Ash Sarker’s recent book on identity politics has drawn media attention for its criticism of the left as well as the right. But it does not adequately deal with the issues it raises, argues BEA GARDNER, in particular relating to identity and class.
Minority Rule
By Ash Sarkar
Published by Bloomsbury, 2025, £18-99
Minority Rule is the first book by Ash Sarkar, who over the past decade has built a sizeable influence as a left political commentator. She also describes herself as a Marxist. Her rebuttal to Piers Morgan in a 2018 TV debate – “I’m literally a communist, you idiot” – has received over eight million views on the YouTube account of Novara Media, which Sarkar is a contributing editor of.
Given her left profile, Sarkar’s book will be a pole of attraction to a sizable layer looking for an explanation about the rise of the far right and attacks on migrants and trans people continuing under the new Labour government. It is therefore necessary to engage with her core ideas and appraise what they offer to those seeking answers.
The book is based on her reflections from nearly a decade of “adventures in the culture war”. It fundamentally outlines what is already known: that the culture wars are a mechanism of distraction, a means of dividing the working class who would otherwise be a threat to the ruling class and their system. Things are not as they are because of “purposeless, random, disconnected phenomena” but are the “result of, and in service to, a historic wealth and resources grab”.
But she also poses that the book is an account for why Marx and Engels, who she describes as predicting “much of the harvest” when it comes to capitalism’s development, got “one massive thing wrong”. She wants to explain why they predicted a proletarian revolution, “yet revolution feels further away than ever”.
The conclusion Sarkar eventually comes to in her final chapter is that “the politics we have are a reflection of the balance of class forces”. She believes the balance is tipped in favour of the ruling elite because they are conscious of their class interests and act collectively to advance them. She pays little attention, however, to the fact that inter-capitalist rivalry is a fundamental feature of the system, including between nation-states.
Meanwhile, according to Sarkar, billions of working-class people are “splintered on the basis of nation, language, gender, sexuality, race and religion… viewing solidarity with suspicion” and “embracing the idea of being minorities, despite forming the majority class”.
Misdirected blame
The cause of this “fragmented working-class power”? She describes how real social decline and problems are “shoehorned” into a narrative that allows the “most ardent defenders of predatory capitalism to profit politically from the very problems they create”.
This is the dynamic captured in the book’s title. ‘Minority rule’ is the concept Sarkar uses to describe an “irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations” at the same time as the real ruling elite, themselves a tiny minority, misdirect blame through the culture wars to retain their power.
For example, in a chapter on demographic panic, Sarkar discusses how “transgender people are consistently presented as a dangerous minority” despite comprising around “0.5 per cent of the population in England and Wales” according to the 2021 census. She describes how they are “being turned into hyper-visible hate figures”, despite experiencing oppression, discrimination and harassment themselves. Sarkar correctly recognises that this is a means of distracting people away from the real economic issues, including underfunding of services and the housing crisis.
The ‘minority’ to blame shifts and changes: it’s antiracist campaigners eroding white working-class culture, it’s left-wing students banning free speech and so on. In each case, the effect is to delegitimise the issues of the minority groups in question and to maintain a divided working class in order to inhibit efforts to address economic inequality faced by the working class as a whole
She dedicates five chapters to describing mechanisms by which the ruling elite has successfully misdirected blame through the culture wars in recent years. It’s down to “a media machine that’s dedicated to pumping trivial outrage-bait; a political class that’s obsessed with chasing headlines; the stoking of anti-immigration moral panics and the hobbling of working-class institutions like trade unions and council housing… and a confected sense of demographic panic which detects antagonism horizontally and downwards rather than up at elites”.
However, the chapter that grabbed the most headlines, and the one she opens with, also places blame for a fragmented working class with the left for its embrace of liberal identity politics and internalising an “individualistic and competitive model of victimhood”.
She argues the left has made it impossible to build a mass movement capable of taking on extreme concentrations of wealth and power; “instead of talking seriously about bringing down capitalism, we’re seeing identity politics invoked to police relatively trivial social interactions”. She argues this has been of assistance to the right by opening the door to victimhood being expropriated and exploited by them. In her epilogue, Sarkar writes, “we are like this because we’ve been losing. But it’s also time to admit we’ve been losing because we are like this”.
She does not reject identity politics altogether, but rather ‘liberal’ identity politics, the core components of which include belief in “irreducible differences” between groups, meaning, for example, a common political identity such as ‘LGBT’ or ‘Black’ cannot speak for more than one specific group. It also includes a belief that minority groups have competing interests and that lived experience has unassailable political authority.
She argues that adopting these beliefs has created an “inverse hierarchy” within left groups and spaces, where those most recognised as “victims” hold the most power, but this does not result in any material change.
Instead of liberal identity politics, she advocates for a reclamation of what she sees as the radical identity politics of the twentieth century. She yearns for political movements more ambitious in their goal to end oppression and anti-capitalist in their outlook, including the Combahee River Collective (CRC), founded in the US in 1974, who Sarkar attributes as having coined the term “identity politics” itself.
She outlines how this group saw that “race and class were experienced simultaneously” and that “systems of oppression” including capitalism, imperialism and patriarchy were “interlocking”.
There are many positives to understanding the interconnected nature of oppression. It points to the need to fight collectively with others or instead of alone or as a single group. It points towards how the system itself produces and reinforces inequalities, rather than being the result of a vague culture or the actions of individuals in isolation.
However, there is also a danger in this formulation of viewing capitalism as one among many systems, and class consequently as one among many oppressions. In reality, it is the capitalist system as a whole that has woven into its fabric oppression and exploitation of many kinds, including sexism and racism. It means liberation cannot be achieved while capitalism remains intact as an economic, political and social system.
Through the institutions of capitalism, including the legal system, education, media and politicians, then ideologies that support inequality and division are reproduced – this is the essence of the culture war that Sarkar outlines.
The targets can vary between time and place, and social progress can be made, but the overall effects of dividing the working class for the benefit of the ruling class remains. Sarkar acknowledges this regarding race, explaining that race has never been used to describe difference but always to “enforce inequality”, though who is the target of racism has shifted over time.
Class struggle
Overall, it is positive that Sarkar attempts to raise the sights of what fighting for liberation should look like, that it should involve “transforming society” not only “concern with being represented within it”. However, it was not an accident that the movements Sarkar looks towards in the 1970s, including the Black Panther Party, arose in a context of heightened workers’ struggles more broadly as well as the recent memory of the civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war protests.
In the UK in particular, the 1970s were dominated by heightened industrial struggles, with the trade unions reaching record levels of membership that rose rapidly during the decade, including among women. So, those becoming radicalised based on oppression today are not starting from the same starting point as the likes of the Panthers or the Combahee River Collective.
Sarkar mentions how the adoption of neoliberal policies by the capitalist class and its political representatives in response to the end of the post-war boom in the 1970s created an environment in which a form of identity politics divorced from class could flourish, with an emphasis on “individualised competitive solutions”. What she does not really explain, however, is how this process was reinforced by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the capitalist triumphalism that followed, and its consequent effect on the mass organisations of the working class – both the trade unions and the Labour Party – as their leaders swallowed the ruling class propaganda that there was no alternative to the capitalism and retreated from collective struggle.
Class struggle is noticeable by its absence throughout Sakar’s book. Dominant features covered include the London riots of 2011, the defeat of Corbyn in 2019, and an epilogue on the far-right dominated riots of 2024. Missing are the movements against austerity, including the public sector general strike over pensions in 2011 or the recent strike wave, which saw the highest levels of strike action since the 1980s.
By not understanding the importance of class struggle, Sarkar instead overemphasises the defeat of Corbyn and in many ways her book is written in the context of that defeat. The main conclusion she draws from the Corbyn experience is that “class remains central to the way politics is conducted”. However, she argues that the right has been successful in defining what it means to be “working class” in a way that suits their interests. She outlines how the same commentators demonising the working class during the 2000s suddenly shifted to becoming champions for the “white working class” to establish oppositionality and competing interests between white working-class communities and others.
This is the real background for her apparent turn against identity politics: lamenting the demise of Labour’s ties with the working class, drawing the conclusion that Corbyn lost sections of the working class to the right and that identity politics has been at the heart of this, with class coming to be defined by political and cultural outlooks, not “shared material and economic conditions”.
Ultimately, Sarkar rejects identity politics because she wants workers looking to Reform UK to drop their identity politics too, to recognise their true class interests lie with the likes of Sarkar not Farage. But what the working class needs is its own agency, not for the left’s “new plan to change the UK for the better” that Sarkar is “eager for”.
It is positive that Sarkar talks about class throughout her book, that she consistently points toward the ruling class as the real cause of the multiple problems people face and that she identifies the absence of working-class unity as a barrier to being able to challenge the ruling class for power.
However, it takes until more than halfway through the book for a definition of class to be given, and what is offered is a serious distortion that indicates not only Sarkar’s confusion on class but also the nature of capitalist society itself.
She acknowledges that Marx defined class by relationship to the means of production but offers a definition of class for “a modern context” which entirely rejects this approach. Instead, she argues, “society has been cleaved in two: there are landlords, the people and corporations who increasingly own everything, and there are the tenants. That’s everybody else”.
She works out who is part of the “big us” and who makes up the smaller “them” based solely on wealth: “If you sold all your worldly possessions, added your savings and the value of any investments, and then deducted the sum total of your personal debt would you have enough to live on? If the answer is no, then welcome to the struggle”.
She recognises it is reductionist but advocates for it as a means of drawing a “nice bright line of opposing interests”. Never mind that the argument quickly falls apart when you consider any pensioner who has paid off a mortgage would likely, by this definition, be part of a ruling elite.
She also conflates size with power, explaining that social transformation happens when one class is “big enough” to overthrow the other. History, however, shows us that the bourgeois revolutions have leaned on the oppressed masses to assist in the taking of power, crushing radical movements afterwards.
The working class is the most powerful force for social transformation because of its relationship to production. The fact that it is also the numerically largest class globally adds to that power.
Capitalism is a deeply unequal system, based on a tiny minority that owns and controls what society as a whole needs, but it cannot operate without workers. When workers strike together, society can come to a halt. Because of the economic exploitation all workers face, they have the potential interest in uniting and acting together.
However, for the working class to shift from being a class in itself, to a class for itself it needs to become aware of the collective exploitation and begin to work together to challenge it. It is through the experience of class struggle that broader conclusions are drawn, and also how existing divisions of all kinds can be broken down. At any stage, differences in consciousness between different sections of the class reflect different experiences, particularly of struggle, but also the role of leadership.
Class consciousness
Sarkar does deal with the question of class consciousness, but disappointingly, this is an inaccurate and one-sided view that does not give attention to the impact of class struggle on consciousness or of global political and economic developments.
In her account of what she sees as a long-term decline in Britain’s working-class consciousness, she gives a potted history of how industrial labour, the trade union movement and council housing were systematically undermined and destroyed by Thatcher.
She emphasises that before then, working-class identity was “a political identity defined by living together, working together and fighting together” and where “working class people voted Labour as a bloc, the ties between the organised labour movement and the party were solid, if occasionally strained, and class consciousness was strong”.
In reality, working-class consciousness has never been as fixed or uniform as Sarkar implies. How would Sarkar account for the presence of Conservative Party supporters groups within the trade unions, for example? The ‘institutions’ of working men’s clubs, trade unions and council housing are themselves the product of historical circumstances, including the nature of the post-war era.
Crucially, consciousness is not linear either. During 2022 and 2023, more days were lost to strike action than in any year since 1989. Trade union membership increased and remains over six million today. The important consideration is not where class consciousness was 50 years ago and today, but the direction of travel now and what that means for the struggle in the coming period.
One consequence of the strike wave, for example, is the recruitment of a new layer of reps and activists, who have now also gained their first experience of strike action, important factors in the processes of rebuilding the trade unions as fighting workers organisations, the first steps toward overcoming the setback in workers consciousness.
While the conclusions of those layers will be partially dependent on what was won in the course of their disputes, nevertheless, the overall conclusion by big sections of workers is that striking works. In the course of mass struggles, divisions of many kinds can become quickly eroded and overcome, as the dividing “lines of opposing interests” becomes apparent in the course of the actual, rather than hypothetical, struggle.
Building unity through struggle
At the end of her chapter on the left, Sarkar asks “what is the point of the left?”. It’s a good question. She responds that “feeling seen has never changed the world”. She instead quotes from the Communist Manifesto, stating the proletarian revolution is the “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority”.
Such a movement, she rightly understands, will have internal contradictions and will involve “bringing together people who have viewed each other as others, rivals, and even enemies”.
It would be a helpful conclusion if Sarkar understood this as the real job of the left: to help overcome such division by uniting the working class, of all genders, sexualities, ethnicities, other oppressions and divisions. This cannot be achieved by demanding unity. Rather, by concretely building it through the course of struggles and uniting workers around a shared programme that both recognises the specific needs and interests of oppressed groups, and points toward the need for a united class struggle to achieve it.
That kind of leadership would take seriously the question of how to develop a strategy committed to fighting oppression at the same time as overcoming division and building unity. Unfortunately, that is not the kind of leadership Sarkar offers; in fact, she consciously opts out, writing “other people are doing the work of thinking through tactics and strategy for the left”.
Instead, having presented serious criticisms of the left at the start of her book, she instead focuses on the “right’s political tactics”, without drawing out a strategy to challenge and cut through their divisive rhetoric and claims.
This is disappointing because Sarkar is seen as a left figure, and the book will be read by a section looking for ideas about what they can do to oppose, for example, the growth in support for the far right and oppose further attacks on trans people.
By pointing in the direction of the class-based nature of society and directing blame at the ruling class Sarkar does expose some of the methods by which they successfully manage to divide working class people. By sharing the ideas of Marx and Engels, and calling herself a Marxist, the book might even spark interest in Marxist ideas among this layer.
However, in and of itself, it falls well short of providing a full explanation for any of the processes taking place in Britain, let alone internationally. Written out is any serious engagement with struggles of any kind, including those over issues of fighting oppression.
Similarly, while it is positive that Sarkar recognises some of the limitations of identity politics, this is not the same as offering an alternative way of organising and in reality, she embraces its core features.
She also omits the role that conscious Marxists and socialists, organised in a party with a programme, can play in the struggle to transform society.
All of this has the potential to disorientate and confuse, as well as sow despondency. In reality, the depth of the capitalist crisis and the volatile world situation mean that there have already been mass social movements and uprisings globally, with prospects for further revolutionary processes unfolding. In Britain, a stormy period of class struggle is on the horizon. All of this means the potential for the working class to draw wide-reaching, socialist conclusions is posed, and opportunities to contend for power are not as far away as they might appear.