If you move in certain internet circles, you will already know who Ash Sarkar is. That is, you will have seen, and possibly celebrated, the 2018 viral clip of her appearance on Good Morning Britain, during which she called Piers Morgan an “idiot”, and responded to his accusation that she admired Barack Obama by saying, “I’m literally a communist”.
You can watch this video on YouTube, of course. If you search Sarkar’s name on that site, the literally-a-communist clip will pop up alongside other clips with titles such as “Ash Sarkar Calls Out Matt Goodwin on BBC Radio 4″ or “Ash Sarkar smashes BBC Question Time”. The vocabulary is familiar. Calls out. Smashes. Destroys. This is the language of the mainstream media culture wars, in which people are DESTROYED but their careers, and their ideas, are left mysteriously standing. So, is Sarkar just another culture war pundit?
In a sense, yes. Sarkar is a contributing editor at Novara Media, an independent, non-profit digital platform for left-wing news and commentary. Novara was set up in 2011 and has since become the first resort of legacy media producers in the UK who want a left-wing person to provide “balance” against a TV panel of otherwise standard, which is to say right-wing, pundits. (A punnet of pundits?)
You could dismiss Sarkar, therefore, as a token TV lefty, or a YouTube talking head. But she isn’t really either of these things. Growing up Bengali in Enfield, north London, and raised by a social-worker mother, she came by her politics honestly. She is a fluent and informed arguer. And what she articulates, for a popular audience, is a serious left-wing critique of the late years of liberalism.
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For instance: among those smashy and destructive YouTube clips is a video called “Ash Sarkar DESTROYS ... herself?” in which Sarkar presents a lucid account of why DESTROYING someone in a viral TV moment leaves basic ideological issues – ie what actually matters – untouched. In other words, Sarkar isn’t fighting the culture wars. She’s trying to get us to see what the culture wars really mean. (In any case, we shouldn’t knock left-wing pundits for exhibiting professionalism. Making cogent left-wing political points on TV isn’t easy. You try it.)
Minority Rule is Sarkar’s first book. The subtitle is off-putting. More “Adventures in the Culture War”? Surely our appetite for books that rehash (or rehashtag – sorry) scandalous Tweets from news cycles past has waned to the point of near-extinction by now? But Minority Rule isn’t that sort of book. Sarkar has come not to wage the culture wars but to bury them. To do so, she advances a critique that has long since been standard on the Marxist left. But it is a critique that everyone now urgently needs to hear. On this, and on most of the other subjects she addresses, Sarkar has the inestimable advantage of being right.
The culture wars are the least of it. We are living, as Adam Curtis keeps saying at the beginnings of his films, through a very strange time. The old institutions of liberalism – universities, courts, trade unions, parliaments, political parties, health services, housing markets, transport systems – no longer work the way they’re supposed to. Our politicians have only one idea left: Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves gave the game away when they explicitly made “growth” the central priority of the new Labour Government in the UK.
And of course these two large facts are connected. Under neoliberalism, “growth” was supposed to improve our lives. Instead, it hollowed out our institutions in the name of enriching a tiny rentier class. We live in the world left behind by this process.
“We know, deep down, that something is wrong,” Sarkar begins. “Housing costs more. Food costs more. Bills cost more.” “London, the fifth-richest city in the world, teems with people who need the care of the state and aren’t getting it.” Primary schoolteachers in the UK need to spend their own money on teaching supplies. When an NHS dentist reopened in Bristol last year, 1,500 people queued outside on the first day. In May 2024, a record 14,159 people were homeless in Ireland. (4,316 of them were children.)
Our lives, like our institutions, feel increasingly atomised and empty. “[T]he ground on which we form connections with others feels increasingly unstable,” Sarkar writes. “We drift through jobs, relationships and crappy house-shares, while floating somewhere amongst perfumed clouds the world’s billionaires add the equivalent of Italy’s entire GDP to their wealth in just a single year ...Satisfaction is fleeting. Fulfilment is elusive.”
The culture wars – TV interviewers asking politicians nonsense questions such as “What is a woman?”; the endless churn of outraged Tweets and replies – are stoked by an “unprincipled and double-dealing” commentarial that is also, somehow, our political class. (As Sarkar points out, there is, in the UK especially, no longer a meaningful distinction between politicians and pundits. Is Kemi Badenoch a politician or a culture warrior?)
The goal is to bury us in “trivial outrage-bait” and thereby to distract us from the biggest wealth-grab in human history, now entering its feral phase in Elon Musk’s United States. The million trivial outrages, Sarkar points out, all reinforce a powerful metanarrative: minorities are taking over the country. This neatly inverts the truth: a minority has taken over, not just in the UK, but in the West generally. Just not the minority they want us to fear. We’ve been had. The truth is not online. The truth is about who owns what – and who doesn’t.
It’s an obvious point, but it can’t be made often enough. That Sarkar’s critique of the culture wars has been received as controversial by the popular (that is, online) left tells us something about how wedded that left has become to identity politics – which Sarkar has also come to bury. The left, Sarkar says, has “absorbed the tenets of liberal politics”. Far from being in the great tradition of left solidarity, identity politics is individualistic. Politically, it serves only to break up the growing 21st-century proletariat (that’s you and me, non-billionaire pals) into “warring identity groups” who cannot organise to resist.
Sarkar doesn’t point out the sadder implications of culture-war identitarianism. The culture wars, whatever else they did, offered a way for people to find meaning and community in an atomised and decaying world. The effect has not just been to fragment the working classes into competing groups, but to create new tribal identities, almost entirely online. A big problem facing the contemporary left is how to transcend these online tribalisms – how to move from the immaterial world to the material one. Donald Trump, Musk and Nigel Farage have already figured this out. The left, itself atomised and lacking in morale, is struggling to keep up.
Sarkar wants to show us “how culture, politics and unequal stakes in the economy combine to fragment, weaken and inhibit working-class power”. She says: “wealth concentrations warp politics and stunt our ability to shape society for the better. Because if you can’t see the world clearly, you can’t change it.” Changing the world, as Marx famously said, is the point. But how? Sarkar’s gambit would appear to be, start by getting people to see the world clearly.
Minority Rule is a good start. Sarkar is candid; she examines her own past errors. She is often funny. (In a middle-class north London neighbourhood, “even the children are made of sourdough” and “A moment of eye contact with a chic young mum improved my credit rating.”) On the other hand, Sarkar is an agitprop journalist, and her prose occasionally collapses into agitprop journalese: “Every media incentive is aligned to make slow-moving societal disintegration slide down the reaction agenda.” This stuff is easy to read, because we all already read so much of it, but it does deaden the urgency of the message.
The book also exhibits the old deep tension within Marxism between its diagnostic power (formidable) and its predictive power (very shaky). How do we get there (an equitable society) from here (the dismal end of neoliberalism)? In the gap between the two terms of this question, the bacteria of right-wing populism are already festering. The conditions in which a viable a left-wing alternative might grow are hard to discern. What can the left realistically do?
[ Joe Humphreys: How to end the culture wars: Stop looking for people to blameOpens in new window ]
Another way of putting the question is: what does Sarkar want instead of what we’ve got? Well, here’s what she hoped a Jeremy Corbyn Government would do: “end austerity, renationalise rail and water and end adventurist warfare in the Middle East […] abolish fee-paying schools, implement a four-day working week, impose a wage ratio so bosses could no longer earn hundreds of times more than their office cleaner”. If you think that’s radical, you’ve been listening to the wrong people. A modestly better world. We used to be able to hope for it. We used to be able to work towards it. Delete your accounts; pick up a book. Pick up this book. The future is at stake.
Kevin Power is an author and assistant professor in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin
Further reading
Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror (Penguin 2023)
A book about how Naomi Klein (the left-wing author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine) is not Naomi Wolf (author of The Beauty Myth and, increasingly, an exponent of right-wing conspiracy theories). From online confusion about the two Naomis, Klein spins a powerful essay about the state of the left in dark times.
Ezra Klein, Why We’re Polarised (Profile, 2020)
Klein, the podcaster and New York Times columnist, sets out an essentially liberal critique of the culture wars, arguing that American politics and media have become a “toxic system” that warps the individual actors within it.
Nick Cohen, What’s Left? How the Left Lost Its Way (Harper Perennial, 2007)
Cohen’s book presciently anatomises the failure of left-liberals to resist the neoliberal power-grab, and the potential (and now actual) consequences of this failure.
