We hear often about ‘red lines’ that cannot, must not, be crossed. These are typically held to apply both to individuals and to organisation or collectivities. But it can be a complicated business defining and acting according to red lines. It involves simplifying human relations, if in often very understandable ways.
Some examples appear very straightforward. Consider those who express overtly racist, sexist, disablist etc views. In such instances red lines are routinely said to have been crossed, and their views should be contested and their company shunned. But complexities immediately arise. I recall reading a philosopher long ago who posited and defended a distinction between ‘making a racist statement’ and ‘being a racist’. Historical context, this argument runs, matters. Someone born into Britain’s predatory imperialism in the nineteenth century might well have been socialised from birth into an unreflexive acceptance of the ruling-class, racist ideology of the time regarding ‘black people’.
Somebody inclined to vote Reform in the second decade of the twenty-first century might do so out of a genuine but unfounded conviction that Britain’s openness to refugees and migrants – that is, to people ‘who are different from us’ and take advantage of our generosity and pervert our native ‘white’ culture – is foolish and wrong. It is only too easy to dismiss such people as ‘stupid’, especially if we do so from comfortable, secure, ‘bourgeois’ occupations and positions. The attraction of Farage and Reform is above all else a by-product of a thoroughly understandable working-class disillusion with the centre-right policies pursued by all the UK’s mainstream political parties from Thatcher onwards. A plague on all their houses!
So writing people off because they have crossed a personal/collective red line is not always straightforward.
Like many on the left I was looking forward to the creation and engagement of what is now called ‘Your Party’. Corbyn was – very – slow to get the project off the ground. Then Sultana sabotaged it by: (i) pre-launching the party on a platform agreeable to her faction, and (ii) unilaterally announcing putative redline policies like scraping the monarchy, leaving NATO and banning so-called transphobes. The so-called democratic voting on party policy that ensued was a sham. Predictably, left-factions lobbied and fought. In-group empathy was pitted against out-group hostility. Red lines to trip people up everywhere.
All this road roughshod over my own suggested strategy taken from the early Chartist mobilisations, namely, to bring people on the left together behind a handful of basic socialist policies focused on improving the lives of those suffering unacceptable levels of material hardship and psychosocial distress. These would focus on the likes of taxation, housing, public services, jobs, security, welfare and health and social care. Such ‘attainable’ reforms, I have argued, could prepare the ground for more ‘aspirational’ – socially transformative – reforms. This general approach to mobilising for change I called ‘permanent – attainable to aspirational – reform’. There would be no guarantees of course. It is a step-by-step process that quite deliberately downplays as many potential red lines as possible. The political and likely military obstacles to the introduction of aspirational reforms would inevitably be robust and hazardous.
Say you meet someone in your local pub. You are familiar with them as an acquaintance but don’t see them as a friend. You get talking. It transpires that your morals and politics are very different. How to handle disagreements/conflicts? I am a (neo)Marxist who lives in a mid-Surrey village. Red lines? The approach I have adopted is a kind of compromise. I rarely raise political issues myself but do engage if they are raised with me or in my presence. When I engage I endeavour to reconcile: (i) a forthright expression and defence of my own views, with (ii) a level of civility. I’m quite good at remaining civil because of all those years conducting seminars and getting students to feel confident enough to think aloud. But discussions with acquaintances in pubs can be especially difficult for sociologists. If people debate with a chemist they accept the chemist knows stuff of which they are ignorant. But everyone has views about the state of society, and quite rightly. It is often hard work to explain that ‘evidence’ is not just a matter of perspective or opinion! Red lines in my locals are challenges to be (re)considered and/or (re)negotiated.
Undisputably red lines separate people. Separation aids division. And division is a device routinely used by the ruling class (‘the few) to prevent the solidary commitment, engagement and mobilisation of ‘the many’. Our present ‘relativised’ culture is functional for the ruling class insofar as it divides people by exhorting a politics of identity and belonging rather than one of distribution.
In raising these few queries about the pros and cons of red lines it is not my intention to encourage a watering down of opposition to racism, sexism, ageism, disablism etc. Far from it. But it is to counsel caution, personal and political (and the personal is of course political), in our personal and collective dealings with others and in the push for the kind of social transformation I am fully signed up to.
Perhaps red lines might occasionally, or for some purposes, be profitably recoloured as orange lines.