Left wing pitfalls: against neoliberal identity politics and class reductionism

Liberatory coalitions have historically been powerful forces against oppression, as seen in Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition. But ruling classes have long used race and nationalism to divide the working class, curbing solidarities. In part one of a two part article, Shanice McBean explores the contradictions of the capitalist crisis and the left strategy needed to overcome them. 

This article was first published on Shanice McBean’s blog.

Coalitions, race and nation

Coalitions used to define liberation politics. The Black Panthers, Young Lords and Young Patriots made up Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition: a revolutionary, working class movement dedicated to militant action against police brutality and poverty. Exactly eight months after the Rainbow Coalition was founded, in December 1969, Fred Hampton was assassinated by Chicago police and the FBI. Not long after, and under a barrage of police harassment, the Rainbow Coalition collapsed.

Coalitions of the oppressed are powerful. So powerful the ruling class of American slave society invented a technology so reliable in its ability to undermine the possibility of coalitions that it has lasted over 500 years in their political and economic arsenal. The technology? Race.

Affording poor whites economic and legal privileges over African slaves, and later the African American working class – real, material privileges through laws that codified white supremacy – pacified poor whites and allied them with the exploiting classes. It created a social hierarchy where white psychological superiority tamed poor white frustrations about their own low status. White supremacy turned a universally, though unevenly, exploitative system into one the white masses simultaneously wanted to defend. Group cruelty has long been an antidote for group insecurity; this was the function of Jim Crow, and is the basis of hierarchical cruelties in society and politics today.

So of course, when a charismatic twenty-one year old Black man began to cut through the bullshit of racial division and brought Black, white and Puerto Rican working class communities together under the banner of revolution he needed to be quickly neutralised.

You might think of national identity as racial hierarchy’s hipster little brother: part of the same clan, but cooler, more modern. Sometimes members of the ruling class like to pretend race isn’t their cup of tea, that they’re too liberal for unsophisticated racisms – but hey, there’s always the nation. Class conflict disappears easily under nation states, where we are all supposedly brethren under one flag. But there is always an enemy within – a constructed threat – that you need to protect your social position against, and direct your frustrations towards. National and racial identities provide the structural integrity of crisis ridden class societies, keeping capitalism free of the burden of mass working class revolt.

Division cuts power into little bits, disorientating and dispersing it. Coalitions and class solidarity do the opposite. They create mutual interest out of potential conflict, consolidate resources, and concentrate power. They make us more effective, and more influential. But this isn’t a new concept. ‘If they come for me in the morning, they will come for you at night’ is an old adage of the communist wing of the Black Power movement. But in today’s political arena solidarity – the principled solidarity of ‘unconditional but critical support’, not the transactional solidarity of ‘I will only give you what you’ve given me’ – is almost mythical in its rarity, at least in the mainstream. So, what happened?

The pitfalls of neoliberal identity politics

I’d argue the conscious destruction of the material basis of class solidarity by the architects of neoliberalism, and the resultant political subjectivity that emerges, have made liberatory coalitions both harder to build (in a physical and spacial sense), and has blunted the political consciousness needed to do so.

At the end of the 80s Ambalavaner Sivanandan and Stuart Hall – the OGs of Black British Marxist thought – have an incredible, now prophetic, exchange about the impact of Thatcher and the new, neoliberal world order. It is a rich and timely debate that I cannot adequately summarise here, but one element I want to draw out is their commentary on the reshaping of class and work, and the new identity politics.

In ‘Brave New World’ Hall predicts a social and cultural transformation where there is

…greater fragmentation and pluralism, the weakening of older collective solidarities and block identities and the emergence of new identities associated with greater work flexibility, the maximisation of individual choices through personal consumption.

In ‘All that Melts into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times’ Sivanandan responds, decrying this shift is the result of the ‘fragmentation of the working class, and hence the obfuscation of class in general’. He then spells out the devastating consequences of this class fragmentation, which bleed into the creation of a new political subjectivity: a politics of the ‘subject, the personal, the individual’. He laments that the new politics gave the

…individual an out not to take part in issues that affected the community: immigration raids, deportations, deaths in custody, racial violence, the rise of fascism, as well as everyday things that concerned housing and schooling and plain existing. There was now another venue for politics: oneself… Carried to its logical conclusion, just to be black, for instance, was politics enough: because it was in ones blackness that one was aggressed, just to be black was to make a statement against such aggression.

The politics of doing nothing. The politics that claims simply being present in a room, perhaps one you’ve never been in before, is the work. The politics of representation. The antithesis of transformation, liberation, revolution. We are far too familiar with this script. The late Sivanandan would certainly say his predictions came to fruition.

What Hall and Sivanandan’s debate helps us contextualise are the ways in which dramatic changes in class composition, work and production at the dawn of neoliberalism created new political subjects: atomised and individualistic, competitive and stingy, with pluralistic identities and, perhaps, conflicting solidarities. While there have always been critiques of this style of identity politics – most frequently and eloquently from Black Marxist voices – there’s no denying that this neoliberal ethics has dominated social movements in the decades since Sivanandan and Hall had this (still very relevant) exchange.

An extreme example is the brief rise of Afro-pessimist thinking during the Black Lives Matter years. There’s a point to be made about how far academic articulations of Afro-pessimism reflect activist interpretations and praxis on the ground. But as articulated in the movement it was a politics predicated on a fundamental conflict between Black folk and all other racialised groups, and the impossibility of solidarity. The condition of Blackness, Afro-pessimists argued, is so unique that it becomes impenetrable, unrecognisable, unrelatable to all outside of it. In fact, all non-Black folk participate in a system that constructs ‘the Black’ as slave. Under this system anti-Blackness – not class, not imperialism – provides the fundamental structure of civil society. Coalitions are theoretically foreclosed. Solidarity is materially impossible. Black people are alone aboard the slave ship.

Afro-pessimism makes maximal use of neoliberal ethics, but the gist of these politics shows up everywhere. Oppressed groups competing for the greatest grievance, the winner of which would be afforded more influence in decision making, and less scrutiny over exactly what they did or said. Politics became deferential; we had to listen to someone because of their identity; pay less regard to collective or global analyses; and take less responsibility for formulating our own politics. We abandoned the systemic for the interpersonal, where politics was primarily about individual behaviour modifications. Lived experience – important, sure, but singular and isolated – became the primary analytical method. A scarcity mentality dominated politics; there was never enough time, attention, concern, or even solidarity, to go around. And where there was it was rationed for only those who ‘deserved’ or ‘earned’ it.

Concepts like double jeopardy and triple oppression – analytical tools created by communists like Claudia Jones and radicals in the Combahee River Collective – used to understand the position of Black women under capitalism and imperialism morphed into a collection of atomised identities, of which the more you had the more power or influence you could be afforded. The end result was a politics focused so completely on shifting the dynamics within our little activist rooms, as Olufemi Taiwo argues, we ended up forgetting who built the room and put us there in the first place. Dare I call this the psychological wages of neoliberal identity politics.

Now pause. I need to make clear there were, and are, real problems these politics were responding to: racism, sexism and other nonsense in activist spaces; democratic decline and the resulting feeling of mass powerlessness; lack of social status afforded to those who are oppressed and the ways this follows you around everywhere you go – the office or the occupation, the picket line or the pub. But in the context of our side’s historic weakness – the destruction of our organisations, communities and collective solidarities, and the resultant political disorientation this created – we have ended up with a politics underpinned by a neoliberal ethics, and as such ended up reproducing the very systems of domination that degrade our lives.

We can see how compatible much of this is with capitalism by the co-optation of identity politics by the mainstream. This exists as both a strategy of pacification – blunting our movements by subsuming them into the machinery of the system. But has also become a tool for disciplining and controlling wage labour, both materially and ideologically. Bosses don’t need to pay their low paid staff more because they have recruitment targets for representation in leadership. And no you can’t talk about Palestine at work because that is a micro-aggression against Jewish colleagues.

Neoliberal identity politics affords us temporary psychological reprieve by allowing us to lash out at someone for getting it wrong, or take up more space, or restructure our immediate surroundings so we have more power or social capital. But this is not the same as liberation, it is not revolution. There is a huge cost to adopting the masters tools, while trapped in the masters house, forgetting who built the four walls that keep you captive.

The pitfalls of class reduction broism

As mentioned earlier, none of these critiques are new. I have been part of a group of Black activists and intellectuals making these arguments for years. And as Sivanandan and Hall show these debates were playing out before I was born! But the shock of a world becoming dust, as fires ignite all around us, has the left re-appraising it’s ideas and strategies. As part of this it is with great annoyance we now have to deal with neoliberal identity politics’ older, crusty brother: class reductionism.

I describe the new class reductionism as a ‘broism’ because, from what I’ve seen anyway, it’s being largely promoted by middle class men typically in the professional classes, often journalists, who appear somewhat fed up that everyone else has been talking far too loudly, and have been taken far too seriously, for far too long. There is certainly a reactionary aspect to the critique of neoliberal identity politics on the left.

Broadly, the class reduction bro argues our side have lost because we’ve spoken far too much about the sectional issues of minority populations like migrants and trans people – or espoused unpopular ideas like police abolition. We need to abandon identity politics and radical ideas in favour of mainstream, bread and butter class issues. In this milieu, the critique of identity politics is not a critique of the neoliberal political subject, but is a critique of the politics of liberation itself. No more anti-racism, trans liberation, or feminism, they argue, focus only on housing, health care, pay.

The problems with this argument are plenty. Nation states of liberal democracies are racial states. They structure class exploitation and organise political discourse on racial hierarchies. They use the terrain of race and nation to fracture working class power; mystifying class conflicts by transforming them into racial and cultural ones. At the local level, racial narratives are used to gut working class infrastructure: inner city (read, Black) gangs are mobilised to knock down council estates, defund community services, and discipline working class life and culture. The spectre of the migrant is used for all manner of political trickeries: from being the reason the NHS is failing, to being the reason everyone’s wages and living standards are declining. Muslims are deemed ideologically suspect, and are used as the justification for strengthening the surveillance and policing empire that is then swiftly used against left wing movements and ‘deviant’ working class cultures. Similar arguments can be made about gender.

In this context what is needed is neither neoliberal identity politics, nor a singular focus on class at the exclusion of all else, but a liberatory working class politics. One that makes cogent arguments that connect the maltreatment of racialised others to the maltreatment of the entire working class, and brings everyone along on the journey as comrades, not antagonists. We need an antiracism that is principled and unafraid to challenge power at the source, but also has the patience and care to realise that not everyone who could be with us currently is – and that is the primary work. This never means ignoring crap behaviour in our movements or communities, but means addressing them in a way that keeps in mind we have a world to win.

Class reduction bros make a fatal conceptual error by theorising universalism as a singular experience, or a necessarily identical motivation to act. This is never what universalism was about, nor is it how the real world operates. When they formed the Rainbow Coalition, the Panthers never told the Lords to stop caring about Puerto Rican issues. Their philosophy was that all of our struggles are connected; this is sometimes because we’re fighting the same fight. But when our struggles look different, the enemy is, in the end, the same.

Take housing – not everyone’s housing struggle is identical. For some the issue is renters rights and affordable housing. For others, the lack of refuge space means they can’t escape domestic violence. For some, their presence on racist gang databases gives landlords the power to blacklist and evict them. For others the issue is overcrowding in run down houses, where landlords exploit tenants with insecure immigration status. The experience of a ‘bread and butter’ issue like housing is not even or singular across the entire working class. Without taking into account these differences we once again fall into the neoliberal trap of reproducing existing fractures within an already weak and divided working class.

The fact is people are moved to political action by different push and pull factors. So many of these end up being about dignity and self worth, as often as they are about cold, calculated financial self interest. The same blindness that leaves people unable to understand why people voted for Brexit despite the warnings it would make them worse off, also leads to not understanding why so many working class people are moved to protest police violence, but not pay. Sometimes the human condition cannot be reduced merely to money.

When I was unemployed and on benefits I didn’t do a single bit of activism on my employment status, or the welfare state. Millions of people came out on the streets for Black Lives Matter. Many tens of thousands put their bodies on the line in different ways. Police violence moves people to action. Sorry class reduction bros, it just does! In fact, it always has. The biggest march of Black people in the history of Britain – the Black People’s Day of Action in 1981 – was about police indifference to murder in the Black community. The miners strike was a huge confrontation between the working class and police, and much of the organising was about resisting police violence. The most pivotal moment, perhaps, in LGBTQ+ history – 1969’s Stonewall Riot – was an action against police harassment. The Black Panther Party’s founding principle was community self defence against police. The suffragists. The chartists. I could go on. Policing sustains class society, and all its inherent inequalities, so of course police violence is a class issue. 

The point is what counts as a bread and butter issue depends on who’s buttering the bread. We don’t have to eat the same bread to recognise that we all deserve more nutritious and complete meals. In a context where racial and national solidarities are used to crush class solidarities, ignoring race – it’s functions and it’s struggles – becomes just as destructive as neoliberal identity politics, as once again we fall into the trap of reproducing the very fractures we are claiming to overcome.

Mass organising, not mass appeal

The huge bleeding wound inherent in the class reductionist bro’s argument is the politics of mass appeal. It argues we need to abandon the idea of political transformation and simply appeal to where people are at. This is, fundamentally, a politics of the status quo: it is a conservative politics that abandons political transformation to the right, and jogs uncomfortably along as the Overton windows drifts steadily towards fascism. The left has for too long seen its role as simply trying to win over the ‘electorate’, rather than addressing our very specific issues: lack of organisational power, division and stratification, and cultural stagnancy. The right, meanwhile, has built its cultural, political, and ideological influence outside of mainstream politics and is now ready to cash in electorally.

I can’t say I have a blueprint for what we need to do. But I have some instincts. We need to return to coalitions, and creating physical spaces where people mix socially, across political and identitarian fractures. We need to orientate our liberation struggles to class and capitalism – not a reduction, but an orientation. We need to organise in ways that build towards mass participation, and give up the comforts of insular activist groups that double up as impenetrable social bubbles. We need to hold on to radical left wing ideas that actually level a challenge to the system, like carceral abolition, but strengthen them by bringing them it into the real world, and connecting to the many experiences and ideas outside our own. We need to stop being tied incessantly and mindlessly to electoral politics, and build alternative working class power that’s able to penetrate and shake up ossified and bureaucratic organisations, the media, mainstream politics and cultural reproduction.

Ultimately, we need class conscious liberation politics and a liberation conscious working class. That’s the medicine.

Part two of the article – Liberation delayed: the trap of ‘war on woke’. If you are interested in reading more by Shanice McBean, please check out Abolition Revolution published by Pluto Press.