Marxist education not culture wars vitriol

The following resolution was passed unanimously by the tenth party congress of the CPGB-ML.

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This congress notes with concern the growing tendency for political discourse to be conducted within a framework of bourgeois-defined antagonistic camps – what have become known as ‘culture wars’. These artificially imposed ‘dividing lines’ often have nothing to do with class and everything to do with keeping workers divided and blaming one another for the problems that are inherent to capitalist society.

Congress notes that the question of immigration was the original ‘culture war’ issue, identified by Marx and Engels a century and a half ago as the true secret of the stability of bourgeois rule in 19th-century Britain. The current proliferation of issues that are being presented in similarly heated and tribal ways is a sure sign of the senility and decay of imperialist society, which has no hope and no meaningful future to offer working people and so must present them with an array of scapegoats on which to vent their anger.

Today this can be seen not only on the key question of immigration, but also on other important topics like climate change, Brexit, the transgender trend, the Covid-19 pandemic, vaccines etc. Congress notes that as a result, public debate is being steadily reduced to something that has more resemblance to a football match than a political conversation, with competitors routinely exchanging insults that further entrench the dividing lines.

Congress notes with concern that even those who identify as ‘Marxist’ or ‘socialist’ are increasingly bending their publicity, especially on monopoly-controlled social media, to fit with (and therefore, whether wittingly or not, to promote) culture wars paradigms – usually because such behaviour is consistently rewarded by the algorithms that govern content promotion on such platforms as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

This congress believes that bending socialist material to fit these laws of ‘successful content creation’ is detrimental to the cause of the proletariat, since:

1. It helps to create extreme polarisation and mutually exclusive positions in regard to important issues, generating blind loyalties and entrenched antagonisms that prohibit meaningful discussion and considerably lower the chance of workers arriving at a nuanced and class-conscious understanding.
2. It lays the basis for encouraging workers on both ‘sides’ of these debates to identify with figures in the ruling class – ‘team leaders’ and ‘saviours’ who egg them on to ever higher levels of enmity – and even to call on the bourgeois state to suppress or silence the other side, which is perceived to be an ‘enemy’ and the cause of all society’s problems.
3. Its fundamental purpose is to keep us outraged but ignorant and impotent, adding to workers’ stress and anger levels without ever raising their understanding or bringing them to a positive and optimistic understanding of their own agency and power.

Congress notes that our party has earned for itself a reputation of standing firm and being guided by science on all important issues. Decades of consistently standing on principles rather than jumping on board the latest bourgeois fads, fashions, red herrings and propaganda campaigns has brought us the respect of friends and enemies alike, and is beginning to earn us a place in the hearts and minds of the most advanced section of the British working class.

This congress instructs its members and the incoming central committee to do everything possible to avoid allowing our party to be sucked into culture wars framing of any issue. This means:

1. Making sure we avoid directing inflammatory or deliberately provocative language at workers who have been misled by one camp or the other on any issue.
2. Framing our arguments, especially when criticising counter-revolutionary organisations, in such a way as to help educate those who have been misled rather than alienating them. This means telling the truth as calmly as possible and explaining the science that lies behind our position; helping workers take steps away from where they are and operating on the assumption that the masses are neither irretrievably bigoted nor stupid.
3. Avoiding the unhelpful terms, categories and insults that today proliferate online, whether they refer to a person’s supposed political grouping or even their age (ie, ‘Boomer’, ‘GenZ’, ‘Gammon’, ‘Libtard’ etc).
4. Avoiding presenting our analysis under ‘clickbait’ headlines that are unnecessarily catastrophic, sensationalist or antagonistic. We must strive to generate interest and awareness with sane good sense rather than counterproductive triggering of knee-jerk emotions.
5. Avoiding getting sucked into debates on social media, which should as much as possible be used as broadcast channels. Rather than writing angry and immediate responses to online controversies that are perceived as being ‘urgent’, we must set the example and build a culture of stepping back from constantly feeding the artificial and inflammatory ‘news cycle’, which distracts the energies and wastes the time of party members and the wider working class alike.
6. Building a reputation for rational and thoughtful analysis and for the promotion of material that is genuinely educative. If we judge that a question needs to be dealt with, we should write our comment as an article, publish it in our physical as well as online media, and post links to the article on social media platforms.