Piers Morgan is a bully. From beefing with Lady Gaga over the veracity of her trauma to attacking gender-neutral clothing as a concept, Morgan has a reputation. That's why it might be no surprise that he got called out (again) on a live broadcast of Good Morning Britain featuring a panel discussing protests against President Donald Trump in the United Kingdom.
Ash Sarkar, a senior editor at Novara Media, was on that panel and ended up in an argument with Morgan that went viral. Morgan challenged her over her willingness to protest Trump by accusing her of not protesting former president Barack Obama. That sparked a shouting match heard 'round the Internet.
Challenged about deportation figures under the Obama administration, Sarkar said she did have a problem with the 44th president's immigration polices. But Morgan wasn't hearing any of it. Morgan repeatedly asked Sarkar where her Obama protests had taken place, speaking over Sarkar's efforts to answer. After Morgan's cohost, Susanna Reid, pointed out that you don't have to take to the streets over every issue, Morgan again refused to let Sarkar explain the work she had done to protest Obama's policies, calling Obama her "hero."
"He's not my hero," Sarkar replied. "I'm a communist, you idiot."
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"Have you ever considered chairing a debate without straw-manning your guests, Piers, to make up for your own incompetence?" Sarkar continued after Morgan claimed there were zero protests against Obama's U.K. visits. (Morgan was wrong about that.) When Morgan again labeled her "pro-Obama," Sarkar responded, "I'm not pro-Obama. I've been critic of Obama. I'm a critic of the Democratic Party because I'm literally a communist."
Sarkar spoke with Teen Vogue about that moment with Morgan and what being a literal communist means when you're talking about U.S. presidents past and future.
Teen Vogue: You were on Good Morning Britain to discuss Trump protests in the U.K. How did those demonstrations go?
Ash Sarkar: There were at least 250,000 [people] at the Together Against Trump March yesterday, which makes it the biggest weekday protest in British history, and the biggest protest since the one in 2003 against the Iraq War.
It was a real mix of people. It was lots of young people, which might have been their first protest. Others were recognizable activists from anti-arms trade campaigns or Palestinian solidarity campaigns, so it put together a diverse range of political experiences.
TV: Have you seen an increase in youth activism in the U.K.?
AS: Yes, certainly. I think that since 2010 especially, when there was a revived student movement, there has been a sense that street protest belongs to the young, and that's a really productive avenue of political expression.
I would think that when you put [on] something like an anti-Trump march, it's about a statement of values, right? And trying to define who you are through a rejection of the values that you find completely abhorrent. It's about defining yourself as the anti-Trump: being welcoming, outward-looking, and anti-racist.
TV: So can we talk about Piers a little bit?
AS: Oh, yeah. A bellicose walrus himself.
TV: He accused you of being pro-Obama by virtue of being anti-Trump; why do you think that people make that assumption?
AS: I think that the reason why he made that connection is because he really knew that if [he] got pulled into talking about Trump's policy platform, it would be completely indefensible. So then he had to do a bit of sleight of hand and set up what he thought the only anti-Trump person could be, which was a pro-Obama one.
What we know is that lots of the people who have protested Trump in the U.S. — for example, all the people of Black Lives Matter — were leading protests when Obama was president, too. And what they've done is highlighted a lot of the consistency of the kind of problems and issues that they've identified with Trump's presidency. So I don't think that it is a simple category error or accident that someone has made that conflation. It's a deliberate attempt to discredit opposition to ruling-class interests. That's all it is.
TV: How does being a communist impact your view of the U.S. presidency, whether it's Obama or Trump?
AS: If you've got politics which are left of social democracy, it implies that you've got an understanding that the economic platform used by Obama, which was [also] advocated by Clinton, did dispossess a great many Americans, and this isn't just the "white working class" everyone loves to talk about in relation to Trump.
Those who have suffered the most are working-class Americans of color. To me, having those politics means that you can look at economic problems without making it identity politics in the way that Trump has. Also, being a communist means being a fierce critic of the prison industrial complex and the military industrial complex. The expanded use of drone warfare and the expansive use of deportation under Obama. You can be a vocal critic of all those things, while also looking at how Trump [has done them] because, quite simply, he was able to build on a lot of Obama's legacy, particularly in terms of executive overreach. He's been able to pursue extreme, draconian forms of state violence.
I also think that Obama represented a possibility of change, of weakened forces of racism in America — pretty meaningful. I'm not going to be someone who's going to discredit his legacy entirely.
TV: You mentioned the economic platform, and the prison industrial complex, and the military industrial complex. Are there any other big, big policies — of either or both Trump or Obama — that are at odds with communist beliefs?
AS: I believe that nothing so arbitrary as money should be able to come between a person and the means of survival. And that's a really fancy way of saying that it doesn't matter if you're poor — you should have top-quality health care. There shouldn't be a barrier between rich and poor in terms of the kind of health care that they can access.
Under Obama, you had the attempt at expanding universal health care, which was a huge step forward for the United States, but ultimately it didn't win the argument of ideology.
[Obama] didn't win on that level, which is why I think Obamacare repeal was always in the cards. It didn't win over hearts and minds in the way that the NHS [does]. Everyone in the U.K. basically has to agree that it's a social good, free at the point of access.
TV: Is that the biggest barrier to advancing leftist and communist policy positions? Is it a question of hearts and minds?
AS: Saying that there should be universal health care, which is paid for by taxation, isn't necessarily a communist point of view, right? It's not even necessarily a socialist point of view. In the U.K., that's a pretty soft social democratic position.
A communist argument — which neither Trump nor Obama or Theresa May or Macron or anyone currently is looking at — is the crisis represented by the automation of labor. Bringing manufacturers back to the Rust Belt in the United States is like, ‘Well, those jobs are all done by robots now.’ Those aren't going to be the kinds of factories that can keep whole towns alive. That's just not the case anymore.
Human labor cannot compete with fixed capital — that's just a fact. In the U.K., one in five jobs is going to be automated. What does that mean? Does that mean one in five people is then excluded from the means of survival because they can no longer afford to feed themselves [or] house themselves?
The political model that’s needed to [deal] with — the idea of surplus disposable population — is fascism. So technology can represent the oncoming of an incredibly authoritarian and violent means of controlling that serf-level population.
Or — and this is the fun communism bit — you say, ‘OK, technology, which Marx calls fixed capital in The Fragment on the Machine, has a contradictory element because on the one hand it makes you more precarious as a worker. On the other hand, it shows what you can be when liberated from work because you've got all this extra time. You can imagine different ways of living. You can pursue your passions. You can live a happy life.’ Why don't we just bring that technology into common ownership? Ownership of the people, not the capitalist class, and distribute the abundance generated by that fixed capital equitably.
And there are different ways of distributing that more equitably. That's possible under social democracy through taxation or universal basic income. It's possible under socialism. But communism is the only thing which says all things should be brought into the hands of commons to benefit all people. In the past, you'd call that communism. I think in the future, we'll have to call that common sense.
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