Too much (therefore superficial and mechanical) political realism often leads to the assertion that a statesman should only work within the limits of ‘effective reality’; that he should not interest himself in what ‘ought to be’ but only in what ‘is.’ This would mean that he should not look farther than the end of his own nose – Antonio Gramsci. 1 Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971, pp. 171-172.
Trump’s Culture War
In January 2025, Donald Trump was re-elected as President of the United States. His first act was to sign a series of executive orders, designed to revive and expand the reactionary nature of his previous presidency. This can be understood as part of what Antonio Gramsci called “the passive revolution of the bourgeoisie” or what Goretti Horgan, in the previous issue of the Irish Marxist Review, called Trump’s ‘revolt from the right’. Many of Trump’s orders have sought to facilitate US capital’s increasingly predatory forms of accumulation and dispossession. He signed orders that tore up regulation on big business and imposed cuts on public services through the infamous ‘Department of Government Efficiency’. Alongside these economic initiatives, moreover, were others that were unambiguously cultural in their focus. These included national-populist orders to ‘Restore American Greatness’ and revive the ‘US Department of War’, alongside deeply reactionary orders that seek to undermine unity within the US working class.
In this category we find orders like ‘Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’, ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs’, ‘Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation’ and ‘Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling’. The language may be blunt and ideologically laden, but the intention is clear; the association of transness with ‘extremism’ and ‘mutilation’, the association of ‘DEI’ (diversity, equity, and inclusion) with ‘radicalism’, and the association of progressive education with ‘indoctrination.’ In this way, Trump began his second presidency with a superstructural salvo against ‘wokeness’; a political position that is conscious of social justice and insists on care and respect for differences within the working class, but has been increasingly twisted to mean, essentially, whatever the far-right wants it to mean.
The idea that conservative (white, Christian, and nationalist) values are constantly under attack has been a favourite claim of the right during the so-called ‘culture wars.’ This has allowed them to argue that western society is plagued from all sides by enemies, internal and external. In so doing, they have radicalised a layer of conservative workers and encouraged them to engage in forms of cross-class collaboration on behalf of capital. Indeed, despite the broader victories of far-right politics over the last ten years, the foot soldiers of fascism, both online and offline, continue to centralise a paranoid vision of ‘the culture war’; often speaking as if they are under siege from a structurally feminist, anti-white, ‘woke’ culture, and constantly referencing films, television shows, video games, books, and other cultural texts, in their memes, podcasts, and manifestos as proof of a ‘great replacement’ or a deep-state plot.
Why is this cultivation of a culture-focused paranoia so appealing to the right? One reason is that it gives them a sort of political cover for their attacks on living standards. Using a playbook tried and tested by Ronald Reagan, Trump has already cut taxes for the wealthy, slashed social services for the working classes, and defunded numerous research and education initiatives to the great pleasure of his billionaire backers. But this argument can only take us so far in explaining the deeper reasons as to why Trump and his supporters continue to claim a sort of cultural victimhood from a dominant position of power. One way to unpack this oddity is through Alberto Toscano’s argument that in our contemporary moment “the superstructure sometimes seems to overwhelm the base, as though forces and fantasies once functional to the reproduction of a dominant class, and racial order, had now attained a kind of autonomy.” 2Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism. 2023, pp. 112. What he means by this is that there is no imminent threat to the reproduction of capitalism so the fear required to animate and maintain a far-right politics must be based not on reaction but anticipation. 3The difference can be grasped if we think about when the Reagan administration began to demonise working class Black communities through disseminating conspiracies about ‘welfare queens’ and ‘super predators’. There were two main benefits to this for the ruling class at that time. This was the beginning of the installation of neoliberalism as economic rationality and, as such, it had to attack working class communities and, due to this, there was bound to be pushback from the workers. By first painting welfare recipients as criminals leeching off the system, the Reagan administration could cut social welfare with less pushback. Further to this, there was a real and immediate threat to ruling class hegemony from the various strains of Black radicalism and Black power movements that emerged in the 60s and 70s. The government associated ‘drugs’ with the black working classes and then launched a ‘war on drugs’, essentially launching war on the Black working class.
The social paranoia of the right is not reacting against actual gains made by the left as much as it is mobilising ‘preventative-counter reforms’ against phantoms that it itself creates.4 Toscano, pp. 113. Thus understood, the all-encompassing fear and loathing of ‘wokeness’ that animates the culture war is not only malleable, but extremely functional. It helps to divide the working class along cultural lines while parcelling off some workers into a cross-class alliance with their own exploiters. This makes it particularly effective during a long crisis of capitalism as the ruling class shifts debates to what unites them with the workers they exploit, all the while reducing the possibility of genuine working class solidarity.
Understood this way, parts of the left have failed to counter this cultural offensive, often placing ‘the culture war’ in opposition to ‘the class war’ as if the two are mutually exclusive. There is a notion in some sections of the left that ‘culture’, in this sense, is little more than a distraction, something invented by the capitalist class and weaponised by the right in order to distract workers and proper Marxists from the task of building socialism. The refrain from these groups is often ‘fight the class war, not the culture war’ with an accompanying demand that we should focus only on what the working class agrees with ‘now’, rather than supporting positions that may need to be won to in the future. This not only fails to see that the ruling class is fighting the class war through the culture war, it also results in a vulgar economistic and mechanistic Marxism without the necessary consideration of how culture helps to maintain and even expand the economic base that determines it. What is missing in these knee-jerk reactions against ‘the culture war’, in other words, is a proper Marxist theory of culture itself.
The cultural theorist, Raymond Williams, famously insisted that culture is perhaps “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language and often means very different things in different contexts.”5Williams, Raymond. Keywords. 1983. He argued that Marxism can enable us to think through the complexities of modern capitalist social formations by conceptualising the relationships between the base and superstructures that compose it, while keeping an eye both on what Marx called the ‘relative autonomy’ of each of the levels (economic, political, ideological cultural etc) and the determining power of the mode of production overall. A Marxist materialist theory must therefore see culture as an inherent part of the reproduction of a capitalist society rather than some idealist, or superstructural, reflex that will passively shift once we make the right changes in the mode of production. Culture is the ‘warp and the woof’ of life in society – it is the sets of social relations through which people reproduce themselves, their families, their understandings, and the norms of the class society they are continually subjected to. As such, control of the subaltern classes cultural production and expression has always been a concern of the ruling classes. In order to dig into this, we must provide a historicisation and theorisation of the relationship between the class war and the culture war in a little more detail.
Culture in Class Society
First, what exactly is culture? Raymond Williams famously declared that ‘culture is ordinary”.
By this he means that,
Later, Williams offers us three broad definitions; culture as referring to a “general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development”; culture as a “particular way of life, whether of a people, period, or group”; and culture as referring to “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity”.7Williams, Keywords. When we speak about culture today, especially popular or mass culture, we often use a combination of Williams’ second and third definitions; culture as a whole way of life, and the creative effort to represent; reflect on; critique; and interpret that way of life. It is the conjuncture of these two definitions that we should begin with.
As part of the general reproduction of social life, culture has, throughout history, played a significant role in class formation and class struggle. Rather than the dominant culture simply emerging in a mechanical relation of cause and effect, the ruling class has had to actively work to create and maintain it. In cruder forms of Marxism it is almost as if the economy automatically generates a culture which serves its interests, rather than taking into account the openness and the contradictions involved in the constant renewal of a living culture. The idea that the superstructure is prefigured, predicted, or controlled by the base leaves little room for an analysis of culture itself. But if we think instead of an economic base that sets limits and exerts pressure on the superstructures, we can begin to see how the mode of production “dictates the tempo and rhythms of development in the other parts of the social formation” rather than fully determining it in a mechanical relation. In other words, the superstructures can never be simply a pale reflection of the base. The social relations of a capitalist society must be maintained, normalised, and even expanded, if surplus value is to continue to be generated. As such, the superstructures assist in the reproduction of the social relations of a capitalist society through the complex and often contradictory generation of what Antonio Gramsci calls ‘common sense.’
The nature of this ‘common sense’ can be made clearer through a brief history of the development of working class culture and the struggle of the bourgeoisie to shape and control it. As John Storey notes, “those with political power have always thought it necessary to police the culture of those without political power, reading it symptomatically for signs of political unrest; reshaping it continually through patronage and direct intervention.”8Storey, John. 2018. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Taylor & Francis: 18.
In the 18th and 19th centuries there was a massive upsurge in industrialisation and urbanisation which centralised large groups of proletarians in urban centres for the first time. Due to class-based housing segregation and the new relations of industrial capitalism, the working class lived and worked within a shared space that allowed them to develop their own culture separate from the ruling class. Storey tells us that “no longer was there a shared common culture, with an additional culture of the powerful. Now, for the first time in history, there was a separate culture of the subordinate classes of the urban and industrial centres.”9Ibid.
This culture quickly became of great concern to the powerful who worried that it posed a threat to a social order based on power and privilege. One of the first thinkers to take popular (or mass) culture seriously as a political force was Matthew Arnold. Indeed, his book Culture and Anarchy (1861-67) inaugurated a tradition of seeing popular culture as antithetical to civilised tastes or what he called, “the best that has been thought and said in the world.”10Arnold, Matthew. 1960. Culture and Anarchy. London: Cambridge University Press. Arnold argued that the “general process of intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic development” is something to be attained by only the few through “the disinterested and active use of reading, reflection, and observation in the endeavour to know the best that can be known.” In other words, it could only be achieved by those who lived off the labour of others. Culture, for Arnold, should seek to minister “the diseased spirit of our time.” This diseased spirit is, in part, the development of an urban working class culture, and the anarchy in the book’s title concerns the perceived political dangers of this new cultural formation. He notes,
In other words, working class culture, to Arnold and his class, signalled social and cultural disorder and a breakdown in what was once a robust cultural authority. The ‘common meanings’ of cultural life began to be challenged by a proletarian class whose ordinary experience of everyday life was vastly different from the experience of the ruling classes. In this period, it became clear to workers that the common meanings presented by the bourgeoisie were in fact not really ‘common’ at all. In their turn towards the immediate realities of their own class position, workers created a culture built from their own common meanings and experiences that were often in complete opposition to those championed by the ruling class as ‘common.’
Faced with this new challenge, the first response of the ruling class was an attempt to ‘civilise’ working class worldviews through a more aggressive dissemination of their own ‘high’ culture. For Arnold, “the fact that working-class culture exists at all is evidence enough of decline and disorder. Working-class ‘anarchy’ is to be suppressed by the harmonious influences of culture.”12Storey, John. 2018. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. Taylor & Francis This continues into the 20th century with conservative scholars like F.R. and Q.D. Leavis arguing that culture must return to what they termed ‘minority keeping’ – that is, returned to the hands of the ruling classes, who once “set the standard of taste without any serious challenge”, but now must contend with what was a rapidly expanding popular culture of the working, and increasingly, the middle classes.13Space prevents me from recounting the Leavis’s argument and analysis in any great detail but both John Storey and Raymond Williams provide useful overviews of their contribution to the study of culture and the dominance of their ‘culture and civilisation’ tradition throughout the first half of the 20th century. While inter-war fascism was concerned with both brutalising and absorbing the working classes in the early 20th century, a more stable form of ruling class assimilation emerged with the development of a consumerist culture after World War Two which tied workers to the system through their desire for material security. The post-war economic boom created a working class in the global north who were, generally speaking, better off than the average proletarian of previous decades. This was largely due to the “advances…that the American working class secured during the New Deal and post-war military Keynesianism.”14Kennedy & Shapiro, 2017. This is important for a Marxist theory of culture as the working class gradually became considered an active part of cultural life in capitalist society.
Workers in this period are reconceived as producers of an important culture of community rather than as anarchistic destroyers of social order (Arnold), or purveyors of tasteless low brow culture (Leavis).15See Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society (1958). The flip side, of course, was that working class culture was far more tolerated because it tied the exploited class into their exploitation. Consumer capitalism catered to a working class that could now afford commodities beyond what was once required to reproduce their labour power. This allowed capitalism to negotiate, absorb, twist, and redeploy aspects of working class culture and sell it back to the class. And this, in turn, better secured the reproduction of capital while weakening the revolutionary capacity of working class culture. What had originally emerged as a counter-hegemonic force was gradually being flattened and shaped into part of a larger culture industry.
This increasing uniformity accelerated with the rise of contemporary digital technologies. We are now in a period in which cultural difference between the classes has been increasingly flattened and commodified. Culture is experienced online and is increasingly dictated by algorithms, global trends, and the flows of capital. Due to this, there are certain un-profitable aspects of a working class culture from an earlier period that have fallen away. A nostalgia for these practices, often rooted in community and solidarity, provides space for a far-right cultural politics to mobilise a particularly resentful and reactionary feeling of cultural nostalgia. Such nostalgia is massively beneficially to the far-right because, in a period in which class as a material relation to the means of production is hidden or ignored, and in which neoliberalism has destroyed networks of social and economic solidarity, the far right can provide race and nation as new forms of belonging.
The far-right make no secret of their cultural focus, referring to it as “meta-politics.” Meta-politics is defined by Shane Burley as “the ideas, culture, and inclinations that motivate politics down the line. Meta-politics, in the neo-fascist sense, are the cultural projects that attempt to influence ideological positions without engaging strictly in political practice…which includes art, music, and philosophy.”16Burley, Shane. Fascism Today: What it is and How to End It. Oakland: AK Press, 2017. Jack Z. Bratich, adding to this, notes that “culture is thus explicitly part of twenty-first century right-wing organisational strategy, encapsulated in the well-worn phrase, ‘politics is downstream from culture’.17Bratich, Jack Z. On Microfascism: Gender, War, and Death. New York: Common Notions, 2022, pp. 3 With this strategy taken up both consciously and unconsciously, the far-right have been quite successful in their meta-political culture war and have moved the dial on many issues. For example, the recent wave of anti-trans legislation in the UK, and the aforementioned executive orders in the US, have not emerged from nowhere. They are the result of over ten years of aggressive cultural meta-politics from the far-right in which formerly fringe attitudes have become adopted by mainstream establishment political parties and news outlets.
These metapolitics benefit greatly from the current economic system. Neoliberalism, as a particularly aggressive form of free-market capitalism has, over the course of its hegemony, manifested significant changes in social and cultural formations. As a political economic system neoliberalism has hollowed out our lives and destroyed our communities and while people are not passive vessels into which far-right poison is poured, the violence of this system has created a dispossessed and brutalised cohort of downwardly mobile people who are increasingly susceptible to a cultural politics of grievance and victimhood propagated by the far-right. To understand how the culture wars have emerged and progressed, we must here delve into the development of neoliberalism so as to better historicise the relationship between the class war and the culture war.
Neoliberalism
Over the last forty years, neoliberalism has become a catch all term for late capitalism often used without the necessary care to situate it as a historically specific political, economic, and cultural force. This is, in part, because “neoliberalism has…become hegemonic as a mode of discourse…to the point where it is incorporated into the common sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.”18Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 2005: pp. 3. Neoliberalism was originally created to re-establish ruling-class hegemony in the wake of mass social unrest in the 1960s and the economic crises of the 1970s. Marxist geographer, David Harvey, notes that in the US “the share of national income taken by the top 1 per cent of income earners fell from a pre-war high of 16 percent to less than 8 percent by the end of the second world war, and stayed close to that level for nearly three decades.” He goes on to specify that this was broadly unchallenged by the ruling class during this period as growth remained high and worked out to a “stable share of an increasing pie.” It was during the collapse of growth in the 1970s that the ruling classes began to feel threatened and had to “move decisively…to protect themselves from political and economic annihilation.”19Ibid, pp. 15. Neoliberalism was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power, through attacks on “all forms of social solidarity” which were to be dissolved “in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.”20 Ibid, pp. 23.
The first successful implementations of neoliberal policy came during the conjunctural crises of the early 1970s. As a result of pay demands by a confident and unionised labour force, the threat of civil unrest by movements made up of women and minorities, and the costs of prolonged military engagement, the US-organized world system faced a crisis of decreasing profitability.21Kennedy & Shapiro. 2017. American neoliberals seized this opportunity as a chance to finally replace long established Keynesian principles. Although, following Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, “we must above all avoid reducing the crisis of the 1960s and 70s to an economic crisis in the traditional sense of the term. For neoliberalism responded not only to a crisis of accumulation, but also a crisis of governmentality, which itself pertained to a severe crisis of hitherto dominant forms of power.”22Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. Never-Ending Nightmare: The Neoliberal Assault on Democracy. London & New York: Verso Books, 2019, pp. 58. Under the cover of restoring price stability, the ruling classes set about dismantling working class economic, social, and political achievements, secured during the New Deal and post-war Keynesianism. Indeed, we can essentially categorise this phase of neoliberalism, running between the early 1970s and 1990s, as the “great unwiring” of the advances and conditions that the American working class secured during the post war boom.23Kennedy & Shapiro, pp. 11, 12. The systemic dismantling of advances made by the working class is mirrored by attacks on the everyday social solidarities that were a result of working class culture. This dismantling of working class power could only be maintained through an aggressive parallel strategy to infuse a culture of competition “into the nooks and crannies of who we are and the environments we inhabit”24 Wilson, Julie. Neoliberalism. London & New York: Routledge, 2018, pp. 3 from our personal lives to the media we consume.
In this period, neoliberalism’s ravages also gradually hollowed out the so-called ‘middle-class’, a cohort who had expected to live comfortable and fulfilling lives as professionals under capitalism. The installation of precarity and downward mobility at the heart of the middle-class experience served to produce a bitter and alienated generation of workers who often vote against their own interests as they perceive them to be aligned with a class they are no longer a member of, or, a racial or gender position as opposed to a position based on class.25 Carroll, Hamilton. Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 5. As Dardot and Laval see it, “neoliberalisation is a vast enterprise of neo-proletarianization” and, rather than this leading to the growth of a class conscious proletariat, the “social, environmental and subjective ravages… [have] fuelled anger, despair and resignation” which in turn feed modernised forms of fascism that correspond to the “sense of abandonment felt by impoverished populations.”26Dardot & Laval, pp. 22.
In this context competition is proffered as a solution to poverty and misery. Competition and entrepreneurial-individualism are presented as common sense, as the normal ways that people relate to each other in a form of totalising capitalism without any alternative.27Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books, 2009. Competition and market logic expand to every aspect of lived experience in this period and “competition’s totalising yet tenuous power over our everyday lives” makes it seem like the socially constructed forces of neoliberalism are natural rather than “historical, political, and subject to change.”28Wilson, pp. 12. This new reality is one of the central contributing factors to the rise of the MAGA movement in the 2010s.
The MAGA Turn
Since the 2007 financial crash and the subsequent period of harsh austerity, neoliberalism has morphed into something far more authoritarian. In the contemporary period, neoliberalism feeds off the negative reactions it has provoked and is strengthened by the very political hostility it fans. Dardot and Laval are once again insightful:
Trump’s brand of America-First nationalism has not strayed too far from the playbook of neoliberal economics, and while “Trump unquestionably represents a significant development in the history of global neoliberalism”30Ibid, pp. xiv. it is important to appreciate that his government (and other ascendant and elected far right forces across the world), very rarely challenge the bedrock of neoliberalism as a mode of power. They continue to “lighten the tax burden on the wealthiest, reduce social benefits, and speed up deregulation, particularly in financial or ecological matters.”31Ibid, pp. xiv. In fact, as Tom Wraight argues, Trump’s economic policies “represent not a rejection of neoliberalism but an extreme articulation of it”; a protectionist neoliberalism that “seeks to use the coercive power of the state to force other nations to conform to a market-based economic logic”32 Ibid. that benefits the ruling class of the United States. While neoliberalism has often been understood as opposing any state intervention in the flow of trade across borders, in fact, it has historically featured “the aggressive use of the state to enforce the ‘logic of the market’ on the whole of society and culture.”33 Ibid. This can be traced back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and his government’s willingness to use state power to intervene in the market and establish competitive advantages for the US ruling classes. For example, in 1985, the Reagan Administration dealt with the ‘crisis of competitiveness’ by threatening to implement protectionist measures against nations like Japan unless they removed their ‘unfair’ trade practices.34 These practices included things like subsidies, state support for key industries, allowing for vertical integration and so on. These threats were made manifest when Reagan demanded US firms be given a 20 per cent market share of the highly profitable Japanese semiconductor market. When this was not forthcoming he “imposed a 100 per cent tariff on $300 million worth of Japanese semiconductor exports to the United States”35Ibid, pp. 740., essentially forcing Japan to capitulate to America’s demand for an ‘open market’ that the US could dominate. Thus, while Trump’s use of protectionist measures may seem to diverge from neoliberal orthodoxy, in practice, neoliberalism and protectionism have often reinforced each other. Where Trump’s ‘MAGA revolution’ differs is in its added superstructural focus. The culture war helps legitimate the expansion of US neoliberalism’s authoritarian mode; a mode which more frequently utilises state power in order to maintain American dominance within the global market, but which offers the average working-class Trump supporter the pharmakon of superstructural change, rather than economic change.
The prominence of the culture war at this contemporary moment arises out of a system which obliterates any and all forms of social solidarity in favour of a competitive individualism that associates poverty and hardship with personal failure on the one hand and promotes a negative solidarity based on race and nation on the other. This negative solidarity does provide a sort of community to atomised individuals but it is a community with significant caveats and deeply negative effects. For example, this sort of negative solidarity unites people through their race and their nation and associates this newly unified people with hardworking individualism. This racialised community can then be directed against migrants and non-white people who are portrayed as ‘scroungers’ or ‘freeloaders’ leeching off the system that the ‘deserving white workers’ should be benefitting from. This mobilises a twisted version of class politics that reduces class to an identity tied up with whiteness (and often maleness) that can then be directed against the non-white members of the working class.
Class, Culture, Race
Ironically, despite their attacks on ‘identity politics’ the far-right use this exact framework when considering whiteness, nationality, and even class. Central to the right wing culture wars is the phantasm of “the white working class” which is often presented as a patriotic, reactionary, white, and masculine group that has been doubly victimised by the state and by the ‘woke’ left. Hamilton Carroll argues that white masculinity’s turn to the politics of identity is one of the most distinctive and novel aspects of this contemporary right wing resurgence. The way white masculinity “mobilises the very politics of identity that it believes are responsible for the disarticulation of privilege from white male bodies in the first place”36Carroll, Hamilton, Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2011, pp. 6 leads to what Sally Robinson has called “identity politics of the dominant.”37Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. This identity politics of the dominant, in which the white male perceives himself as personally attacked by the gains of feminism and racial equality feeds into a powerful, emotional force in contemporary culture driven by what Jilly Boyce Kay sees as “white men’s anger and humiliation at being ‘left behind.’”38Kay, Jilly Boyce. “Abject Desires in the Age of Anger: Incels, Femcels and the Gender Politics of Unfuckability.” In Imagining “We” in the Age of “I”: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture. Edited by Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra. London & New York: Routledge, 2022, pp.29 As such, the far right will often amplify the fantasy of a past in which the white worker made a breadwinner’s wage, lived with his family in a racially homogenous neighbourhood, and went to church on Sunday. This “racialised and gendered image of a socially recognised patriotic worker”39Toscano, pp. 9 is mobilised in order to construct a false political totality; a victimised group that any white man can be a part of.
Class is collapsed in favour of whiteness as a “supplement to a politically void or spectral notion of the working class…Whiteness seems to be indispensable in order to belong to this working class, while any determinate relation to the means production is optional at best.”40 Ibid, pp. 19, 20. As such, the term ‘white working class’ becomes a useful catch all descriptor used by many across the political divide. For the American far-right it is comprised of ‘forgotten men’, the white heroes who built the country and are now tossed to the curb by a ‘woke’ and ‘feminised’ nation and who now supposedly make up the Republican party’s base, while to the liberal elite they are a base of rural racists who can be blamed for the rise of Trump. In both instances the ‘white working class’ is used as a screen, an exemption, that gives an enormous pass to the upper classes who can position this phantom class as either victim or scapegoat. This is a continuation of historic wars over culture as a nostalgic, twisted version of working class culture is used to position the masses as either part of a nostalgic past – something that has to be made great again; or as part of a boorish mob – something to be denigrated and attacked politically. Both political persuasions of the ruling class now utilise questions of culture to position the working class as inherently reactionary and in doing so work to control and destroy working class solidarity.
Conclusion
The culture wars are not new, nor are they divorced from class struggle. If we lack a truly Marxist theory of culture and ignore the broader function of the culture wars, we risk assenting to the far-right’s control of cultural narratives. This can be seen recently in Ireland with some on the left taking up the claims that anti-migrant protestors have ‘legitimate concerns’ – often accepting a notion of the ‘white working class’ defined by culture, location, and racial identity, rather than a determinate relation to the means of production. It is true that the far-right’s metapolitical culture war is drawing some workers to ideas of racism, nationalism, and chauvinism, but accepting that these ideas have legitimacy is to tail rather than lead the struggle for emancipation. As Gramsci explained in the quote that begins this article, too much ‘political realism’ often leads to the assertion that we should only work within ‘effective reality’; that we should not be interested in what ‘ought to be’ but only in what ‘is.’ In doing this, some on the left resign themselves to agitating only on issues that the working class agrees with already, while broadly sidelining crucial issues of working class unity like anti-racism or trans rights until an indeterminate future point. By refusing to fight ‘the culture war’ today, these portions of the left are, in a sense, absenting themselves from struggle, happy to follow sections of the class rightward while agitating only for economistic demands for a national proletariat.
To this, we say that the working class is not revolutionary by default. Its revolutionary character is built and maintained through collective struggle. The people who have been drawn into the far-right are not operating as members of a class but as a manipulated seriality working on behalf of race, nation, and capital. They have been offered the salve of identifying with the powerful in a cross-class racial alliance in which the ruling class offer not social support, not improvement of economic situation, not even true cultural support, but the feeling of power over others. We should not ignore how intoxicating the feeling of power can be to the powerless, but neither should we make excuses for these reactionary elements of the class. We should lead by example in both economic and cultural struggles and refuse a mechanistic vulgar economism. As Stuart Hall reminds us “hegemony is not a given and permanent state of affairs but has to be actively won and secured: it can also be lost.” 41 Hall, Stuart. “Culture, the Media, and the Ideological Effect” [1977b]. In Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies. Edited by David Morley. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2019: 298-336, pp. 318.There is no such thing as a permanent hegemony and even under totalising hegemonic conditions, such as the authoritarian neoliberalism we find ourselves enmeshed in today, there can be no “total incorporation or absorption of the subordinate classes.”42 Ibid, pp. 319. Consciousness is always contradictory under capitalism and people can be won from, as well as lost to, the ideas of the right. As Marxists we must be willing to build a counter-hegemony that is unapologetically anti-racist, internationalist, and pro-LGBTQ+ as well as anti-capitalist. In a period in which the ruling class has formed a cross-class alliance and directed their power against the limited superstructural protections oppressed communities had previously fought for and won, to fight the class war effectively one must fight the culture war.
