ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As a political science major, the Marxist idea of class struggle resonates strongly with my understanding of  systemic oppression. I was introduced to class struggle theory through the anti-capitalist and feminist nonfiction literature assigned in Felix Fuchs’ class, notably the Combahee River Collective Statement and the manifesto Feminism for the 99%. “Polarization of the Oppressed: A Marxist Critique of Identity Politics” is my first literary review on the relationship between class and identity politics from a Marxist perspective. This essay and Fuchs’ class remain significant to me because I found through them an intellectually fulfilling area of study to which I want to dedicate part of my future academic research.

 ”Struggle is a school, and an opportunity”
– Feminism for the 99%

–Noémie Bélisle-Gervais

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On the fifth of November 2024, Republican leader Donald Trump won the presidential election in the United States, revealing a growing endorsement for the far right and white nationalism by the nation’s electorate. The populist trend of far-right nationalist parties is not exclusive to the United States, but is also broadly visible in North America and Europe. Why are people increasingly voting for right-wing parties? And, most importantly, how did socially progressive centrist parties and the left fail to answer the needs of their constituents? The answer lies in the dominance of identity politics within leftist political discourse over the past decade and the failure of left-leaning political parties to convincingly represent the interests of common people. By focusing on marginalized communities only in terms of their social identity, identity politics has undermined a working class political discourse that encourages solidarity between all sections of the working class. Since it fails to focus on economic issues, identity politics also rarely contributes to improving the conditions of marginalized individuals, since it seeks solutions almost exclusively in neoliberal policies that are compatible with capitalist institutions. In sum, this paper argues that liberal identity politics is deficient because it neglects class politics and enables social inequalities under capitalism. This essay will first define identity politics, its premises and purposes, before arguing that, in its liberal version, it undermines the development of an intersectional class movement. Finally, this essay will demonstrate that it is the return to the primacy of class as an explanatory mechanism that will enable left-wing parties to convincingly fight for decent living conditions for all.

 

1. What is Identity Politics?

 Identity politics is a political approach to struggle based on numerous overlapping identities (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) that diverge from the norms of mainstream society. Queer, feminist, class, and race politics are considered branches of identity politics that collectively seek the “recognition/respect” of their respective communities as distinct from the White, male, heterosexual population because of their socio-economic struggle (Das 4). Identity groups commonly address oppressive experiences and assess marginalized people’s material and emotional needs to establish their difference and require accommodations from the State and its institutions. The term “identity politics” emerged in the 1970s, when it was most notably defined by the Combahee River Collective, a Black, feminist, lesbian organization, in its 1977 manifesto. Identity politics represented a response to the growing resistance of social groups based on “identity issues” since the 1930s, which required a new analytical framework (Rodríguez V. 106). It is also notable that the term emerged alongside the early political shifts that mark the era of so-called “globalization” (Fukuyama 92-93). Since then, identity politics has taken an exponential place as an explanatory mechanism for social issues caused by economic distress. Its dominance in political discourse today is owed to the fact that, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama points out, “identity politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs” (92).

Identity politics is a separation of the marginalized into different groups that base their agenda on individual experiences of oppression. It is “informed by the post-structuralist/post-modernist mode of thinking” which focuses on the subjectivity of oppression, sourcing in individual experiences (Das 6). When mentioning the individuality of identity politics, Das points out that “social oppression is a matter of how individuals behave in their everyday lives” and not why (8). This element of individualism shapes another key aspect of identity politics: its descriptive function. The influences of capitalism, although prominent, are in this liberal understanding of identity politics understood to be “without any linkage to the agenda” of identity groups (5). Identity politics is instead characterized by a “neglect of the materiality” of human life and a “rejection of a systemic view” to struggle (6). The idea of identity is central to any arguments for change put forward by identity politics; it disregards the materialist or systemic grounds of oppression. Thus, although identity politics “provides a reasonable description of some aspects of society,” it fails to explain their root cause: capitalism (7). This focus on descriptive explanations is strengthened by the use of intersectionality in liberal identity politics, which is defined as “a matrix of oppression in which race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. are all important, they all interact” (6). Not only does identity politics categorize the experiences of singular identities, but they also turn overlapping identities into separate categories, like transgender black women, further fragmenting the oppressed collective. The segmentation of resistance and the lack of consideration for class relations is part of the critique of identity politics in the section below.

An identity politics that accounts for class, on the other hand, would fight for “representation, in both political and cultural senses, speaking to distribution of power and claims for political agency” (Bannerji 17). Liberal identity politics, however, accommodates neoliberal and capitalist policies and allows only for small-scale changes that support the status quo. Even worse, an identity politics that rejects a historical, materialist framework also polarizes exploited workers from both marginalized and non-marginalized communities, undermining the bonds of solidarity needed to challenge power.

 

2. Segmentation of Workers: The Negative Effects of Identity Politics

Going back to Trump’s election and the rise of white nationalism, identity politics led to the “right’s embrac[ing] of identity politics” and the construction of a narrative that the so-called white working class had become invisible to left-leaning parties during times of economic distress (Fukuyama 102). The rising cost of living in the past decade, notably due to the pandemic and multiple inter-country conflicts, has left the working class, including non-marginalized individuals, in a situation ranging from financial discomfort to utter poverty. As a result, financial crises have affected two fundamental human motivations that are relevant for political discourse: “the desire for material resources or goods… [and] the craving for dignity” (93). In today’s society, which overvalues property, dignity and material resources are closely related. For this reason, economic losses directly feed a growing anger stemming from a perceived lack of dignity. The latter phenomenon translates into Trump’s election and his anti-immigration laws. There is even a shift in vocabulary, a borrowing of the left’s identity politics term in the narrative of white workers that now see themselves as “marginalized” and “victimized”– terms ill-used considering the “historical privileg[e]” of whiteness (102, 104).  What’s to be taken from this shift is that politics needs to respond to the struggle of the collective. Otherwise, it leads to polarization and hateful competition among people who are just looking to have decent living conditions.   

Above all, the segmentation that is an essential feature of liberal identity politics weakens the working class and undermines the democratic rights and decent living conditions of all. Put differently, its focus on individuality feeds into capitalist and neoliberal oppressive practices. This divide in the marginalized working class is caused by what Rodríguez calls “the neoliberal co-optation of identity politics” (116). Identity politics, despite its relationship to Marxist theory, is also deeply intertwined with the history of neoliberalism.

When neoliberalism became a dominant paradigm in the 1970s, its ascent “paralleled the rise of identity politics” (116). Thus, the neoliberal policies that facilitated the “competitive tendency towards the production of commodities” in the post-war period also came to structure identity politics in academic and workplace practices (Das 16). In its concrete manifestation, identity politics operates “from below” and “from above” (12). On the one hand, employers, academics and politicians divide the working class from above with policies that minimally prioritize marginalized individuals to stimulate the labor demand and supply. On the other hand, the workers compete with one another by “using their upper caste or racial advantage” to secure better positions and improve their socioeconomic status (12). As a result, liberal identity politics leads only to small-scale policies that overlook and support the capitalist interests of the Bourgeoisie. Moreover, the same structure fosters a “false consciousness” among the working class that leads to their “identification with their own exploiters” (20). This, in turn, explains why movements like “corporate feminism” have a growing audience (Arruzza et al. 1). In this way, identity politics “can become an ideological tool…[to] namely make the connections [of capitalism and oppression] invisible” because of its concrete participation in the exploitative structure of capitalist labour (Bannerji 38). Hence the importance of replacing the descriptive function of identity politics to one that is causal and material.

 

3. Class as a Binding Identity to Address the Cause of Oppression  

In order to address the ways in which identity politics is implicated in neoliberal practice, we need to go beyond describing socioeconomic injustices in terms of identity by acknowledging class relations as concrete representation of systemic oppression. That is to say that we have to see how “class has primacy” in explaining the underlying material causality of identity politics’ narratives (Das 16). In identity politics, class is seen as a distinct category that is often mentioned “in the same breath as race and gender, (and) sexuality” thus ignoring how class relations structure social oppression (9-10). From a Marxist perspective, this distinction between class and identity is a “false separation between a sense of self or being, and the world that being inhabits” (Bannerji 18). There is a dialectical relationship between identity, as the ideal conception of ourselves, and class, as the structure that shapes our self-conception. That continuous relationship is evident in the ways in which socioeconomic experiences are often framed in terms of oppression. Now, class has primacy over other social relations because “the major problems of the world…are fundamentally caused by mechanisms of class/capitalism” (Das 16). While identity may give social oppression its specific shape, it does not explain its structure fully because it fails to include the entire exploited working class while class politics does. Thus, centering on class politics to explain socio-political issues would make the working class as a whole visible to progressive politics and ultimately would create a possibility to denounce and reform the capitalist system. Radical identity politics could help challenge capitalism by highlighting the class relations that structure the exploitation of marginalized communities. Class and identity politics can thus co-exist in activism. For instance, in their 1977 statement, the Combahee River Collective points out the “necessity for developing an understanding of class relationships” and a “need to articulate the real class situation of persons” extended to the black feminist community (5). The social movement Feminism for the 99%, argues in the same tradition that in order for women to be liberated there needs to be a united front of workers who “identify, and confront head on, the real source of crisis and misery, which is capitalism” (18). Capitalism is here identified as the root cause of social oppression, which structurally relies on the economic gaps based on racism, sexism, etc. That is what left-wing politics should abide by.

 

4. Conclusion

Ultimately, identity politics in its liberal application does not bring socio-economic equality to marginalized communities because it overlooks and, therefore, participates in what causes oppression in the first place. That does not mean that we have to dismiss identity politics tout court; its goal of fighting for recognition and dignity for marginalized communities matters. However, it has to integrate a critique of class relations and how they structure social oppression. If this is not done, it continues our current situation of an angry working class that embraces right-wing ideas of white nationalism and willingly fragments itself in hopes of winning crumbs of resources and a semblance of dignity. Simply put, the working class must stick together and must only settle for full equality of rights, freedoms, and conditions. That is to be done through the radical overhaul of our production system. In its current state, identity politics is one more bourgeois mechanism to profit from ordinary workers.

 Works Cited

Arruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, et al. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. Verso, 2019.

Bannerji, Himani. “The Passion of Naming: Identity, Difference and Politics of Class.” Thinking through Essays on Feminism: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism. Canadian Scholars’ Press and Women’s Press, 1995, pp. 17-40.

Combahee River Collective. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” 1977. PDF, https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Keyword%20Coalition_Readings.pdf.  

Das, Raju. “Identity Politics: A Marxist View.” Class, Race and Corporate Power, vol. 8, no.1, 2020. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/48645490.  

Fukuyama, Francis. “Against Identity Politics: The New Tribalism and the Crisis of Democracy.” Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 5, 2018, pp. 90–114. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44823914. 

Rodríguez V., Jorge Juan. “The Neoliberal Co-Optation of Identity Politics: Geo-Political Situatedness as a Decolonial Discussion Partner.” Decolonial Horizons, vol. 5, 2019, pp. 101–130. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.13169/decohori.5.1.0101.