Minority Rule
- Author Ash Sarkar
- Narrator Ash Sarkar
- Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
- Publish Date 27 February 2025
- Run Time 9 hours and 17 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Disinformation and misinformation, Ethical issues: censorship, Far-left political ideologies and movements, Far-right political ideologies and movements, Left-of-centre democratic ideologies, Political campaigning and advertising, Political economy, Social and political philosophy.
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What to expect
**A Guardian Book of the Summer 2025**
** The instant top 5 Sunday Times bestseller from political commentator Ash Sarkar **
'One of the boldest and most exciting thinkers of her generation' NAOMI KLEIN
'Delivers its message with punch and panache ... A joy to read' GUARDIAN
'If leftists feel they have been stumbling around in the darkness, Minority Rule flicks on the light' STANDARD
We live under minority rule. But who is the ruling minority?
Most of us are getting screwed over. Our world is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload. As the world burns, mega-corporations are reporting record profits. How are they getting away with it?
‘Minority rule’ is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they’ll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren’t actually silencing the ‘forgotten’ working class, immigrants aren’t eating your pets, trans-activists aren’t corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn’t crushing free speech.
In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it’s facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction – and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.
An 2025 highlight for GQ, New Statesman and Irish Times
Minority Rule was no. 4 in the Sunday Times bestseller chart, 09/03/25
** The instant top 5 Sunday Times bestseller from political commentator Ash Sarkar **
'One of the boldest and most exciting thinkers of her generation' NAOMI KLEIN
'Delivers its message with punch and panache ... A joy to read' GUARDIAN
'If leftists feel they have been stumbling around in the darkness, Minority Rule flicks on the light' STANDARD
We live under minority rule. But who is the ruling minority?
Most of us are getting screwed over. Our world is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload. As the world burns, mega-corporations are reporting record profits. How are they getting away with it?
‘Minority rule’ is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they’ll have you believe, antiracist campaigners aren’t actually silencing the ‘forgotten’ working class, immigrants aren’t eating your pets, trans-activists aren’t corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn’t crushing free speech.
In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it’s facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction – and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.
An 2025 highlight for GQ, New Statesman and Irish Times
Minority Rule was no. 4 in the Sunday Times bestseller chart, 09/03/25
Critics Review
An exegesis of the playbook of the right ... [Sarkar] is one of the most refreshing, salient voices on the left. For many progressives, the last decade has felt like something akin to a slow descent into madness, or falling victim to a collective, large-scale gaslighting campaign. With spectacular clarity and genuine wit, Sarkar puts her arm around their shoulders, offers a little tough love, and invites them to step out of the mist. If leftists feel they have been stumbling around in the darkness, Minority Rule flicks on the light
Sarkar has the inestimable advantage of being right ... We’ve been had. The truth is not online. The truth is about who owns what – and who doesn’t ... 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 ... Pick up this book. The future is at stake
A Marxist critique of left-liberal politics that delivers its message with punch and panache ... She prosecutes her case with more panache and punchiness, more hilarity, than is usual from the dour quarters of British political punditry. Her hyper-caffeinated prose and acid observations are unquestionably a joy to read ... Sarkar cultivates the image of a sassy social commentator, a sort of Tariq Ali of looking at your phone a lot
Original, vivid, reflective ... Feels like it's written by a really sage old philosopher, sequestered away in the corner of the university, but who is somehow across pop culture to be able to make references that you find funny and have touchstones with ... A marvellous piece of writing
I love a book which confounds your expectations. And Minority Rule is definitely that. It's the sort of book actually you wish you'd written. I really recommend it. Ash is a truly original thinker: unafraid to have something uncomfortable to say to her own side, which to me, is one of the marks of any political book which is worth reading
Her analysis is painfully true – it’s brave and honest and the Left needs to hear this, especially from one of their own
A lively analysis of how the ruling classes purposefully misdirect political blame
Ash Sarkar is one of the boldest and most exciting thinkers of her generation
A brilliantly bracing polemic
This book is a timely investigation of how our culture, in its broadest sense, supports ideas that favour the ruling class … Ash Sarkar’s book is essential reading – and time is short!
One of the most charismatic and compelling commentators in British politics for years now ... With the alt right seemingly winning the battle for hearts and minds around the west, Minority Rule is a necessary and welcome salvo from the other side
In a book that will likely do what Owen Jones's Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class and Reni Eddo-Lodge's Why I'm No Longer To White People About Race did to shift the political dial, Sarkar's debut looks at a world defined by inequality, insecurity, information overload and lack of community
A thrilling polemic-meets-memoir, which identifies who really wins when the marginalised and the exploited turn on one another, and is not afraid to name names
In her timely book, the political commentator Ash Sarkar addresses the fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations
An examination of the way British Conservatives and American Republicans have stoked fears of a 'takeover by marginalised groups'
Look out for the story of ... the rise of the culture wars
[An] urgent dissection of the deafening culture of distraction stoked by the ruling minority in the UK, and around the world
User Reviews
18/03/2025
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