Joti Brar, political activist, editor, deputy leader of the Workers Party of Britain and co-author of Identity Politics and the Transgender Trend, discusses the links between imperialist endeavours and worker exploitation while historicising the tradeoffs made by the western political elites who granted temporary advances to workers during the post-war boom, to include free education and council housing. Explaining how we inhabit a rawer version of capitalism today with no care for the needs of the poor or workers, Brar compares this period to the Victorian era as workers’ rights are being rescinded, poverty is quickly augmenting and aggressions on the working class are heightening. She also chronicles the fragmentation of working class organisation brought on, in part, by identity politics whose reactionary discourse is dividing the disenfranchised while the corporate world is now taking charge of the mandate of “human liberation” in what Brar deems to be a massive inversion of reality where the ruling class is reversing who is oppressing whom with industry leaders today “preaching at the workers about oppression.” Indicting victim narratives prevalent in the west where “fragile egos” and the focus on language have perfectly driven away any rational and scientific discussion of actual suffering, Briar highlights the real-life dilemmas that women face around the planet who need genuine “safe spaces” for their survival.
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