Judy Cox and I never debated one another, although I did try to contact Cox, with no reply. Not only that but the public secret that has been orchestrated around me often causes me to be sceptical of who is who and what is what, especially when it comes to phoney attack pieces meant to put out misconceptions about my work that outlive their refutations.
It's not worthwhile for me to respond to this Red Mole Substack article in detail because it does not begin to try to address my work - same problem as Judy Cox in fact. As far as George Galloway is concerned, this is a ridiculous accusation by Cox that has been lazily repeated in this article, with no substance to the claim, and a charge of class reductionism that is addressed in my reply to Cox published in International Socialism. The argument I make is along the lines of Ellen Meiksins Wood that class is central but not exclusive. Just take Engels' The Origin of the Family and already you have a more complicated picture than the one presented here, and unlike most post-Left thinkers I have no intention of moving backward from the radical leftist canon. The often repeated argument made in this article that women or racial groups etc do not want to wait until after the revolution for their issues to be addressed is not a Marxist or Leninist argument, or a Trotskyist one for that matter, it's a petty-bourgeois argument that I reject. The example of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the early stages until Stalinism took over, is the simplest refutation of that cliché argument - and my reply to Cox mentions Martha Gimenez in that regard, so please do your homework before you pretend to correct me.
A longer reply to Cox than the one the that International Socialism allowed was published on the Communis website: https://communispress.com/in-defence-of-marxism/. My work and my position can't be summed up with a few one liners, not even the notion of zoological materialism. For example, how does that concept, which I use to suggest that Touré Reed did not invent the concept of race reductionism (which for him has implications of later historical developments), relate to Alain Badiou's critique of democratic materialism, or Slavoj Zizek's essay argument in "Postmodernism or Class Struggle, Yes Please," or the critique of post-politics or of autonomist Marxism, just off the top? These are issues that concern me and that are integral to my work even if they are off the radar of reviewers like this one.
If someone wants to know what I think, they could read my last four books on the subject: Class Struggle and Identity Politics, the edited anthology Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism, Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation, and Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (only the version on my academia page is free of typos that were hacked into the final print version).
People who know me know that I've been at work on a book in film studies for some time, with a long essay on Sean Baker's Anora and SRT which took me over one year to research. People could at least wait until the book is published to comment on the manuscript that is in progress. In any case I reject the claim that it's not who wins the Oscar statue that's important but the stage they are standing on. That's not Marxist in the least. That is the kind of nonsense matterism that passes for materialism these days. Moreover, my work does not asses what is important in culture on who wins the awards - and I wrote something to this effect after Macklemore was ignored in almost all of the end of year lists in 2024.
To put things simply on the class and identity discussion, I reject both the "either or" class or identity position, as well as the "do both" class and identity logic that you find for example in intersectionality - there are countless other examples.
Please do me a favour and drop the Galloway comparison. This is a caricature by Red Mole Substack, repeated from Cox, which shows that the said mole is not burrowing but staying on the surface and pretending to burrow. Do some reading before blathering please.
Thank you for the reply, and for the longer piece at Communis, which we have now read in full.
One correction is due. The Galloway comparison was taken from Cox without independent grounding in your work, and having read the Communis piece it is clear it does not hold. You have not written in support of Galloway's politics; the SWP entered Respect, not you. We have added a post-script to the article withdrawing that characterisation. The rigorous characterisation standard we apply to others applies to us, and we failed it here.
The substantive disagreement remains, and it is worth naming precisely. You argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that class is central but not exclusive, and that the task is Marxist universalism rather than either class-only reductionism or do-both intersectionality. We do not dispute that framing. Where we diverge is on how that universalism is built in practice: whether through theoretical clarity about what contaminates socialist politics, or through the patient work of standing with people in their specific struggle until the connections become visible. The Bolshevik evidence you cite via Sharon Smith, which we think actually supports the latter position rather than refuting it, is one of several points that deserves proper treatment. That is a separate piece, not a comment thread.
We will engage the full Communis argument in due course.
Thanks. I would recommend that rather than comment on the Communis piece you comment accurately and comprehensively on my book, Class Struggle and Identity Politics. The Obama book has a long chapter on racialism that may also be of interest, and I will add, since I was canceled by some people for this, that the term "cultural Marxism" predates its use by the alt-right by some twenty years at least, to my knowledge, and was used by the left, which is something many people do not appreciate. This is similar to the appropriation of the term political correctness, which also emerged on the left. The socialist position is not to stand alongside people in their specific struggle, in a logic of allyship. The socialist position takes a Marxist or class line on all struggles and oppressions. It's not as though you have socialists to one side, and women, or LGBTQ groups, or nationalities, on the other. As for Sharon Smith, I'm more in agreement with her earlier writings than her later more conciliatory writing.
The allyship/solidarity distinction is the right place to press the argument, and you are right that allyship logic is liberal rather than socialist. But the FI tradition's case for autonomous women's organising is not allyship logic. It does not position socialists alongside women as an external support. It argues that women's liberation is a constitutive condition of socialist transformation: that without the mobilisation of masses of women in struggle for their own liberation, the working class cannot accomplish its historic tasks. That is not standing alongside. That is an argument about what the working class is and what class struggle requires.
Your own formulation here makes the point: it is not socialists on one side and women on the other. Women are in the class. Their oppression is a class question fought on the terrain of social reproduction. Organisational forms that engage that terrain, the Zhenotdel, the autonomous women's movement the FI built after 1979, are class organisational forms, not allyship arrangements.
Judy Cox and I never debated one another, although I did try to contact Cox, with no reply. Not only that but the public secret that has been orchestrated around me often causes me to be sceptical of who is who and what is what, especially when it comes to phoney attack pieces meant to put out misconceptions about my work that outlive their refutations.
It's not worthwhile for me to respond to this Red Mole Substack article in detail because it does not begin to try to address my work - same problem as Judy Cox in fact. As far as George Galloway is concerned, this is a ridiculous accusation by Cox that has been lazily repeated in this article, with no substance to the claim, and a charge of class reductionism that is addressed in my reply to Cox published in International Socialism. The argument I make is along the lines of Ellen Meiksins Wood that class is central but not exclusive. Just take Engels' The Origin of the Family and already you have a more complicated picture than the one presented here, and unlike most post-Left thinkers I have no intention of moving backward from the radical leftist canon. The often repeated argument made in this article that women or racial groups etc do not want to wait until after the revolution for their issues to be addressed is not a Marxist or Leninist argument, or a Trotskyist one for that matter, it's a petty-bourgeois argument that I reject. The example of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the early stages until Stalinism took over, is the simplest refutation of that cliché argument - and my reply to Cox mentions Martha Gimenez in that regard, so please do your homework before you pretend to correct me.
A longer reply to Cox than the one the that International Socialism allowed was published on the Communis website: https://communispress.com/in-defence-of-marxism/. My work and my position can't be summed up with a few one liners, not even the notion of zoological materialism. For example, how does that concept, which I use to suggest that Touré Reed did not invent the concept of race reductionism (which for him has implications of later historical developments), relate to Alain Badiou's critique of democratic materialism, or Slavoj Zizek's essay argument in "Postmodernism or Class Struggle, Yes Please," or the critique of post-politics or of autonomist Marxism, just off the top? These are issues that concern me and that are integral to my work even if they are off the radar of reviewers like this one.
If someone wants to know what I think, they could read my last four books on the subject: Class Struggle and Identity Politics, the edited anthology Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism, Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation, and Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (only the version on my academia page is free of typos that were hacked into the final print version).
People who know me know that I've been at work on a book in film studies for some time, with a long essay on Sean Baker's Anora and SRT which took me over one year to research. People could at least wait until the book is published to comment on the manuscript that is in progress. In any case I reject the claim that it's not who wins the Oscar statue that's important but the stage they are standing on. That's not Marxist in the least. That is the kind of nonsense matterism that passes for materialism these days. Moreover, my work does not asses what is important in culture on who wins the awards - and I wrote something to this effect after Macklemore was ignored in almost all of the end of year lists in 2024.
To put things simply on the class and identity discussion, I reject both the "either or" class or identity position, as well as the "do both" class and identity logic that you find for example in intersectionality - there are countless other examples.
Please do me a favour and drop the Galloway comparison. This is a caricature by Red Mole Substack, repeated from Cox, which shows that the said mole is not burrowing but staying on the surface and pretending to burrow. Do some reading before blathering please.
Thank you for the reply, and for the longer piece at Communis, which we have now read in full.
One correction is due. The Galloway comparison was taken from Cox without independent grounding in your work, and having read the Communis piece it is clear it does not hold. You have not written in support of Galloway's politics; the SWP entered Respect, not you. We have added a post-script to the article withdrawing that characterisation. The rigorous characterisation standard we apply to others applies to us, and we failed it here.
The substantive disagreement remains, and it is worth naming precisely. You argue, following Ellen Meiksins Wood, that class is central but not exclusive, and that the task is Marxist universalism rather than either class-only reductionism or do-both intersectionality. We do not dispute that framing. Where we diverge is on how that universalism is built in practice: whether through theoretical clarity about what contaminates socialist politics, or through the patient work of standing with people in their specific struggle until the connections become visible. The Bolshevik evidence you cite via Sharon Smith, which we think actually supports the latter position rather than refuting it, is one of several points that deserves proper treatment. That is a separate piece, not a comment thread.
We will engage the full Communis argument in due course.
Thanks. I would recommend that rather than comment on the Communis piece you comment accurately and comprehensively on my book, Class Struggle and Identity Politics. The Obama book has a long chapter on racialism that may also be of interest, and I will add, since I was canceled by some people for this, that the term "cultural Marxism" predates its use by the alt-right by some twenty years at least, to my knowledge, and was used by the left, which is something many people do not appreciate. This is similar to the appropriation of the term political correctness, which also emerged on the left. The socialist position is not to stand alongside people in their specific struggle, in a logic of allyship. The socialist position takes a Marxist or class line on all struggles and oppressions. It's not as though you have socialists to one side, and women, or LGBTQ groups, or nationalities, on the other. As for Sharon Smith, I'm more in agreement with her earlier writings than her later more conciliatory writing.
The allyship/solidarity distinction is the right place to press the argument, and you are right that allyship logic is liberal rather than socialist. But the FI tradition's case for autonomous women's organising is not allyship logic. It does not position socialists alongside women as an external support. It argues that women's liberation is a constitutive condition of socialist transformation: that without the mobilisation of masses of women in struggle for their own liberation, the working class cannot accomplish its historic tasks. That is not standing alongside. That is an argument about what the working class is and what class struggle requires.
Your own formulation here makes the point: it is not socialists on one side and women on the other. Women are in the class. Their oppression is a class question fought on the terrain of social reproduction. Organisational forms that engage that terrain, the Zhenotdel, the autonomous women's movement the FI built after 1979, are class organisational forms, not allyship arrangements.
It's very good article Duncan. It is a really helpful guide to reflection on practice. Thanks