BOURGEOIS LEFT

DAVID WALSH—What preoccupied official “radical,” academic and even artistic circles, however, in the months and years preceding the present crisis was the increasingly unhinged and selfish politics of race, gender and sexuality. Countless articles, books and pronouncements of various kinds informed the public that the “defining issue of our time” was, for example, “white privilege,” reparations for slavery, the #MeToo campaign or sexual harassment—or, for that matter, baleful “Russian interference” in the great American democratic project.

DAVID WALSH-In his own speech to the court, Weinstein explained that he thought the relationships with the various women were consensual and suggested, in the words of the New York Times, that “he was the victim of a rush to judgment.” He argued, according to the Times, “that the #MeToo campaign was similar to the Red Scare of the 1950s and compared himself to the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who was jailed and blacklisted after joining the Communist Party. ‘I think that is what is happening now all over this country,’ Mr. Weinstein said.”

ALEX LANTIER—#MeToo’s role exposes the interaction of petty-bourgeois identity politics with the agenda of capitalist governments. Promoting gender politics in opposition to class politics, #MeToo has relentlessly moved to the right.

Macron has reacted to 16 months of mass strikes and Yellow Vest protests against its overwhelmingly unpopular pension cuts and tax cuts for the rich by cultivating far-right police forces to assault protesters. Since Macron hailed France’s Nazi-collaborationist dictator Philippe Pétain as a “great soldier” in 2018, police have arrested over 11,000 people, wounded nearly 5,000 and killed two.

ERIC ZUESSE—On January 17th, Reuters editors chose to publish and headline an alleged ‘news’-report “Flap with Warren knocks Sanders’ strategy off course”, indicating that Sanders was ‘knocked off course’, and that Warren gained at his expense, when the January 14th final pre-primaries debate in Des Moines included Elizabeth Warren saying that Bernie Sanders had told her that a woman can’t win the Presidency in the United States and Sanders responded by saying that he had never said to anyone anything of the sort because he never believed anything of the sort.

TONY SUTTON—If the system is so obviously flawed, then how does capitalism continue to get away with such shameless, self-centred behaviour? That’s the question that Rosenthal confronts in the early sections of Rebel Minds, where she analyses the physical and mental torment created by ever-increasing demands of profit-hungry bosses on workers who have become numbed by mindless and meaningless, drudgery in jobs that barely pay their bills.