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Interesting to see that the communist party of Britain came out against gender identity, being the “only party in Britain to do so”.
Rather good arguments as well.
https://www.communistparty.org.uk/the-gender-recognition-bill-and-equality-law/
Of course the average generation Z twitter communist (of the type who has read one book and it’s not the communist manifesto, but the one from the evil transphobe) is up in arms in their respective bedrooms and basements. What would the communist party of Great Britain, an actual party rooted in tradition and theory, associated with actual working people who leave their bedrooms know about communism anyway. It’s all about beating up terfs. It’s always been about beating up terfs, that’s what historical determinism is about.
I don’t live in Britain anymore but if I did I would vote for the communists for the first time ever.
The "Communist Party of Britain" is a tiny Stalinist sect. The CPB should not be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain. The CPB was formed as an offshoot of the slightly more mainstream CPGB in the 1980s when the leadership of the latter decided "hm, maybe totalitarianism and mass murder is bad". From the first paragraph of the CPB's Wikipedia article:
The Pyongyang Declaration:
So you would side with (even vote for!) these Stalinists, North Korea apologists, wannabe mass murderers, these certified lunatics, because they said "trans bad"?
You will surely understand why your post doesn't make me more sympathetic to the anti-trans side.
The Trans Question in an actual, living political issue in western countries. It matters; it has a direct impact on people's lives. Taking a stand one way or the other entails having some amount of skin in the game. An individual's views on trans issues are a strong signal of what sort of social classifications they belong to.
In contrast to being pro- or anti-trans, being pro- or anti-Stalin is much closer to being a personal aesthetic choice. It's a dead issue. There is no realistic chance of anyone implementing a Stalinist agenda in any western democracy. It's spatially and temporally distant from us; one is free to treat it with a degree of irony.
From that perspective, someone's views on trans issues say a lot more to me about what type of person they are than their views on Stalinism. I choose my political allies based on their perspectives on living issues, living questions. Their views on dead issues and lost causes are less relevant.
Some would disagree in reference to the Critical Theory Revolution. No, it won't have red banners, hammers-and-sickles, and drawn-out applauses for Uncle Joe, but the substance would still be there.
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Im not sure I care about what sways your opinion. What I like about the CPB is that they are one of the few socialist parties to describe trans as a neoliberal project.
Why would you like that, it’s not solely a neoliberal project, it’s clearly much far reaching than “neoliberal”, and especially rich considering it was vastly overrepresented in the left before it was present anywhere else including the neoliberal Center.
Why wouldn’t I like that. I’m not a communist, a socialist, a neo liberal or a neo conservative. Or a green, mainly because they have unworkable policies. So I vote for the best option.
Confusing
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No I don't. By your own admission this is a tiny Stalinist sect. The majority of communists nowadays are pro trans. It's a bit weird that the same thing doesn't make you lose sympathy for the pro-trans side.
Sorry, by "this", I meant the post I was replying to. I have edited the comment now to clarify.
The reason the post doesn't make me more sympathetic to the anti-trans side is that it was someone from the anti-trans side who saw this insane Stalinist sect post something anti-trans and then apparently decided that Stalinism isn't so bad after all as long as it keeps trans women out of women's toilets.
It still comes off as "it's ok if you vote for the commies, as long it's the pro-trans ones" given the leanings of communists, and trans activists.
I think Tarn's comment was more along the lines of something Brandon Hererra once said in a Gun Meme Review video: "stop simping for Communists." You're interpreting it in the other direction.
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It's a very 'conservative' mealy-mouthed statement that seems desperate to look for an excuse to not put themselves behind placing men into womens prisons. Here's a pro-tip for center liberals and the CPB: If you say you are in favor of trans rights, open your eyes and recognize that these are men asking for the rights and privileges of women. If you are in favor of that don't act shocked or walk back your support or hide behind excuses when those men take advantage of those rights and privileges.
Worries about legal implications and consequences for the broader system are, in activist terms, called growing pains. To give an example of this, the desegregation implementation in the US impacted prisoners a lot. We are talking untold numbers of beatings, killings and rapes. All for racial justice. Similar stories can be found in British society and in British prisons as a consequence of immigration.
The morbid facts of those matters are not of any significant inconvenience to anyone who pushed for the policies of desegregation or immigration and integration. It's at best an inconvenient bump in the road that, in hindsight, should have been handled slightly differently, but never will be since doing so might make the whole thing look worse. But there's no grief there or anything. No one loses any sleep over it, ever. No matter how gruesome and horrifying the consequence of their advocacy was and continues to be. Most people never even think about it.
Compared to that, what is the worst case scenario here? What am I being asked to think and care about? A trans person rapes a woman in jail? Or, to put it in a way that is consistent with the CPB's own statement, a woman rapes a woman in jail? Sorry, compared to the rest of the progressive program, an increase in rapes in womens prisons isn't something I'm going to be losing sleep over. Nor should anyone in favor of desegregation or third world immigration if they in any way shape or form care about consistency. It's actually just a gender inclusive joke now. Don't drop the soap!
All in all, I find the whole clash between trans issues and womens issues to be highly illustrative of just how much more society cares for women than men. We are seeing strides towards gender equality that no MRA type could ever even have dreamt of. All off the back of a few guys who pretend to be women. Like, as a man, the actual mechanism for more equality is to pretend to be a woman.
The ideology says that women don't have privileges, even when they do, so I doubt this will happen.
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Theres a lot of off topic sentiment there. It’s quite possible to desegregate the prisons and penalise rape in prisons.
You didn’t read the statement if you think the CPG would describe transwomen as women.
„ The Communist Party is the only political party with a coherent political analysis of sex and gender. Gender as an ideological construct should not be confused or conflated with the material reality of biological sex. Gender is the vehicle through which misogyny is enacted and normalised. Gender identity ideology is well- suited to the needs of the capitalist class, focusing as it does on individual as opposed to collective rights, enabling and supporting the super-exploitation of women.“
The CPB contradicting itself isn't a problem of mine.
I'm hesitant to attach myself to any specific theory or definition relating to 'trans-anything' since there are so many, but it's a common feature for the vast majority of them to define 'trans acceptance' as an acceptance of the trans person as their identified gender. That means that you don't get to hold biology or anything else over their head in any way shape or form. Trans women are women and that's that. Anything else is not trans accepting but trans exclusionary. If you are trans exclusionary you are not supporting the right of trans people to live free from discrimination and prejudice. You are in fact doing the opposite.
Rape is already penalized in prisons. That doesn't stop it from happening. The thing that would actually drastically stop a lot of it from happening, along with a lot of the beatings, murders and so on, would be to segregate the prisons. But the vast majority of people decided that the cost, that included torturous beatings, rapes and murders, was worth it for the sake of whatever racial ideology they believed in.
With that being the case I don't see how it could possibly be such a tough hill to climb to just let trans people into whatever prison they want to. Not to be a smartass but just apply the same rubric you just applied to mens prisons and desegregation. It's quite possible to allow trans folk into whatever prison they want and penalize whatever negative that comes of it. Is it not?
Quoting that one paragraph again doesn’t help your argument.
If rape were properly penalised in prison it wouldn’t happen. In the US at least rape is part of the process.
Mealy-mouthed:
afraid to speak frankly or straightforwardly
If the CPB doesn't support trans rights then they shouldn't say that they support trans rights.
Brushing aside what appears, to me, to be an unfortunately 'low resolution' view on prison rape, pending clarification. What is the problem with letting trans people into womens prisons? Just "properly" penalize them so they don't do anything wrong.
Thats a lot of extra work to facilitate a fantasy.
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Is the communist party of Great Britain associated with actual working class people? I mean this is probably evidence that it is, but there’s a wide variety of tiny old-school Stalinist parties willing to denounce modern -isms as a distraction from class conflict.
The "Communist Party of Britain" isn't even the British communist party. That would be the "Communist Party of Great Britain" (which was Soviet-backed, and disbanded after the fall of the Soviet Union, with its leaders drifting seamlessly into senior positions in the left wing NGO-sphere). The "Communist Party of Britain" was a tankie splinter group that split off from the "Communist Party of Great Britain" in 1985 (de facto) or 1988 (de jure).
The bit in The Life of Brian about the rivalry between the People's Front of Judea and the Judean People's Front was inspired by real events in British hard-left politics at the time Monty Python were making the film.
Of all British "communist" groups, the one you really need to watch out for are the "Revolutionary Communist Party", who appear to be libertarians (but are currently LARPing as anti-woke social conservatives).
My understanding is that CPGB went "gender critical" before and harder than CPB.
My understanding is that the CPGB dissolved in 1991, long before this question was mainstream enough for a party to want to take a stance on it.
Ah yes, I see the full name of the group is CPGB(ML). This is the one I meant, though.
Yes, they are separate and apparently unrelated parties. The genealogy appears to be as follows:
CPGB (main British communist party for most of the 20th century) – dissolved in 1991
Labour Party – extant
The above is not exhaustive. There are a bunch of small far-left sects which are not included here.
Including Simon Pure's Good Brand, which has managed to survive for nearly 120 years without ever being relevant to wider politics:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain
Gotta say that "Instantly enact complete and full communism with abolition of money and everything else, but only if we get 50%+1 in the election" is at least a slightly endearing position.
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At a guess, it's associated with working class communists. All two of them.
To their credit, the 19th century left ran a lot of educational programs for working men, and so their genuinely was a large cohort of working class people who understood and believed in socialist theory. But their main representative was the Labour party. The Communists must always have been the extremist fringe of the movement.
Yeah, I was gonna say, I'm an American and even I can recognize that this would be a bigger deal if it was Labour that was putting out this statement. Having a Communist Party in the UK seems almost redundant.
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