Each blow against oppression advances us all

Make no mistake, the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are an attempt to discredit the project of antiracism as such.

These attacks represent a further intensification of the U.S. capitalist class and state’s war on the existing Left, on emergent left-wing possibility, and, most crucially, on the already heterogenous working class. 

Trump’s threat to deport millions, including international activists, and especially university students, who’ve supported the Palestine solidarity movement speaks for itself. So, too, do the virulent and sweeping attacks on trans and gender non-conforming folks. These seek not only to deny healthcare, legitimizing the U.S. status quo of material disinvestment in social reproduction for all working class people, but also to police our bodies and our gender expression so as to reinforce the bounds of hetero- and homonormativity. Even Trump’s offensive against what are intentionally limited D.E.I. initiatives is not just about dismantling this or that program. It is an effort to consolidate the current racial regime of U.S. capitalism.  

Adopting and militarizing the very identitarian language that he supposedly rejects, Trump is seeking to roll back even the minor and already strictly limited concessions that have been wrung from the U.S. capitalist state. These were not beneficent gifts handed down by philanthropists; they were the products of years of struggle. 

But it’s not just that the Trump administration is seeking to discredit any and all struggles against exploitation and oppression and to rev up the authoritarian capacities and reach of the capitalist state. The blatant targeting of immigrants, queer and trans folks, and those who are racially oppressed, reveals that, whatever its internal divisions, one of this administration’s most coherent projects is to displace the crises endemic to capitalism onto already vulnerable populations. The problem, Trump is attempting to tell exploited U.S. workers, is not capitalism and its all-consuming, socially destructive prioritization of profitability above all else. Rather, it’s those supposedly undeserving sections of the proletariat that are the problem, or left-wing forces that have compromised the security of the U.S. working class with their calls for equality. Such an argument is as old as capitalism itself. 

The only way for the Left to respond to this all-out assault on both equality and the forces fighting for it is to return to the I.W.W. credo that an injury to one is an injury to all. We have to make clear, in the streets and in our workplaces, that we’ll fight like hell against attempts to roll back the gains, however limited, that movements against oppression and exploitation have exacted from the U.S. capitalist class and state. 

But just as importantly, we also have to fight like hell against any and all attempts to divide the working class against itself. As good socialists, including Marx, have long understood and argued, this means we must not only struggle for so-called universal programs—for higher wages, healthcare for all, affordable housing, and the like—but also strenuously struggle against those forms of oppression that legitimize inequality within the working class and between workers. This struggle can’t be waged in the abstract. It has to be concrete. It means fighting not just against division but for race- and gender-specific demands and for other targeted groups. Such struggles have to be at the center of any socialist politics that takes self-emancipation seriously. 

Class reductionism redux

Strangely, though, some self-described U.S. socialistst have been less than critical, even disturbingly celebratory, of what they take to be Trump’s war on “identity politics.” And they’ve made quite a splash in the capitalist press. For example, a recent New York Times’ article quotes Bhaskar Sunkara, describing himself as “definitely happy” about the fact that D.E.I. initiatives and policies are “buried for now.” Another stalwart of the electoralist Left, Vivek Chibber, takes a more rhetorically nuanced path that ultimately ends up stranded in the same place. In a recent interview, Chibber says that the “Left should very aggressively and actively fight against social domination of any kind” but also that we should focus on class-wide demands over and above fighting against forms of social oppression. Chibber argues that this or that fight against racism at this or that workplace—say, for example, a fight against racialized pay disparities at Walmart—is too small and a distraction from class-wide demands. The Left should instead be most engaged in pursuing a big-picture politics that argues for broad “economic redistribution.” It’s not that overcoming disparities doesn’t matter, Chibber argues, speaking out of both sides of his mouth, but rather that such concerns are really “most important to and for elite sections of minority populations.” 

It’s not just that these arguments are logically weak but also that they are, at the level of strategy, disastrous. Why can’t we fight against disparities and for class-wide demands? Couldn’t workers organized in a rank-and-file union movement do both? And isn’t doing both—as a matter of successful organizing—essential to accomplishing either? 

These arguments emerge from, and attempt to justify, the class-reductionist Left’s  commitment to a failed strategy and a utopian conception of both the Democratic Party and the capitalist state. But, if our task as socialists is to help build a militant movement of workers and the oppressed that can not only push back on Trump’s attacks but also win substantive material change, this strategy is suicidal. It trades the task of building a solidaristic, unified, and militant workers’ movement and Left, ready to take on capitalists and the capitalist state, for capitulation both to capitalism’s rules of “good” political behavior and, by extension, to the gender and racial oppression capitalism generates. 

Arguments for class reductionism rest on the opportunistic, intentional, bad-faith conflation of hollow liberal identity politics with all struggles for race- and gender-specific demands. In this narrative, there is no real distance between, for example, (socialist-)feminist struggles against misogyny, both within the working-class and social movements and in the wider social world; struggles on the part of multi-racial labor militants to desegregate unions and workplaces; and something like Hillary Clinton’s much-quoted statement that breaking up the big banks won’t end racism and sexism. 

This conflation has nothing to do with ignorance. Rather, it is a purposeful obfuscation. It allow the electoralist Left to blame the utter failure of their strategy on an “identity-obsessed” Left or an “identity-obsessed” electorate that can be easily bought off with empty platitudes. This keeps working people and social movements, they argue, from uniting behind broad social and economic programs. 

Take Chibber’s analysis of Harris’ devastating loss to Trump. Though Harris “steered clear of” identity politics, Chibber writes, “the party has been propagating it in a very aggressive way over the past six or eight years. So dropping it at the eleventh hour didn’t fool anyone.” In a very similar post-election piece, Sunkara calls on the Left to undertake “a thorough rejection of identity politics in favor of a universal appeal that has the same popular message for people from all backgrounds.” Sunkara follows this up by rejecting what he describes as “maximalist” demands, “like police abolition.” 

From a purely class-reductionist standpoint, we might ask why socialists are being asked to support, or even to just shut up about the necessity of abolishing, state-funded strikebreakers? What about, one must ask, ending U.S. support for the Israeli ethnostate and its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? Aren’t calls for the end of U.S. imperialism, the development of international working-class solidarity, and the abolition of the borders that constrain self-determination and legitimize the criminalization of migrants similarly maximalist according to Sunkara’s sense of the term? In periods when mass struggle ebbs, and when the majority of workers see themselves, by and large, as individual sellers of labor power, dependent and powerless, aren’t calls for strikes, stoppages, and even unionization similarly maximalist? By this logic, shouldn’t we all just give up on socialism? 

However, during moments of mass disruptive struggle on the part of workers and oppressed people, those demands that originally seemed so maximalist and divisive often appear much more practical. As millions took to the streets during the anti-racist uprising of 2020, Haley Pessin reminds us, “an astounding 54% of Americans felt the burning of a police station in Minneapolis was ‘justified’ or ‘partially justified.’” And, though neither Chibber nor Sunkara discuss this, Harris’ unwavering support for Israel’s assault on Palestinians—which could be read as an electorally practical and non-maximalist position—was a massive thorn in the side of her campaign, driving many from the polls. This was not a problem of Harris’ inadequate attempt to distance herself from liberal identity politics. It was a recognition, on the part of many in the U.S., that the Democrats’ rhetorical commitment to basic democratic rights and equality cannot be taken seriously. 

Any strategy that links winning real material gains for working and oppressed people to the election of members of a pro-imperialist and pro-capitalist political party like the Democrats is bound to lose. The Democratic Party is a force of capitalist discipline, a mechanism of reinforcement rather than possible realignment. But the bugbear of “identity politics,” as the electoralist Left mobilizes it, covers all sins. It was the Party’s turn to identity politics, we’re told, and the gullibility of the divisive dupes who fell for arguments like Clinton’s, that lost Bernie Sanders the nomination in 2016, not the Democratic Party’s intransigence or it’s very structure, which, as Kim Moody puts it, “has been fortified against its rivals, external and internal.” 

On the other hand, when Kamala Harris or any other Democrat loses, the electoralist Left—rather than investigating the structural impediments keeping the Democrats from offering any substantive challenge to the socio-material status quo—can again blame identity politics. They claim that the divisiveness or maximalism of identity politics chases away some sort of abstract mass of working-class voters, sick to death of “wokeness.” This argument ignores the reality of the working class in all its diversity, whose members live their exploitation not on the fantasy terrain of the purely economic but rather in the real world, a world riven by racialized and gendered divisions that are just as real and material as the divisions between workers and bosses. 

Cutting history to fit a model 

The class-reductionist consensus is that struggles against social oppression are particularly susceptible to “elite capture,” to being hijacked by the ruling class.  But the phenomenon of elite capture is a byproduct of class struggle, an attempt by the ruling class to defang mass disruption by absorbing it and containing it within capital’s rules of reproduction. There’s nothing particularly new about it.  

 Throughout the long history of capitalism, the ruling class has often attempted to take credit for the progressive and egalitarian demands won, even in stunted form, by mass struggles of workers and oppressed people. And this has happened not only in relation to struggles against oppression but also in relation to struggles that Chibber, Sunkara, and others on the class-reductionist Left would no doubt describe as universal, class-wide, and non-identitarian. 

In fact, in the first volume of Capital Marx describes this same process of elite capture and ruling-class cooptation in his discussion of the English working class’s struggle for the enforceable legal limitation of the working day, After years of intense class struggle, “a civil war of half a century,” in Marx’s words, the “masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step” were more than happy to pass off the legally limited working day as their own philanthropic innovation. “The Pharisees of ‘Political Economy,’” Marx sneers, “now proclaimed the discernment of the necessity of a legally fixed working-day.” 

The class-reductionist Left has spent very little time confronting or trying to make sense of these departures from its guidelines for good socialist politics. This is because their rejection of “identity politics” is ultimately little more than a smokescreen. It is a convenient argument that allows for the preservation, in the face of clear historical evidence, of the utopian delusion that the Democratic Party and the capitalist state can be, in some way, captured by the working class and repurposed, incrementally, as a guarantor not of profitability but rather subsistence.  

Indeed, the models of capitalist history presented by the class-reductionist Left are consistently nostalgic for a non-existent past of, as they see it, capitalist state intervention. Thus, this section of the Left, because of their commitment to working within the capitalist state and the Democratic Party, actually falls for elite capture, reading the limited concessions of the capitalist state as a product of, in Chibber’s words, having “a voice inside the Democratic Party.”

This is bad history. The Democratic Party is consistently where good struggle, be it against social oppression or for class-wide demands, goes to die. Recycling long-debunked interpretations of U.S. history, Chibber points to A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the CIO as bastions of anti-racism that were also broad and universalist. But it’s clear that what he really means is that Randolph and Rustin subordinated themselves to the Democratic Party. But because of this, they ultimately failed to deliver on their most radical demands. Instead, the Party disciplined them. 

As Moody notes, Randolph and Rustin’s orientation toward the Democratic Party and the forces of official reformism “was never a class orientation.” Rather, it was “an effort to make one of the nation’s preeminent cross-class, bourgeois-dominated institutions stand in for actual working-class political organization and even for a social democratic politics the Democratic Party was incapable of adopting.” It is important to note that, toward the end of his life, King was moving away from such a politics, not only calling for mass “extralegal protests” but also breaking with the Democratic Party by, for example, denouncing the Vietnam War. We even see King celebrating the mass disruptive action of urban uprisings, even if he finds them ultimately politically insufficient, in his posthumous “A Testament of Hope.”

Similarly, the CIO’s failure to seriously build an anti-racist industrial unionism in the South—obstructed mainly by the capitulation of the left-wing forces within it to a conservative, often racist leadership—is one of the major factors in the now decades-long decline of the labor movement and the degeneration of its leadership into a sclerotic, often anti-democratic, bureaucracy. 

Before this, the U.S. Communist Party ate itself from within by way of its adoption of the Popular Front strategy, which subordinated anti-racist organizing to the kinds of supposedly broad politics Chibber and Sunkara call for. The real motivation was not broad unity as such but rather a compact with so-called “progressive” capitalists and the capitalist state. And the result was neither realignment nor meaningful reform but rather the self-subordination and eventual disintegration of the Left as an independent force capable of challenging the status quo through mass organization. As Moody points out, the gains of the New Deal era, often held aloft as the product of the working-class working within the Democratic Party, were really the result of years of mass struggle on the ground.

The class-reductionist Left loves, as E.P. Thompson would have it, to cut history to fit a model. And, at the end of the day, their baggy, all-devouring conception of “identity politics” is a convenient if shabbily constructed strawperson. It can be invoked to swallow up any and all forms of political involvement, no matter how deeply materialist their conceptions of oppression, that don’t conform to their strategic model.  This is why their arguments—not that oppression doesn’t exist, but that the social relations of oppression are, in fact, something other than they are and are best resisted by not resisting them in any direct way—are so strange. 

The model is wrong

But the class-reductionist model is wrong at every level. 

The Democratic Party is a reactionary force, not a progressive one. It seeks to maintain and extend U.S. imperialism and to preserve capitalism, not to take care of working and oppressed people. This is why it can only engage in a failed form of identity politics, which it attempts to pass off as the real thing. The better reading here is actually that, because of its unwavering commitment to capitalism, any party of capital and the capitalist state must necessarily fail when it comes to meeting demands for equality. Even the limited concessions that the class-reductionist Left lumps under the intentionally imprecise term of identity politics have been exacted through mass disruptive struggle precisely against the capitalist state and its supporters. 

So-called identity-based forms of oppression aren’t just free-floating contingencies. They’re outgrowths of capitalism’s turbulent dynamism, which continually reinforces the inequality not only between capitalists and workers but also within the working class. These forms of oppression are material. Contrary to popular opinion, capitalism does not homogenize. Rather, it differentiates, even within the working class. Race and gender oppression, among other exploitations, are the socio-material relations that legitimate and explain the inequality that capitalism produces and must necessarily reproduce. Capitalists and the capitalist state have always relied on claims of difference to legitimize things like tiered labor forces, the supposedly inherent inability or inferiority of those members of the surplus population, disinvestment in social reproduction by way of organized abandonment, imperialist projects of dispossession and accumulation, and the like.

When organizations of collective struggle have failed to seriously confront the real material divisions between working people, they’ve failed to build fighting organizations capable of taking on the employers and the state. Michael Goldfield puts it plainly, in reference to the failure to organize the U.S. South in the 1930s and 1940s: “the issues of confronting white supremacy in all its various forms, and the subordination of women, and other excluded groups, both domestically and internationally, are a prerequisite for solidaristic struggle, and for the labor movement to become a ‘tribune of the people.’” 

In arguing for some abstract solidarity and simply ignoring the real material divisions between working people, the class-reductionist Left misses this structural engine of class division. Chibber falls quite easily into this trap: 

Take wages, for example. You might see at the lower ends of the job market, say at Walmart, that blacks get lower wages than whites do. That’s true. But if you solve that problem, will it take care of the quality of life and the life opportunities for black Americans or Latinos? If you move them from, say, $13 an hour to what whites are getting, which is, say, $15 an hour, will it solve the problem? Well, it makes it better, but it absolutely doesn’t solve the problem. 

Instead of struggling to upend such racialized disparities, Chibber maintains, the Left should be focusing on winning broad social programs. But why the exclusivity? Doesn’t the ability of the Left to constitute itself as a fighting force depend upon its ability to maintain solidarity, to kick against the differentiation that capital uses to divide it and that workers, when class struggle seems impossible, use to argue for their own advantage over other workers? 

 If the horizon here is the beneficent gift of broad social programs by way of Bernie Sanders or the Squad or some other force within the Democratic Party or the capitalist state, then organizing workers able to push back on inequality legitimized by way of racial and gender oppression doesn’t much matter. But this conception of winning concessions is utopian and elitist, and that’s precisely the problem. Mass disruptive struggle and, even more importantly, its extension and preservation, even in lean times, means developing a militant working-class that fights for itself and rejects those forces used to divide it—not by simply ignoring them but by seeking to actively root them out at every level. 

Struggles against oppression as class struggle 

Struggles against oppression cannot be separated from or merely added on to class struggle. They are constituent of it and must therefore be taken up with real militancy by the Left. We should understand struggles against identity-based oppression as struggles against capital’s socio-material relations. When these struggles don’t conceive of their demands as such, the Left should be there, involved and committed, to advance a totalizing theory of capitalist social relations that situates oppression as an inevitable outgrowth of capitalist inequality. 

The struggles that have surged forth in the last few years and offered real glimmers of possibility are not only those confined to a reductive conception of the economic. The George Floyd uprising in 2020—perhaps the largest movement in U.S. history, turning out over 20 million people into the streets—offered real glimpses of militant possibility. But the largest forces of the organized Left in the U.S. were largely absent, focusing instead on electing Democrats. What allowed for the momentum and possibilities of the largest social movement in U.S. history to be absorbed by the logic of lesser-evilism in 2020 was precisely the organized Left’s commitment to working within the Democratic Party. 

 Donald Trump’s recent barrage of executive orders—which have targeted workers, immigrants, queer and trans folks, women, and those who are racially oppressed—give lie to the fact that struggles against oppression can either be tabled in favor of class-wide demands or somehow fought indirectly. Trump’s election is the result not only of the failure of the Democratic Party but also the disorganization of the U.S. Left, which couldn’t bring itself to offer any meaningful alternative. After years of capitulation and self-subordination, the Left must reject calls to work within the capitalist state and its supposedly progressive Party, the Democrats, and start building meaningful and militant resistance on the ground.  

Arguments for strategic class reductionism cover over the reality of working-class division. And they also displace the hope that can emerge from building a working-class that can attack this division head on, by fighting against it in the streets and in the workplace. This is why Tempest sees struggles against oppression not just as something to be added into, or left off of, class struggle but rather as constitutive of it. This resistance will only be built by way of a rejection of any and all forms of oppression and domination, which is the bedrock of working-class solidarity. 

Featured Image Credit:Image by Madhushree1984 modified by Tempest.