GCs suckered by Communist Party press release
I’ll be honest, I didn’t have JK Rowling and Graham Linehan singing the praises of authoritarian micro-faction the Communist Party of Britain on my bingo card for this year, but there we are. And with that they’ve only really served to demonstrate how far they are from understanding what the broader left really thinks at all.
By way of background context, the Communist Party of Britain has an interesting history, having emerged out of a schism in the (Russian funded) CPGB after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Recent estimates for their membership, including the significantly more active Young Communist League are around 1500 people. The original CPGB which it emerged from in the 90s had been one of the more prominent left wing factions to have defended the USSR’s crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 and during Stalin’s reign of terror had their policies personally approved of by him. My understanding is that more recently the CPB have policies not to directly celebrate Stalin, which given how awful it looks when people do that is understandable, but is rather less useful with respect to present day horrors. They are open with their support for the authoritarian regime in North Korea, and in 2022 issued a statement equivocating about the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a matter of a struggle between capitalist empires rather than recognising it as a war of expansion and aggression by Russia.
Regarding the statement by the CPB on “Gender Identity Ideology” itself, it’s full of GC dog whistles and, perhaps surprising for a communist party but only if you’ve been living under a rock, repeats a number of positions on trans life that you would see in the Murdoch press, with little evidence of any sort of contact with left wing Trans Liberationist thought, or with the thought of revolutionary communist feminists like Angela Davis (who has made her support and solidarity for trans liberation clear).
But really at the bottom of the issues here is that the problem that trans liberationists have with the right — the reason we point out when GC activists are connecting themselves with and emboldening the far right in particular — is that they (like a handful of microfactions of the authoritarian left!) are profoundly authoritarian, and quite comfortable with the idea of dictatorship in service of their political aims. The CPB’s support of the North Korean regime makes this as abundantly clear as their political predecessors support for Stalin and the crushing of the Hungarian rebellion.
Meanwhile much of the rest of the left in Britain is vibrant, diverse and anti-authoritarian. The latter is particularly relevant in terms of the widespread skepticism of state regulation of identities, how that plays into capitalist border control projects and threats of creeping encroachment on our lives (concerns which the CPB brushes away as “individualist” and “suited to Capitalism”.
Anyway, fine J.K. Rowling, your war on trans people is emboldening the far right who quote your words when they attack trans healthcare policies and attempt to legislate us out of public life in the USA, AND it is also emboldening pathetic authoritarian communists I guess, who aren’t meaningfully in power and aren’t likely to be. You got us there.
Neither of these are good things and both of them are damning to the gender critical agenda, in terms of what either association means for human rights.
