In Praise of “Brocialism”

David Lindsay

Corbyn looking cool

Recent events have redefined the political debate, and ongoing events are continuing to redefine it, in terms of economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends. In the struggle for economic equality, the leading role belongs to the working class, and the leading role within the working class belongs to the trade union and co-operative movements. In the struggle for international peace, the leading role belongs to the working class and to the youth. It is possible to see that latter dimension in the movements around Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, and Ron Paul. When seen in that context, then it is only to be expected and applauded that those youth movements are largely male.

The eventual failure of the Ron Paul campaign was in no small measure due to its failure to locate the struggle for international peace within the struggle for economic equality, and vice versa. The Bernie Sanders phenomenon remains constrained by its failure to learn the lesson of Donald Trump’s victory, and of Leave’s victory in Britain: that the workers, and not the liberal bourgeoisie, are now the key swing voters, so that environmental and identity issues are subordinate within that, if they can be, or they are precluded by it, if they cannot be so subordinate.

Enter the Brocialists, if that is what you want to call them, and as they might usefully call themselves. Born in the 1990s or in the twenty-first century, they are hectored by the likes of Harriet Harman, Stella Creasy, Yvette Cooper, Jess Phillips and Laura Pidcock, causing them to wonder, “Well, what the hell did I ever do?” They are stunned at the very existence of all-women shortlists, which are the kind of thing that they have grown up assuming to be illegal, and which have not brought more women into politics, but have simply made it far easier for women to get on by drastically restricting the field. Women now need to be far less accomplished, capable or even promising than men do, and they are routinely wafted into positions for which their male contemporaries would be told that they were far too young.

Those contemporaries fail to see the economically egalitarian gains of the decades since the 1970s. Alongside a collapse in male employment that had in any case largely happened by the time that they came along, the defining experience of their own politics has been to have grown up under Governments, of all three parties, that have harvested young men in wars with a sheer pointlessness that had not been since 1918. Hence their attraction and attachment to a politician who has opposed every single one of those wars.

The very same Governments, of all three parties, have refused as a matter of principle to reindustrialise Britain, have taken pride in presiding over the collapse of parliamentary scrutiny in the House of Commons by ensuring that any and everything has to be nodded through for the sake of school holidays and babies’ bathtimes, have turned fathers into cash machines whom vengeful exes can deny on pain of imprisonment any contact with the children for whom they are rightly still obliged to pay, have empowered women to take men to the cleaners financially after even the briefest of relationships, have dramatically altered the content of arts and humanities courses against male interests (a key element in the prevention or suppression of the radical political action to which mass classical education has always been fundamental), have pumped boys full of Ritalin, have classified young male political engagement and many other normal patterns of male behaviour as autistic spectrum disorders, are now trying to force bare breasts and vaginas into men’s and boys’ communal showers and changing rooms by means of gender self-identification, and have redefined rape as any heterosexual encounter that the female partner chooses to declare to have been so, under cover of anonymity and even decades after the event.

Write it on the doorposts: all of these things have been done by the Governments, of all three parties, whose economic and foreign policies have directly caused the Corbyn phenomenon. Brocialism? Of course it is Brocialism. Not before time

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