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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 182 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 182, January 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The War of the Words
Ed: Sarah Dunant
Virago £7.99
Over the last few years, the press and the establishment have found a new ‘loony left bogey’ to attack in the shape of ‘political correctness’ (PC). What began as an argument about positive discrimination and language codes has now blown up into an ideological and political battle over many of the gains made by the movements for liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. From protests against the Nazis to attempts to highlight date rape as rape, those of us who want to end oppression are attacked as ‘the PC thought police’, curtailing people’s freedom and democracy.
Of course the reality is somewhat different as many of the contributors to this new book adequately demonstrate. The various ways of opposing oppression that have been lumped together as ‘PC’ by those who perpetuate such oppression, in reality, are about trying to give a voice to those readily denied it in capitalist societies. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown describes the attack on PC as ‘a kind of back to basics campaign ... an instant way of discrediting anybody who talks of the need for change, redress or equal rights.’ This book sets out to examine the pros and cons of PC as a method of redressing discrimination.
It contains some eloquent and interesting defence of measures such as anti-racist policies and positive discrimination. Meera Syal, the writer and director of the film, Bhaji on the Beach, explains how the equal opportunities policies of Labour left councils such as the GLC in the mid-1980s allowed many oppressed groups access to education, politics and the arts that had previously been denied them by racist institutions. She roots the impetus for such policies in the anger and injustice people felt at the rise of the National Front in the late 1970s and the riots against poverty, unemployment and police harassment in the early 1980s.
Professor Lisa Jardine describes how questioning the notion of a superior Western civilisation has opened up the study of literature and history in universities outside of a previous narrow ‘great tradition’. Other contributors argue that changing language can change attitudes and that PC challenges sexism.
There was much in some of the pro-PC articles I disagreed with, however.
Many of the strategies proposed concentrate on changing education and language rather than the actual society that produces inequalities. None of the articles even glanced at the possibility that ordinary people themselves hold the power to transform society in the way that, for example, organisations like the Black Panthers or the Gay Liberation Front did when they challenged oppressive institutions in the 1960s.
However, when put alongside the articles in this book which attack PC, it is easy to see what side socialists should be on. The anti-PC articles are not about alternative ways of fighting, rather they end up siding with bigots and Tories on both sides of the Atlantic who use their attack on PC as a cover for their decimation of welfare services and attacks on the rights of minorities. Melanie Phillips continues the attack on anti-racist training for social workers she began in her column in the Observer and argues that the failure of our education system to cater for the poorest, disadvantaged and ethnic minorities are more to do with ‘liberal’ teaching methods than Tory cuts. Phillips spends much of her article proclaiming how brave she is to stand out against the ‘intellectual lynch mob’ of the left and liberals in her defence of things such as the ‘normal’ family – obviously allies like the Sun and Peter Lilley are not enough to protect her views!
It is sad to see the often sharp critic of capitalist society, Christopher Hitchens, missing the real point of the attack on PC and arguing that the task of genuine liberalism in the ‘defence of free thinking from its false friends’ – rather than from the people who would ban Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers or the explicit work of the gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe.
The book is not a bad starting point to examine the controversy around PC, but for a clear socialist analysis read John Molyneux in International Socialism 61.
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