More Lenin Needed: Review: Class War Not Culture War
By Paul Murphy
Class War - Not Culture War is a new book by Red Network member and former People Before Profit Councillor, Madeleine Johansson. It outlines the Red Network’s call “to go back to fighting the class war” and argues that “if we go into battle fighting the “culture war” then we have walked into the trap set for us by the establishment.”
At its heart is an unfortunate retreat from a Leninist approach to fighting oppression in the context of the rise of racism and transphobia. To be clear, this is not a Sahra Wagenknecht1-style advocacy for the left to take up reactionary positions on issues of oppression. Madeleine strongly opposes racism, sexism and transphobia throughout. But it does make the case for foregrounding economic issues and placing less emphasis on the struggle against oppression.
‘A trap’ or functional?
Central to this case is the view that the increasing centrality of issues of oppression is part of a conscious strategy of divide and rule by the capitalist class. The opening paragraph sets this out succinctly:
“The establishment set a trap. And the left walked right into it. The working class is being attacked on all fronts. Housing crisis, health crisis, cost of living crisis, low pay, bogus self employment, the gig economy. At the same time the left has walked into the trap that is the “culture war”. It was created by the establishment with one purpose; to divide us and distract us from the real war: the class war.”
Is it accurate, though? Think of the three main so-called ‘culture war’ issues that are dominant today in Ireland: the demonisation of asylum seekers in particular as ‘unvetted male migrants’ and racism towards immigrants in general; the attacks on transgender people; and the moral panic around sex education in schools, with lies being spread that children are going to be shown porn or taught to masturbate.
Are these attacks really all a trap laid by the establishment? Madeleine doesn’t present evidence for this claim. If she did, she might have referenced the run-up to the local elections last year, where there was clearly a concerted and successful campaign by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in government to centre the issue of immigration to undermine Sinn Féin and the left. In this, they were enthusiastically aided by the media, which ran daily stories on the number of asylum seekers sleeping at the canal, without informing their audience that there were enough empty beds in the system for everybody.
But even in this case of racism, is it really accurate to suggest that this was “created” by the establishment, or to say as Madeleine does that racism persisted after slavery because it “divides the working class and creates a scapegoat for the ruling class to divert attention from them”? The emergent far-right had been successfully whipping up fear about asylum seekers, organising local protests, burning down more than 30 asylum centres and initiating a riot in Dublin city centre before the government decided to get in on the act.
The truth is that contrary to what Madeleine argues, racism in Western capitalist society does have an autonomous existence separate from the immediate wishes or interests of the capitalist class. From the very beginnings of capitalism in Europe in the fifteenth century, race was the primary “rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-’Europeans’.”2
Colonisation, imperialism and the slave trade were central components of this emerging economic system - not secondary features. As Cedric Robinson outlined in his flawed, but nonetheless brilliant book, Black Marxism, “[t]he development, organisation and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, and so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.”3 Its function within these social structures go beyond ‘divide and rule’ - particularly within the US, the most powerful country in the Global North, it serves to legitimise the continued super-exploitation of Black workers.
The case for a conscious strategy of the establishment is even weaker when it comes to transphobia and sex education. Is the Red Network really making the case that the emergence of these issues is because the political establishment has decided that they will be useful tools of division? Both have their roots in the defence of rigid, sexist gender roles which are being increasingly challenged by progressive struggles for gender equality and LGBTQ rights. These gender roles play a functional (not just divide and rule) role for capitalism in generating unpaid and massively undervalued socially reproductive labour, overwhelmingly carried out by women.
A cultural backlash has been stoked by the far-right, which defends these gender roles and is looking for issues on which it can win mass support. Undoubtedly, it’s true that on an international plane, these reactionary forces are supported by a significant section of capital, particularly in the US, epitomised by the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and the Koch brothers. But is this really a capitalist conspiracy to divide and rule the working class, rather than a struggle between oppression and liberation?
It is instructive that all of the attacks on the working class that Madeleine lists are economic. They are all real attacks on the working class that the socialist movement must foreground and seek to organise struggle on. But it is an illustration of the economism of the Red Network that while Madeleine opposes racism, transphobia and sexism, she doesn’t consider these as attacks on the working class. Instead, in her schema, these are ‘culture war’ issues, which apparently exist in a different plane than ‘class war’ issues and distract from the possibility of unifying the working class.
Return to Lenin
Of course, Madeleine and the Red Network are not the first to make this case. Jacobin has published article after article with headlines such as “We Need a Class War, Not a Culture War”, “We Don’t Need a Culture War. We Need a Class War” and “The New Class War Isn’t a Culture War.” Ash Sarkar of Novara Media recently published Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War. This is also a favoured preoccupation of Vivek Chibber, the editor of Catalyst, and author of The Class Matrix.
This argument is being made in the context of a reactionary backlash happening in Western society after decades of important victories on racism, sexism and homophobia. It is true that within the movements against oppression, identity politics rather than socialist politics were dominant. This is hardly surprising given the major defeats for the working class, the retreat of the left and the rise of neo-liberalism and post-modernist ideas. While the right-wing backlash is often cloaked in opposition to the ideology of identity politics, it is actually directed against the material victories that have been won, such as abortion rights, same-sex marriage, legal protections against racist discrimination, and gender recognition.
Thus, a section of the left has reverted to (or never went beyond) a pre-Leninist socialist understanding of how to deal with oppression. This was epitomised by the approach of Eugene V. Debs, who was an uncompromising opponent of racism within the socialist movement. Nonetheless, he argued that socialists:
“... have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the working class, regardless of color — the whole working class of the whole world.”4
Lenin had to wage an immense battle within the socialist movement in Russia and internationally against this “colour-blindness” and for a conscious struggle against oppression in all its forms. He had to fight within the Communist International for an approach that foregrounded the struggle against national and racial oppression, centrally with the call for the right to self-determination.
Madeleine’s argument that we “oppose racism [and sexism and homophobia] because it divides the working class and diverts our focus away from the ruling class and the system” misses a crucial part of the Leninist approach to oppression. We are not just against racism, sexism or homophobia because they divide the working class. In that case, we wouldn’t mind discrimination or oppression directed at middle-class people - but we do, and Marxists always have.
Rosa Luxemburg argued passionately for the socialist movement taking up the cause of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer falsely convicted of espionage in 1894.5 She argued:
“We can’t act as indifferent witnesses to what goes on in the interior of the bourgeoisie, unless socialism could be realized outside of bourgeois society, for example through the foundation in each country of a separate colony…. The principle of class struggle not only doesn’t prohibit, but on the contrary it imposes the active intervention of the proletariat in all the political and social conflicts of any importance that take place inside the bourgeoisie.”
We react to every instance of oppression not out of an abstract moralism, which Madeleine counterposes to her class reductionism. Rather, we believe that, as Lenin argued “the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects….”6 This consistent opposition to oppression is a crucial part of the building of a working class and socialist movement.
How the working class is formed
Underlying the economism of the Red Network and others is the belief that if only all the issues of oppression could be put aside, the working class could unite on class lines and it could take on the capitalist class and win. Elsewhere, a comrade of Madeleine’s, László Molnárfi, puts it plainly “[t]he magic of class is its primacy, where differences can be made to dissolve for the shared interest of social revolution.”7
This is idealism in the extreme. There is nothing magic about class. Nor is there anything inherently and objectively ‘primary’ about class in a political sense, rather than race or gender. Class is historically and economically primary to the development and functioning of capitalism, but that doesn’t mean that politics automatically follows class. We, as socialists, seek to make class primary because we understand that the working class is the force with the interest and potential power to overthrow the capitalist state, and end all exploitation and oppression.
The political primacy of class can only arise through struggle, whereby the working class is transformed from a class “in itself” (an object of exploitation), to a class “for itself” (a subject of revolutionary action). This will not be done by attempting to ‘dissolve’ divisions within the working class and oppressed, but rather by recognising those differences and struggling against oppression of all sorts. The assumption of the class reductionists is that, by virtue of its objective position as an exploited class, the working class develops its consciousness and becomes a revolutionary subject. But this is not how it has ever worked.
A class “for itself” is something that is created through struggle. One crucial part of that struggle is against the capitalist class and its governments - feeling its own strength, learning through defeats, and building its class organisations. But the other crucial part is struggle within the working class itself. This is a ‘culture war’ within the working class - by the advanced sections against the backward sections. It is a struggle against scabbing on a strike. It is a struggle against the idea that solidarity is a waste of time, and that you should just work hard and put your head down. It’s also a struggle against sexism, against homophobia and against racism.
This is why Marx and Engels laid stress on the negative impact of the oppression of Ireland on the working class in Britain. Marx argued that it was “the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.”8
The working class will not be unified on the basis of a rational appeal to put aside other issues and unite solely on the economic issues - but only on the basis of a consistent struggle against all oppression. William Clare Roberts put it exceptionally well when he argues:
“Stuart Hall’s famous line about race being “the modality in which class is ‘lived’” needs to be given its true generality: culture is the modality in which class is lived, and that means that even the experience of class identification and class-belonging is a cultural experience.”9
We cannot win the class war by abandoning its cultural front.
Notes
1. Sahra Wagenknecht is the leader of the split from Die Linke in Germany, who founded the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance), which combines a reformist left economic programme with anti-immigrant policies and a conservative positioning on social issues.
2. Cedric Robinson, ‘Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition’ (University of North Carolina Press, 1983 republished 2000)
3. Op. cit.
4. Eugene V. Debs, ‘The Negro In the Class Struggle’ (1903)
5. Rosa Luxemburg, ‘The Dreyfus Affair and the Millerand Case’ (1899)
6. V.I. Lenin, ‘What Is To Be Done?’ (1901)
7. László Molnárfi, ‘Revolutionary and Realpolitik’, (Horizon Magazine, 30 June 2025)
8. Karl Marx, Letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt (1870), published in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, 1975)
9. William Clare Roberts, ‘Class in Theory, Class in Practice’ published in Crisis & Critique (Volume 10/ISSUE 1, 2023)