Transfascism and the ‘Left’

The so-called left is deeply divided over trans ideology. Some are mystified by this ‘regression’. Some take the side of identity politics, others oppose it on the basis of class. But few have worked out why trans identity politics has blossomed in the neo-liberal period into something that threatens to destroy the unity of the working class. We put forward our analysis here.

If you want an explanation for this ‘regression’ try sexism on steroids. Its not enough that women take the brunt of male violence, infanticide, femicide and sexual trafficking. Capitalism is desperate for new ways to objectify and dehumanise them.

Why? Capitalism in terminal crisis is throwing up all the old crap of ages in preparation for fascism that divides and destroys the working class as the revolutionary class. It draws on the slavery and serfdom of all prior modes of production as wage labour ceases to deliver the profits. Most important it casualizes wage labour to break down the solidarity of social labour and replaces it with disorganized internal class warfare.

As if to rub our noses in this historic decomposition of social labour, capitalism dredges the underworld to make a new iteration of the patriarchy in the form of the trans cult seeking to destroy women whose historic resistance is an unbroken link back to the original gender oppression that signified the overthrow of the commune and introduced the first class society, the patriarchy.

Since then all attempts by the patriarchy have failed to defeat women’s historic liberation struggle. So today with late stage capitalism in terminal crisis, the bourgeois state now recognises men as legal women attacking the historic solidarity between men and women in the working class, uniting to defeat fascism and overthrow patriarchal capitalism.

Women’s resistance to the threat posed by trans ideology has been countered by the trans cult with increasingly violent arguments directed at them as transphobes, even fascists, justifying open violence by the ‘left’ to shut them up. Judith Butler, a US academic influential in developing the argument that gender trumps sex, recently stated that those who criticise trans gender people are motivated by the alt-right and are fascists. Gender critical women are therefore fascists.

But Butler gets it all wrong. Fascists defend the patriarchy. So does gender ideology which insists that transwomen with penises are women. Therefore, for both alt-right and alt-left versions of the patriarchy, the common enemy is women who lead the resistance to patriarchal capitalism. The real left takes the side of women, especially lesbians, against the threat of the trans cult, against fascism and rotten capitalism.

Butler is wrong because she is a liberal. She glosses over End Stage Capitalism and argues for human rights despite capitalism’s inability to deliver them to all but the ruling class and their agents. She rejects the determining influence of capitalist social relations. She takes the post-modern line that individuals can self-determine their identity as a matter of free choice. This is an idealist erasure of production relations by exchange relations. The market rules and freedom becomes freedom of choice. Into the vacuum left by the missing production relations she validates the alienated exchange relations of bourgeois individuals.

The theory of ‘gender’ demonstrates this perfectly. Production relations under capitalism are class relations. Gender identity denies the production relations of labour and sex and the necessity of class struggle to revolutionise these relations. Instead, the alienated subjectivity of exchange relations defines self-identity as the buying and selling of commodities to meet socially contrived needs, that is, the ‘performance’ of self-determination.

The performance of gender miraculously erases the historical oppression of gender grounded in the exploitation of women’s reproductive power. By privileging gender over sex, men re-define women as determined by their gender, that is, subordinated to their oppression. They attack women’s human agency as a revolutionary force that can overthrow the patriarchy as part of the socialist revolution.

Fascism is the extreme reaction of end stage capitalism to smash the working class as the gravedigger of capitalism. That is why it will be women, and lesbians in particular, that lead the antifascist struggle against trans ideology, as part of the socialist revolution that ends capitalism and builds socialism.