The Coddling of the American Mind i.e. the I am offended brigade and the shrill shriek of liberal students trying to shut down debate on the filmiest of grounds. She amusingly points to being taken to task by a student for not referring to the characters in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as African-Americans. Sarkar had described them as black, the student blissfully and ignorantly unaware that the novel is set in the Congo, not the USA. She doesn’t labour this point, but my own experience is that much of the debate on the left has all the intellectual gravitas of the idiot who challenged her, the gift that keeps on giving to the media and the right.
She challenges identity politics, but only up to a point and much of the later part of the book is taken up with how the right have taken advantage of identity politics discourse and weaponised it rather than looking at what the left can do to stop tearing itself apart over the issue. And there is one identity, I will deal with later, that she won’t let go of, even when talking about other things like racism. She is at her best when talking about race, and challenging individualistic notions of identity politics, a term she reminds the reader was invented by a group of black women in the 1970s seeking to reach out to other oppressed groups, including the working class. She makes great play of the 2011 riots following the murder of Mark Duggan by police as an example of unity by blacks, Asians and whites. She talks critically about the idea of white privilege but underestimates just how pernicious the whole notion is. She ridicules the idea proposed at conference she attended to abolish all organisations that were not 51% non-white in an 80% white country. But says of just how far this nonsense goes that “I don’t think that you’d see someone arguing in real life that Anne Frank had white privilege.”
Actually, you would. There was a debate on that exact issue on Twitter (which perhaps is not real life, though Sarkar herself says it is where the political and media class spend a lot of their time), leading many commentators and even Jewish organisations to respond to it. In fairness, at Novara Media they dismissed it as a silly discussion and dismissively attributed it to someone who was probably a 14 year old.[1] I am not so sure. In Ireland the leader of the Social Democrats, Catherine Murphy, stated in the Dáil (Irish parliament) that “While it is true that the Irish have known our fair share of oppression, the reality is that during that oppression we still maintained our invisibility cloak of white privilege.”[2] To be clear, our oppression included a famine that left 1.5 million dead and many more forced to emigrate, whilst the British exported food from the country. Identity politics is nuttier than she thinks, and more divisive - and Murphy was no 14 year old.
There are parts of the book that are worth reading, if only to read about examples of the right weaponising nonsense, faking reports and creating moral panics around a whole host of issues. She takes many of these stories apart, including one involving people complaining about asylum seekers behaving terribly, cashing cheques in the local post office etc. Except of course the area in question hadn’t a single asylum seeker, but had lots of people on hand to give first-hand accounts of exactly that which puts it on a par to alien abduction stories, with all the lurid details and credibility of someone reared on too many sci-fi films. In fighting racism we have all come across such ridiculous stories and “eye-witnesses”.
But the book does not do what she said it set out to do. The weapons the left forged that are now being used against it are barely mentioned. Zionists have weaponised Hate Speech legislation to ban Palestinian marches in many parts of Europe. From the river to the sea is classified as hate speech. People have lost their jobs over tweets made on their own personal twitter account. Sarkar is aware of this and recently wrote an article on the use of identity politics by Zionists to silence pro-Palestinian voices.[3] She does deal with this in the book as well. Though, Zionists are not weaponising identity politics they have the copyright on it and Cancel Culture as well. It was they who set out to limit speech on campus, invoke offence in order to shut down debate and challenge people over their language. Many of the weapons stridently raised in discussions, such as being offended, needing a trigger warning, microagressions etc, are all on display in the media over Palestine. These are the weapons the left argued for and got, ones the state was only too happy to give them. They are not a Zionist aberration, they are the flip side of the same coin many on the left, including herself were only too happy to play.
Not just in Britain either. Recently a French TV journalist Jean Michel Aphatie was suspended for comparing Nazi massacres in France to French massacres in Algeria.[4] Anyone who knows anything about Algeria would know that such a statement is not only true, but blindingly obvious. Yet, he caused offence and had to go. Identity politics was never just a left-wing thing, the right did not weaponise it as Sarkar claims, but rather it is a reactionary idea that the left borrowed from the right. It would seem that Sarkar with this book is trying to put some distance between herself and some of the more stupid examples of left identity politics. But it is difficult to believe her. She seems to want to have her cake and eat it too.
The one identitarian issue she is determined to keep pushing and is given a pass is that of trans. She claims she does not want to shut down debate on this issue, though some of her pals at Novara and her mixed doubles partner Owen Jones could not say the same. Jones is a particularly vile creature, having repeatedly embraced and stabbed Jeremy Corbyn in the back, with such frequency and fervour, you could be forgiven for thinking he was rehearsing for an audition for the role of Brutus in Julius Caesar. She has described those who raise legitimate concerns as bigots, including in relation to the safety of women in prison (a place she is unlikely to ever see the inside of, now that she is firmly ensconced in the middle class). She acknowledges that some male inmates have been violent towards women, such as the sex offenders Karen White and Isla Bryson, but goes on to argue that where trans serve their sentences should be decided on a case-by-case basis, ignoring that both White and Bryson were decided on that basis and that Bryson’s transfer to a women’s prison was one of the issues that brought down Nicola Sturgeon. To be clear, Bryson a.k.a Adam Graham is a double rapist. Around the same time Andrew Burns a.k.a Tiffany Scott was also due to be transferred to a woman’s prison. He is a man so dangerous that he “is one of only some 100 offenders in Scotland subject to an Order for Lifelong Restriction (OLR), meaning he will only be released when he is no longer considered an "unmanageable risk to public safety".[5] In the name of identity politics Sarkar is willing to brush these concerns under the carpet.
I have neither the energy nor the inclination to go over much of the dishonest debate she has engaged in on the issue and repeats in the book. But in her appeal for unity on the basis of class, who is included and excluded? Are left-wing gender critical feminists included? It is not clear, though we should be thankful she did not mention how right-wing gender critical feminists rushed into the arms of Tommy Robinson and those that didn’t, like Julie Bindel, are busy defending Zionism. I suspect that on many of the points raised in the book, Sarkar will flip further down the road. She is a pundit and has probably sensed which way the wind is blowing and seen some writing on the wall. But the book is unconvincing in its message. The one issue that has lead to people losing jobs, been excluded, harried and harassed and even physically assaulted is the trans issue. She is dismissive of the idea of Cancel Culture, even though Zionists cancelled Norman Finkelstein, a man I would like to think she admires. Many lesser-known people have been cancelled on this issue, even pro Palestinian Jews have been excluded from Palestine solidarity events because they are gender critical. So, if it not clear whether women who raise concerns and objections on this issue are included, it is not clear whether Sarkar’s appeal at the end of the book to take back our sense of comradeship with one another is real.
Are there any issues or circumstances in which comrades could be cancelled, silenced, excluded? There are left organisations who will have nothing to do with anyone who does not agree 100% on the trans issue with them. Dissent is tolerated on any issue except this one. They will not engage with them on any level and this includes issues as far removed from trans as climate change. You fall foul of them on that one issue you are toast. Are there any other issues? We don’t know. She doesn’t say.
What is in doubt is her sincerity. You get no sense of any self-criticism on the issues she looks at. She was part of it all, but the book reads like she was a fly on the wall the whole time. It is hard to trust someone who won’t own up to their mistakes, criticism is fine, but self-criticism is better. If a book review were written like a child’s school report it would say “Good effort, must try harder.”
There are better books that deal with the issues raised such as Haidt and Lukianoff’ book The Coddling of the American Mind, Asad Heider’s Mistaken Identity and Finkelstein’s I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Come To It. Times are tough, spend your money wisely.
[1] Novara Media (21/12/2022) The most pointless twitter discourses of 2022. Moya Lothian-McClean.
[2] See.
[3] Novaramedia (27/02/2025) How the Pro-Israel Right Used Identity Politics to Crush Palestine Solidarity. Ash Sarkar.
[4] The Guardian (09/02/2025) Journalist quits role after comparing French actions in Algeria to Nazi massacre. AFP.
[5] The Daily Record (30/08/2017) Court put in lockdown as dangerous ‘dirty protest’ transexual appears in dock half naked.
⏩ Gearóid Ó Loingsigh is a political and human rights activist with extensive experience in Latin America.
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