“In Defence of Marxism: Why Judy Cox and the Socialist Workers Party Are Wrong,” by Marc James Léger, is an original feature of Communis. An abridged 6000-word version will appear in International Socialism this December.

“The North American and European left does not for the most part appreciate the extent to which class consciousness has been displaced by identitarian thought. And to the detriment of the left, the far right does understand this, even if only on account of its structural advantage as a detachment of the capitalist owners of the means of production. Different variants of identity politics have contributed to the postmodernization of the left, meaning to say, its intellectual liquidation, when seen from a Marxist perspective.”

— Marc James Léger

Why Judy Cox and the Socialist Workers Party Are Wrong

Meanwhile, in the rest of the world the great majority of politicians and theorists in the social democratic and former Stalinist left drew the conclusion that it was socialism that had failed and that the future lay with Western style markets, failing to perceive the depths of the crisis there too. […] The overall conclusion has to be that corporations, whether multinational or other, do not regard a state which will defend their interests as some afterthought based on nostalgia for the past, but an urgent necessity flowing from their present-day competitive situation.

– Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism

A man / Extremely lazy / Exhumes the cooked pigeon / His words indignant / Because it was cooked wrong / Middle class revolt

– The Fall, Middle Class Revolt

In September this year I clicked on a YouTube video the algorithm sent me titled “Marxism vs Identity Politics,” which was posted on the Socialist Workers Party (SWP UK) channel (SWP TV) and which features a lecture given by Esme Choonara at the Marxism 2025 Festival of Socialist Ideas in the trendy London section of Shoreditch.[1] Choonara is married to SWP central committee member Joseph Choonara. Early on in her conversation, she mentions the problematic views of Francis Fukuyama, whose 2019 book, Identity, is criticized at length in my book on this subject, titled Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide.[2] In the same breath, Choonara mentions my book and says that it should be rejected, along with the views of other leftists who believe that identity politics has caused the re-election of Donald Trump, which is not an argument that I would make. Class Struggle and Identity Politics is framed in such a way as to ask the question: Does identity politics strengthen or weaken the left? If so, why? If not, why not? The arguments presented in my book, as well as the conclusions, are decisive. The fact that Choonara singles me out is odd since I agree with almost everything she says in her talk. I immediately wrote to the SWP and to the SWP TV channel and asked them for an explanation, or for the opportunity to discuss this with whoever has decided to make this a party position, receiving no reply.

Matters were not clarified when someone appraised me of a May 13, 2025, article by Judy Cox published in the print and online versions of International Socialism: A Quarterly Review of Socialist Theory, a house organ of the SWP that is now edited by Joseph Choonara. Titled “Class struggle and identity politics in the era of Trump,” the article is written as a hit piece directed at Class Struggle and Identity Politics (CS&IP) in particular.[3] The text by Cox is so full of errors, disingenuous misdirection and disinformation that it functions neither as a book review nor a serious article on the subject. For a book review to have any value it should present accurately the focus of a book, its overall structure and argument, its aims and objectives, and whether it lives up to those stated aims. Cox’s article does none of these things and so the least we could say is that it is not a book review. Given everything I lay out in my book, which refutes every one of Cox’s aspersions, the article is designed to obfuscate rather than clarify the Marxist understanding and critique of identity politics. As I argue in the third section of this article, the reasons for this have to do with the SWP programme. Sectarian disagreements on the left regarding “what is to be done” are not at all irrelevant to the class and identity debate but are central to it. That discussion is in fact the issue that CS&IP lends itself to, which in most conversations and even on left political party agendas are brushed under the carpet.

In October of 2025, after writing to several comrades and to members of the SWP central committee, the editors of International Socialism have allowed me a 6000-word reply, which has been submitted to them, and which will then allow Cox a reply of her own of 4000 words. I thank Communis for allowing me this more detailed reply, written November 3, 2025. Although I welcome this opportunity to further my analysis, I warn comrades at the outset that if someone wishes to know my views, as presented in Class Struggle and Identity Politics, or in the previously published companion piece, Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (ITS), they should not rely on Cox or the SWP to give this work an accurate and fair assessment.[4] If the SWP finds that they were mistaken in their denunciation of my work, then that will be a felicitous outcome. If not, then the onus will remain on them to correct their representation of my work. Regardless, I encourage those who subscribe to International Socialism to read my book for themselves. I consider that Cox’s critique is to the political right of my communist politics. The views of an independent scholar, however, are not influenced by the same practical concerns as those of a political party organization.

Note that nowhere in my work have I ever suggested a wrongminded, undialectical and reductive opposing of Marxism to identity politics – I have even in print rejected the slogan “no war but the class war” – but instead have sought to provide a Marxist analysis of identity politics and critique of its most nefarious manifestations, especially with regard to postmodern theories and to articulations that are not socialist.[5] The only pertinent aspect of the article, in my view, is the question of whether the second Trump administration, or the advance of other far-right parties and movements – in Argentina, Czech Republic, Japan, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere – signals the death knell of wokeism, for good or bad, or simply gives cause to those with which we could associate the term to double down on it.[6] Before getting to the task of refuting Cox’s slander, I am here re-presenting, in the following section, my slightly modified November 15, 2024, analysis of this issue – what happens with DEI and wokeism under Trump – which I had posted on my Blog of Public Secrets.[7] That posting is no longer available on my blog since the Typepad platform ceased hosting user content on September 30, 2025. All of my BOPS articles would nevertheless have been available to Judy Cox when she wrote her article and to Esme Choonara when she publicly denounced my work.

Fascism and the Suspension of Belief

In “Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss,” the democratic socialist and labour party leader Adolph Reed Jr. reiterates the plea he usually makes at election time that leftists should hold their noses and vote for the Democrats despite their failings, which, this time around, includes genocide in Palestine as well as preparing for a NATO war with Russia, Iran and China. He writes: “We must engage; the everyday world and its concrete challenges don’t go away just because we want to transcend them. And we have to relate to that domain through the Dems.”[8] The difference between social democratic reformism and revolutionary Marxism does not go away either, no matter how practical or realistic we would like to be. If the former is weak at the moment, that is not unrelated to the fact that the latter is now practically nonexistent. What interests me in Reed’s article, in any case, is its conclusion. He writes: “I won’t be surprised if the next four years among intellectuals come increasingly to evoke scenes from Visconti’s The Damned, Bertolucci’s 1900, or Szabó’s Mephisto.”[9] There are concrete, historical and material reasons for the turn to neo- or post-fascism, most of them having to do with the ways in which capitalists have ignored socio-economic problems rather than confronting them directly. The crises of capitalism are managed through militarism and through a change of the guard among the political elite. There are also ideological reasons for the turn to fascism, and films like Mephisto, or more recently, Megalopolis, attempt to capture the more elusive aspects of personality as people are lured, cajoled, threatened and whatever else into compromising situations in which they are expected to lower their political, professional, intellectual, cultural, ethical or civilizational standards and accept the morality of thugs.

Although I appreciated Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) and David Russell’s Amsterdam (2022), one of the films that best captures our surreal moment is Werner Herzog’s Invincible (2001). In Nazi Germany, a strongman is enlisted by a con artist to perform as a Nordic Aryan “Siegfried” to propagandize the notion of Aryan superiority. As an allegory of the culture industry, the film is one of Herzog’s most direct representations of fascism. Not unlike a séance or a game of Ouija board, the con only works when people agree to suspend disbelief. The difficulty today, from the side of the left opposition, is that people do not want to suspend disbelief and enter the game – or more exactly, the struggle. It becomes more difficult to fight fascism today because people have the habit of suspending belief. Disbelief becomes generalized and people believe in nothing because others also disbelieve. The postmodern suspicion of meta-narratives has become a meta-narrative of suspicion, leading to the repressive desublimation of culture and politics. Think of something like sexual debauchery, when people make no commitments to anyone, not even themselves, and apply this dilemma to politics or art. It’s all good because nothing matters. Or better still, it’s all good because everything matters equally, without the distance needed for critical thought and radical practice. Clinically speaking, the condition that is created leads to anxiety about the inability to live up to all of society’s injunctions towards hedonism or empowerment. These no longer give meaning to countercultural conversion strategies, which is why the petty-bourgeois disposition, after first having become a dominant disposition among all classes of society in the postwar era, has entered a stage of decadence.

What I want to address here is a phenomenon that I described in a previous blog post and that could benefit from more elaboration.[10] In my book on the Obama portraits I wrote: “Contemporary culture and politics are … caught in a Chinese finger trap. The greater the need for a radicalization of the political economy, the more that various forms of identity are proffered as the most pertinent problems and pressing issues of the day. This trap manifests the politics of post-representation.”[11]

Without repeating here my theory of post-representation, or what you could also refer to as post-politics, the far-right Trump regime will not be met with what historically was the most concrete, determinate form of opposition to fascism – namely, communist internationalism – but the only kind of left we have today, which is a postmodern left with liberal plus identitarian or nationalist characteristics. Expect, however, this time around, a more revanchist form of identity politics, attuned to the mood music being played in Washington D.C. In progressive left circles, the belief in the inevitability of far-right politics as the only probable outcome of the global capitalist crisis, on the one hand, and the persistence of the belief that identity politics is an entry point into radical left politics, on the other, will continue to undermine revolutionary theory and proletarian organization.[12]

Instead of radical class organization, which is what we need, the shiftless droning of the postmodern liberal left will likely persist. An anticipation of this can be found in Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the Democratic Party Convention, in which tributes to the “joyful warrior” Kamala Harris were interspersed with the refrain “we’re not going back,” which alludes to the MAGA notion of a golden age of white supremacy, robber barons and Rooseveltian bully imperialism.[13] Of course a “progressive neoliberal” like Oprah is not suggesting that “the people” are not going back to a time of Old Left communist politics, but the Democratic establishment that pushed Bernie Sanders out of the 2020 nomination race did in fact say something to that effect: “This is not going to be the party of Bernie,” as Bill Clinton put it.[14] The same goes for anyone who does little more than hang a portrait of FDR on a White House wall and sing the macarena at some United States factory somewhere. Such pseudo-progressivism includes the pantomime of prominent labour leaders such as Shawn Fain, Randi Weingarten, Sean O’Brien, Mark Dimondstein or Michael Coleman.

Before Oprah uttered those words, and even before Trumpsters created the MAGA slogan, the postmodern left was already reacting to the resurgence of the macropolitical left that was making its way from the streets into the academy, from the Battle in Seattle through to the 2008 banking crisis and Occupy Wall Street. It was simply too much for this academic left to think that any class but the middle class could be the leader of progressive change. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in Fear of Falling, this professional-managerial class had already been transformed by deindustrialization, neoconservatism, the yuppie zeitgeist and the New Right.[15] A globalized economy of precarity, downsizing and wage suppression beset the middle class, which was now out to save itself first and foremost, never stopping to think that to save itself it had to save the majority. Despite the illustrious rise, especially in the U.S., of postwar (black) civil rights, second wave feminism and gay liberation, all of them not unrelated to the existence of the Soviet Union as well as postwar consumer prosperity, and all of them now defanged by postmodern anti-Marxism, anti-universalism and anti-normativity, the emphasis on differences of identity in government, business, education and the media is today a desperate expression of middle-class decline. What was perhaps a progressive impulse in scholarship today serves to maintain the status quo.

The North American and European left does not for the most part appreciate the extent to which class consciousness has been displaced by identitarian thought. And to the detriment of the left, the far right does understand this, even if only on account of its structural advantage as a detachment of the capitalist owners of the means of production. The ruling class benefits from identitarian culture wars as much as it does from labour. The crucial difference is that while class struggle illuminates the culture war, the culture war obscures class struggle. Consequently, the two wings of the capitalist elite, neoliberal and neoconservative, can countenance one form or the other of the culture war. In fact, they routinely, programmatically, stoke its two sides: racist and anti-racist, patriarchal and feminist, xenophobic and pluralist. Neither one, in contrast, instigates labour struggle. They prevent working class opposition from developing, co-opt or destroy its leadership, sabotage its means of organization and use government power to send strikers back to work. Although Trump rails against identity groups as much as he does against socialists, or the spectre of antifa, he claims that the Biden family are Marxists, not Mexicans. The devil, they say, tells the truth half of the time, and through this populist stratagem, even reprehensible figures can get a pass for seeming to be on the right side of one issue or another.

One of the key tenets of historical fascism is the belief that people prefer to fight against other identity groups, usually other nationalities, than they do against the bourgeois class of their own society. This is critically important for socialists who indulge in identity politics to understand. Since many poor working people aspire to a comfortable, middle-class existence, they strive for what has since the 1970s been structurally improbable for most in their cohort. They therefore compete with their class brothers and sisters, whether those people are domestic or foreign workers, in the hope for a better life. Where class mobility is gridlocked, petty-bourgeois identity politics appears an alternative path to social progress. A study I conducted of the 2022 conference of the professional association I belong to, the Universities Art Association of Canada, found that while fewer than four percent of the two hundred or so presentations were concerned with questions of labour and class, more than seventy-five percent were concerned with one variant or another of identity politics, and this is not even to get into the trendy methodologies that sustain these agendas and that as a matter of course exclude or downplay the concepts of Marxism, anti-capitalism, consumerism, the Frankfurt School, or even nationalism, in favour of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, decoloniality, gender and sexuality, communitarianism, performativity theory, the senses, phenomenology, care studies and ecology.[16] The reason that academic professionals invest so much time and effort on such topics is so that they can avoid losing support from their students, their colleagues and their administration. This is a problem.

Another ad hoc study I conducted found that among American scholars in humanities and social science departments – such as philosophy, political science, sociology, anthropology, literature and art history – there are fewer than three percent who present themselves on department webpages as Marxist or socialist scholars. Among those who identify as leftist, a majority are invested in new social movement methodologies. Otherwise, the more prominent and trendy methodologies today are in health and care studies, race and gender studies, animal studies, new materialisms, international relations, and similar topics that combine easily with neoliberal organizations and government. Glancing at left and progressive booksellers, it is impossible to not notice the overwhelming number of titles since around 2012 dedicated to race studies and anti-racism.

Today’s socialist left typically distinguishes between class/labour exploitation and forms of oppression, usually defined in terms of nationality, religion or identity markers such as gender, race and sexuality. The latter do not yield the same forms of analysis, and so the oppression and exploitation dichotomy is not as simple as it may seem. Regarding racism, the claim that anti-racism is by itself effective in fighting fascist capitalism is one that no serious Marxist on the Old Left would ever have entertained. As Leon Trotsky wrote in “What Is National Socialism?”:

As a matter of fact, in Germany as well as in Italy, fascism leaves the social system untouched. Taken by itself, Hitler’s overturn has no right even to the name counter-revolution. But it cannot be viewed as an isolated event; it is the conclusion of a cycle of shocks which began in Germany in 1918. The November Revolution, which gave the power to the workers’ and peasants’ soviets, was proletarian in its fundamental tendencies. But the party that stood at the head of the proletariat returned the power to the bourgeoisie. In this sense the Social Democracy opened the era of counter-revolution before the revolution could bring its work to completion. However, so long as the bourgeoisie depended upon the Social Democracy, and consequently upon the workers, the regime retained elements of compromise. All the same, the international and the internal situation of German capitalism left no more room for concessions. As Social Democracy saved the bourgeoisie from the proletarian revolution, fascism came in its turn to liberate the bourgeoisie from the Social Democracy. Hitler’s coup is only the final link in the chain of counterrevolutionary shifts.

(…)

In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The qualities of the race are construed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting “economic thought” as base, National Socialism descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it appeals to zoological materialism. The theory of race, specially created, it seems, for some pretentious self-educated individual seeking a universal key to all the secrets of life, appears particularly melancholy in the light of the history of ideas. In order to create the religion of pure German blood, Hitler was obliged to borrow at second hand the ideas of racism from a Frenchman, Count Gobineau, a diplomat and a literary dilettante. Hitler found the political methodology ready-made in Italy, where Mussolini has borrowed largely from the Marxist theory of the class struggle. Marxism itself is the fruit of union among German philosophy, French history, and British economics. To investigate retrospectively the genealogy of ideas, even those most reactionary and muddleheaded, is to leave not a trace of racism standing.[17]

Race reductionism, as we could also refer to zoological materialism, which connects to similar phenomena such as race metaphysics, race exceptionalism (not a surprising phenomenon for the U.S., which is mired in Christian fundamentalism and nationalist exceptionalism) and race populism, is now common among racialists of various sorts, most of whom are either liberal or postmodern. Such elements cannot be counted on to defend a robust social democratic programme.[18] The problems of such reductionism are further extended into intersectional studies as well as racialist forms of Stalinism.

Today’s professionals, academics and journalists are socialist to the extent that they are sometimes part of unions, but few of these are even remotely implicated in socialist internationalism. Like most other unionized workers, their main concerns are good pay, good work conditions and control over their professional domains. These unions are now heavily invested in DEI advocacy, which has little bearing on the forces that weaken them and in fact contributes to their own inefficiency.[19] In the years ahead, the Trump regime may instigate a more entrenched version of the culture war by imposing policies such as budget reconciliation restitution for whites who have been harmed by diversity mandates. His plan for schooling is to dismantle the Department of Education and privatize curriculum by placing it in the hands of parents. This is not a repetition of what was seen when white working-class voters migrated away from the Democratic Party to become Reagan Republicans. Why? As Vivek Chibber has pointed out, the trickle-down anti-racism and anti-sexism of the New Democrat coalition of minorities and middle-class (sub-)urbanites is no longer enough to secure votes for the Democratic Party.[20] The 2024 exit polls indicate that it is working-class minority groups, as opposed to the white working class – the preferred scapegoat of the liberal elite – that are defecting in significant numbers to the GOP. In 2016 this included a notable increase among LGBTQ voters. The Democrats’ lead with non-college educated voters shrank (down 33 percent from Biden), as did the Latino vote (from 71 percent in 2008 to 53 percent in 2024). As Chibber puts it, the Democrats are not simply losing white workers, but all workers, regardless of race. He adds that this weakens the left wing of the party and strengthens the so-called CIA or Liz Cheney Democrats. And the reason for the shift is economic worries, which of course is counter-intuitive given Republican Party policy.

The lesson of the 2024 election, according to Chibber, is the lesson of one hundred years of struggle. If he argues that the left needs to understand this, the reason is no doubt because the postmodern comprador left that we have today programmatically refuses to understand it. This post-political left is unable to suspend its disbelief of the meta-narrative of revolutionary class struggle. Without a genuine opposition to contend with, the liberal middle class will continue to scapegoat the working class for failing in its historical mission. Since so many of the people whose work life and identity no longer fit the Archie Bunker model, new stereotypes will fill the void: Bernie bros, Brexiters, sports hooligans, online trolls, trad wives, immigrants, etc.[21] The important takeaway is that this is a problem of middle-class projection since the conflict, now heightened by bipartisan blackmail, is not external but internal: the propensity of the American middle class to conspire against genuine socialism and to restrict radicalism to the concerns of an educated managerial strata, leaving the apolitical creative class sector vying against the politicized activist and NGO sector. If the latter identify as socialist, it is most often a post-left variety that is too caught up in intellectual and cultural gymnastics to make the left relevant to the working majority. The most sophisticated of these tell us that Marxism was never so simple as to be comparable to Soviet communism, or that Marxism is little more than political economy.

The character of the struggle in the next four years is likely to be a con game that the majority are expected to go along with as they are called upon to do the obvious and suspend belief in revolutionary socialism. One of the reasons for this, I argue, though not the only or even the most determinant, is that the struggle will continue to be encoded in the form of culture wars, whether nationalist or identitarian.

The SWP Has No Clothes

In 2024 I published a reply to a disingenuous review of my 2022 book Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism, noting that the reviewer’s work had the signature features of the many manipulated peer reviews I had received for my work since 2016, which have similar characteristics, including the inversion of truth, disingenuous comments, distortions of scholarly material and comments that allude to work I have completed elsewhere, or that is in process.[22] Whereas that reviewer is associated with the Democratic Socialists of America, this more recent attack comes from a socialist party, causing more consternation. The review by Cox may not have anything to do with previous backroom dealings, but it nevertheless makes use of many of the same stratagems. It is difficult to see why such shoddy work was endorsed by Esme Choonara as well as the handful of people who provided comments and suggestions to Cox, as noted in the references section of her text: Joseph Choonara, Iain Ferguson, Donny Gluckstein, Rob Hoveman and Camilla Royle. Based on publication profiles, Cox is a retired schoolteacher and lifelong socialist who has worked on the editorial board of International Socialism. Her doctoral research and publications are focused on the history of women in radical left movements. I find it ironic that it is this SWP member who should criticize me since my colleagues know that since January 2025 I have been doing detailed research on the prewar “woman question” and postwar social reproduction theory.

The following elaborates the claims, misdirection and mistakes made in Cox’s article as these pertain to Class Struggle and Identity Politics. As far as scholarship goes, her text is so misconstrued that it does not merit a serious response. However, given its endorsement by a political party of the socialist left, it would be irresponsible if not elitist of me to not respond. Cox’s text begins with the assertion that the second election victory of Donald Trump has “dealt a severe blow to the idea that people see politics through the prism of identity.” From this, one might presume that people rather see politics through the prism of class and economic interests. This is generally true, but it does not solve the dilemma in question. According to Touré Reed, in a short-lived re-run of 2016, the electoral failure of Kamala Harris and pseudo-left populist running mate Tim Walz led many among Democratic Party supporters to argue that racism explains the second Trump victory. Other explanations for the loss of Democratic Party support include concern for Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, Biden’s war in Ukraine and defence of Israeli genocide, as well as government attacks on campus protests and academic freedom. Some thought that Harris had too little time to prepare her campaign and others blame the doom lust of the electorate. For Reed, these explanations tend to obscure resentment of the continued pursuit of neoliberal policies (such as the failure to protect abortion rights, affirmative action and birthright citizenship), Obama-style bootstrap moralism, anger over persistent racial disparities and flyover avoidance of regions hard-hit by decades of austerity.[23] This is not to ignore Trump’s overheated race baiting, Reed says, but that might not explain why Harris underperformed by 2 percent (approximately 10 million voters) from Biden, especially with white voters, while nevertheless performing better with white voters than both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Harris did not underperform with whites, but with voters of colour, losing 12 percent with Hispanic male voters and 7 percent with African American men. She did not improve on Biden’s performance with black women and lost support among Latinas and Asian Pacific Islanders. This means that anti-black racism or misogynoir do not explain her loss.

Reed’s focus is not the same as Cox’s. Whereas she is glad to mock those who argue that the political left was “just too ‘woke’, too busy checking its privilege, to appeal to working class people,” which would have allowed the political right to capitalize on the association between DEI policies and neoliberal centrism, Reed affirms the emphasis on universal policies as the best policy orientation:

the righteous antiracist discourse that has gripped the liberal imagination since the summer of George Floyd has encouraged us to settle on a narrow vision of social justice focused on racial parity at the expense of redistributive programs that might provide economic justice for all.[24]

For Reed, unlike Cox, it is not that people do or do not see politics through the prism of identity, but that identity should not be construed as a locus of political beliefs. Racism, according to him, is an alibi, and the key to his analysis, and mine, which is not accounted for in Cox’s analysis, is that this approach applies to both racism and progressive anti-racism. This approach helps account for rather than ignore efforts by the neoliberals and the political right – and I would add, the broad liberal left – to conflate identity with politics. What is needed instead is an approach that politically articulates questions of identity to politics and to political economy. A decisive factor is the category of universality as well as the presupposition that in socialist politics it is the proletariat and not the bourgeoisie that is the universal class. This approach does not ignore questions of nationality, religion, gender, race or sexuality, or problems of oppression. Instead, it leads to a discussion of what is race and racism, what is gender, what is sexuality, and how have these historically elaborated constructs been harnessed to different political agendas, to business needs, government and intellectual-cultural paradigms. Rather than ignore the construct of “race,” Reed calls for a materialist analysis of how “race” helps to ideologize contradictions by harmonizing with late capitalism. That approach, I would argue, without denying its significant merits, involves a tendency towards historicism that underplays aspects of Marxist philosophy.

As with other far-right groups, historical and contemporary, the Trump administration has used anti-immigrant xenophobia as a demagogic tool. This ignores the reality that most immigrants who emigrate to the U.S. do not do so to fight culture wars but to persevere or succeed within the system as it exists. Harris’s advice to these people was “don’t come.” She was no more welcoming to immigrants than Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz. The neoliberal parties of the centre-right are broadly perceived as having the same capitalist agenda as the neoliberal parties of the far right. The only visible difference among them is between rhetorical anti-racism and demagogic racism – both used as strategies to divide the working majority. However, when it comes to what Jacques Rancière refers to as para-politics – the technocratic management of markets and populations in a world of global capital in which ideology is said to have come to an end – Trump represents a return of the repressed dimension of politics, albeit in a confused form that distorts pragmatic solutions. The only politics that comes close to this on the post-left is culture wars, which are wars in which minority groups are not likely to win, and so they must be combined intersectionally. But this strategy weakens class politics to the extent that these movements are not organizationally anti-capitalist. This is the milieu that groups like the SWP seek to influence.

At the 2025 World Transformed festival, an annual event that takes place at the same time as the Labour Party Conference, the SWP joined similar groups such as Counterfire (a SWP splinter group), RS21 (another SWP splinter group), Germany’s Die Linke, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s Your Party, the Workers Party of Belgium, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Socialist Alternative, and similar left of centre groups. Speaking for La France Insoumise (LFI), Nathalie Oziol argued that the LFI is not a party but a political movement. Because the social and cultural divisions in France no longer correspond to “traditional” class distinctions, she argued, the party form is no longer adequate. Instead, social movements with ad hoc strategies must be mobilized to pressure the existing parliamentary channels to meet movement demands.[25] Shortly after the festival, France’s Socialist Party (PS) abandoned its comrades in Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s New Popular Front (NFP) and helped to install a centre-right Prime Minister, thereby strengthening the long-term position of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally (RN) party. One can anticipate that similar sidestepping on the British left will eventually usher in worse that Boris Johnson and Starmer.

There is no reason to accept the standard terms of debate on racism and anti-racism, especially now that MAGA nativism, xenophobia, transphobia and other forms of discrimination are wielded as a matter of jouissance.[26] As Jodi Dean argued in 2015, Trumpism is not simply built on the resentment of “deplorables,” but openly appeals to base desires and impulses that are regulated by political correctness, “owning the libs” through the freedom of incivility and the enjoyment of superiority.[27] Along similar lines, Slavoj Žižek argued in April 2025 that Trump knows he is a “piece of shit,” and so there is little to gain by making fun of him.[28] Žižek uses this blockage to explain why many who voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at the local level, voted for Trump, at the federal level. Unlike technocrats, AOC and Trump appear to voters as people whose speech is not calculated and cautious. Instead, they seem to say what they mean, unafraid to disturb the conventions of respectability and decorum. The case of Harris is the opposite: she avoids direct answers to concrete problems. I would add that whenever Harris shows her enjoyment, she displays even more the twisted logic of the technocracy. For Žižek, the misperception of Trump’s authenticity is a problem of enunciation and enunciated content: the more he is caught lying, the more people interpret this as a sign that he is human and not a robot, that he lies and cheats like everyone else. This explains Trumpism only so much, Žižek insists, but it helps to account for the persistence of Trump well beyond his January 6 expiry date.

Like many of the underworld characters in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Trump is a cynic who openly displays his dishonesty as a form of honesty. Cox says something similar about the Tech Bros from Silicon Valley who at one time advanced DEI policies when it was expedient to do so but are now catering to Trump’s demands that they root out these programmes. Democrats, Cox says, presume that voters fail to understand the threat that Trump poses to democracy. Whether they fail to understand this is not really the problem. It is not that the Democrats are the “only bulwark against fascism,” as Cox writes, but that they are the only probable alternative in the existing bipartisan setup. The further problem is not “frustration” with “top-down identity politics,” as represented by diverse faces in high places. Neoliberalism is not a form of identity politics. Neoliberalism is a form of politics that wields identity politics to political ends.[29] The problem is the inability of the left to produce a mass movement that breaks with the Democratic Party alternative to the Republicans, or to the Labour Party alternative to the Tories.

In my own work, which insists on the concept of universality, particularity is never conflated with politics, whether this is socialist politics, liberalism or conservativism. It is only postmodern approaches that allow identity to be conflated with politics. Without mentioning this aspect of my work, we are simply not on the same page. I have addressed these issues in countless ways in my recent writings, which include the books Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (2022), Bernie Bros Gone Woke (2022), and the edited text Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (2023), none of which are mentioned by Cox. It is difficult to address these issues if one ignores how the concept of hegemony that was developed by Antonio Gramsci as one way to account for why a communist revolution was unlikely in Western Europe has been twisted by postmodern thought by making identity politics equivalent to class politics. Further, my work gives emphasis to the rise of the professional-managerial class in the early twentieth century as well as the predominance in postwar consumer culture of a distinctly petty-bourgeois cultural disposition, which over the long run has resulted in the transfer of countercultural trends from the political left to the political right. Cox is likely oblivious to these prominent aspects of my writing. For me, it is less the case that “Trump and the far right attack identity politics to facilitate a much more serious attack on all the rights of the oppressed” [my emphasis], but that Trump and the far right attack oppressed minorities and champion historically privileged sectors of society so that they can oppress everyone by decimating rights and strengthening the power of the oligarchy and the state. This is why people now accuse the far right of taking their cues from the “fascist playbook,” almost as though actual belief in racial, gender, national and religious superiority is superfluous. The goal of today’s neoliberalism, with or without fascist characteristics, is to guarantee that the socialist left stays out of the picture. This is why before, during and after January 6, the Democrats did little more than call for a strong Republican Party.

Towards the end of her introduction, Cox sets up a two-part description of the problem, as she sees it, and through this gets my work completely and utterly wrong. The reversal of the fortunes of identity politics at the moment of Trump’s re-election leads to two false responses, she argues. Before even getting to what these are, I would counter that both the rise of neoliberalism and its authoritarian alternative are not a reversal in the fortunes of identity politics but the protracted result of the reversal of the fortunes of world communism since the 1930s, and later, with the neoliberal attack on postwar Keynesianism, a welfare agenda that went hand in hand with civil rights gains. From the 1950s to the 1980s, a distinction emerged between civil rights movements, which are universalist and rights-based, and the postmodern ideas that now inform new social movement agendas, which are typically difference-based, anti-normative, anti-Enlightenment and anti-Eurocentric, among other standard characteristics. Belief in the end of ideology and the end of revolutionary class struggle within the academic sector became even more pronounced after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, leading to post-political versions of democratic agonism that replace the labour and capital opposition that is central to Marxism with discourse theoretical paradigms, structuralist models of representation, literary deconstruction and a host of methods that combined with identity politics. Because of this shift in education, culture and society, the two false responses to Trump that are outlined by Cox are themselves false. In the first, one responds to Trump’s re-election by defending the political centre and denouncing Trump supporters as bigots, anticipating a return to normal – a replay of the Biden back to brunch, as it were. The second response to Trump 2.0, according to Cox, is “to accept that sexism, racism, homophobia and transphobia cannot be challenged, to tone down the defence of migrants and refugees and trans rights, and to focus exclusively on issues like jobs, homes, healthcare.”

Cox argues that my work gives theoretical expression to the second tendency. This is false. My work can no more give theoretical expression to the second tendency than to the first. What CS&IP does do, however, is describe the left political tendency that does call on the left to move away from culture wars and to focus on material incentives for workers, namely, the democratic socialist politics represented by the ‘Class Unity’ and ‘Bread and Roses’ tendencies within the Democratic Socialists of America, for example, as well as the editorial departments of Jacobin and Catalyst. The views of some people associated with this tendency are presented in the part of CS&IP dedicated to ‘Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism,’ which I contrast to the views discussed in the parts on ‘Fascism and Conservatism,’ ‘Liberalism and Neoliberalism,’ ‘Anarchism’ and ‘Postmodernism.’ My own position, revolutionary Marxism, comes closest to the work of those authors who are discussed in the section on ‘Socialism and Communism.’ And none of these sections, which function as guides to further research, pretend to be exhaustive. Call me orthodox, but when it comes to the material incentives argument, I long ago displayed my adhesion, in the form of a Fluxus event score, to Karl Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and Friedrich Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880).[30]

On the point Cox raises that some people are calling on the Democrats to drop their ambitions when it comes to anti-oppression and be more like the Republicans, I have written two relevant texts, neither of which is mentioned by Cox. One is a 2021 response to the Jacobin-created organization, the Centre for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), whose analysis, I argue, does exactly what Cox describes as the second option. I write in that text that the bread and butter issues the CWCP emphasizes is a problem for socialist strategy because it avoids solving the class struggle and identity politics quandary at the level of theory and programme. Instead, it approaches the matter by focusing on what policy points resonate the most with voters. While the CWCP’s research is focused on voter behaviour, I argue that more attention should be given to the impact of Cultural Studies, post-structuralism and related theories on the broad social movement left, problems that due to the division of labour and expert forms of knowledge may not reflect the average worker’s concerns – like the kerfuffles over whether or not to use the terms Latinx or pregnant persons – but that nevertheless shape the assumptions, goals and expectations of the political, professional, managerial and business class.[31]

Another related text is my critique of the Sanders Fighting Oligarchy tour with AOC, which addresses the anti-wokeism response of a pro-Democrat neoliberal think tank called Third Way to the first bevy of Trump executive orders and cuts to federal administrations, recommending that the party rebrand itself along Republican lines, for instance, by highlighting dreams of economic success rather than reflecting worry about stagnant wages and high prices.[32] My article considers how this strategy revisits the autonomization of middle-class from working-class politics in the 1970s. That trend did not, however, imply abandoning social movement identity politics; on the contrary, neoliberal belt-tightening and focus on the family, hard work and patriotism was accompanied by the lifestyle identitarianism that was being served by academia, with for example feminist texts such as Heidi Hartmann’s essay about the “unhappy marriage” between Marxism and feminism creating a nascent privilege theory and allyship argument against “patriarchal capitalism” that is structurally similar to Cedric Robinson’s non-Marxist theory of “racial capitalism.”[33] Incidentally, Hartmann’s analysis was criticized by a raft of socialist feminists, including Emily Hicks, whose 1981 essay “Cultural Marxism: Nonsynchrony and Feminist Practice” is the first but hardly the last use of this term on the left that I am aware of, which belies the taboo against the word by those who think that it belongs to the alt-right.[34]

Anyone who reads CS&IP will understand that I do not advocate a class only position. However, many who argue for a focus on class and who criticize identity politics from a left position have made important contributions to the struggles that have taken place since the years after Occupy Wall Street, which it is important to appreciate is the timeframe that CS&IP is essentially concerned with, which is to say, the period when the communist and anarchist surge of the 2000s, and in which the anti-globalization movement shifted from summit hopping to the stage of global urban encampments, suffered blowback from not only the mainstream but also a nonplussed postmodern academia, except maybe for those who saw this as an opportune occasion to transition from Foucauldianism to Deleuzianism. It is this post-OWS era that saw the rise of Black Lives Matter (BLM), MeToo and a new culture war agenda that was premised on intersectionality, decoloniality, privilege theory, Critical Race Theory, afro-pessimism, and related methods, with DEI mandates as the most widespread and visible effect of this shift. It is at this moment of the “great awokening” that the Combahee River Collective and Kimberlé Crenshaw became the soupe du jour on the so-called woke left, and this, as the short-lived surge of universalist macropolics was denounced as reductionist and nostalgic, if not masculinist, phallogocentric, white supremacist, cishetero-patriarchal, etc. It is after 2012 that academic departments (now scrambling for the best diversity hires), psychiatric associations (inventing new afflictions such as toxic masculinity), book publishers (calling for more titles against racism and sexism), newspapers (warning white critics to not ruin black careers), Hollywood (imposing quotas so as to not be so white), politicians (including Crenshaw, attacking Sanders universalism), business executives (making their boards and products more diverse while they disciplined their oppressive employees with sensitivity training that recommends they be less white), advertisers (wokewashing corporate profits), activists (bending the knee and cleaning people’s feet at rallies), and even the CIA (belatedly honouring Harriet Tubman with a bronze statue at Langley HQ), played their part in ratifying the diversity agenda. And it is that mixed bag of new social movement postmodernism and post-liberal progressivism that Cox and the SWP want you to defend.

A few years down that road, as Trump played his 1776 whitewash against the equally tendentious, and equally wrong, 1619 Project – derided by the conservative intellectual Michael Eric Dyson as Covid 1619 – a smattering of left voices, derided by David Roediger as “class-splainers,” managed to pierce the postmodern bubble and offer a principled critique of wokeism from the universalist left.[35] I sought to bring the best of these together in Identity Trumps Socialism, which includes essays by Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, Bruno Bosteels, Vivek Chibber, Barbara Foley, Nancy Fraser, Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, Walter Benn Michaels, David Harvey, Jodi Dean and myself. The original subtitle for this book was “the politics of emancipatory universality,” and the book’s target is the attack on universalism by the postmodern left. The planned table of contents included David Walsh, the arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site.[36] The first version of the book, which included a 50,000-word addendum, was first proposed to Verso Books, who turned it down, which was a bit of a surprise given that most of the contributors had previously published with them. The editors declined the proposal, writing: “It’s not for Verso (and the inclusion of a member of the super-sectarian WSWS is very odd!).” So odd, in fact, that Walsh later decided to opt out. The book was also turned down by Bloomsbury Academic, with the excuse given to me after six months that the commissioning editor could not find anyone to peer review the title, and by Manchester University Press, who would have liked to expand the table of contents with offerings by left postmodernists. It was later accepted by Routledge, whose editors managed a timely and positive review process without difficulty. Around the time I was working on these issues, comrades told me they appreciated my work but were afraid to do anything similar in their workplace or activist circles. Although it now seems a distant memory, this was a time when legitimate people were being fired from their jobs by illegitimate activists whose narcissistic and self-serving efforts to correct historically given structural inequalities – with for example the racialist attacks against the Whitney Biennale for showing Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till – made the particulars of any one case irrelevant to them.

Almost all the research that is published today on the class and identity debate falls within petty-bourgeois, liberal-left and postmodern parameters. Among the few researchers on the left whose work combines universalism with emancipation, I would mention Nivedita Majumdar, Touré Reed, Daniel Zamora (who co-edited the invaluable Foucault and Neoliberalism), Preston Smith, Tom Mackaman, Barbara and Karen Fields, Paul Street, Sharon Smith, Margaret Kimberley, Sheila McGregor, Martha Gimenez, Norman Finkelstein, Neil Larsen, Roger Lancaster, Dan Kovalik, Jennifer C. Pan, William I. Robinson, Mike McNair, Benjamin Fong and Terry Eagleton. Many related authors have contributed helpful but isolated articles and so despite this have not yet made a significant impact, as far as I’m aware. Among liberal thinkers I would include Mark Lilla as well as Susan Neiman, and among religious thinkers I would add Cornel West and Chris Hedges. Among those who have died, one would have to include Ralph Miliband, Ambalavaner Sivanandan, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Fredric Jameson, Glen Ford and Mark Fisher. Many others try to bridge historical materialism with the usual laundry list of good causes, making their work tokenistic if not irrelevant when it comes to the advancement of knowledge.

The contributors to Identity Trumps Socialism do not belong to the same strand of left materialism. Their work is typically at odds with the neoliberal, activist, NGO and political party sectors that demand the subordination of theory to pragmatism. It is the needs of recruitment, in my view, that cause Cox and the SWP to ignore the intellectual contribution of CS&IP, especially when it comes to the question of postmodern theory. Only this explains why they have falsified my political identifications and underplayed those aspects of socialist orthodoxy that we share. Cox’s portrayal of CS&IP is not a scholarly discussion by any means and comes across instead as sectarian discord, which causes the author to muck about tangentially relating random events and phenomena back to me. While discussion of Hillary Clinton, Sanders, MAGA, Brexit, Corbyn or Starmer is germane to my book, and most of these are mentioned in CS&IP, the assertion by Cox that the Democratic Party centrists who pilloried Sanders are now bowing to Trumpism by abandoning migrants and trans people misses entirely the thrust of my work, which, to cite Chelsea Manning, is the view that equal opportunity oppression/exploitation will not help the majority of trans people or migrants. The question regarding how to end gender, sex and race discrimination cannot be separated from the question of class and the question of class cannot be separated from politics and political economy. My argument adds to this the view that problems of identity and discrimination also cannot be conflated with the question of class, politics and political economy. If and whether the Democrats now consider it convenient to abandon DEI, it is not because they are suddenly in agreement with the likes of me that we need to question the many ways in which identity politics, which I clearly distinguish from anti-oppression identity struggles, have strayed from revolutionary politics.

The problem with the term identity politics is that the designation covers the entire political spectrum, left to right. This is why my handbook is divided into three parts. The first part addresses the different variants of identity politics that have contributed to the postmodernization of the left, meaning to say, its intellectual liquidation, when seen from a Marxist perspective. This does not refer to women’s struggles, struggles for civil rights, anti-imperialist liberation struggles or struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. It refers, in CS&IP, and after a section on the development of identity politics in the postwar era, to contemporary intellectual currents with which we can identify specific scholars, concepts and activist agendas. These are: radical democracy, (left) populism, privilege theory and critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. This first part of the book was originally conceived as an addendum to Identity Trumps Socialism because the essays contained in that reader left many of these stones unturned. The addendum was removed and remade into a more detailed primer.

The second section of CS&IP looks at how the new postmodern trends, or the class and identity debate more generally, have been the subject of discussion, elaboration and critique across the political spectrum, beginning with conservatism and fascism, then liberalism and neoliberalism, postmodernism, anarchism, social democracy and democratic socialism, and ending with socialism and communism. Those scholars who are discussed in the second section have in their respective ways dealt with the ideas and practices that derive from the shift from universalist civil rights towards post-political postmodernism. Despite many overlaps, this means that the culture wars of the 2000s are not the same as those of the 1980s. The book is designed to help readers navigate a highly uneven terrain, especially when most commentators use simplistic formulations with which they can more easily argue their position. Whereas many commentators limit their concerns for the sake of rhetorical effectiveness, CS&IP covers the entire social space.

The third section of CS&IP identifies three caveats against the idea of a postmodern left: 1) postmodernism’s tendency to reject universalism, 2) the difference between socialism and identity politics, 3) the problems of cynicism and eclectic materialism. The conclusion provides several theses that summarize my critique. The conclusion alone is enough to dismiss Cox’s text as an inadequate description of my work. The introduction adds to this my rejection of the emphasis on the last and eleventh of Marx’s theses on Feuerbach, demonstrating the fact that Marxism should not and cannot be confused with voluntarism, pragmatism, empiricism or immanentism. Not that Cox cares to inform her readers about this, but my work as a cultural theorist is based on the Marxism of Henri Lefebvre, the genetic structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu and the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. For obvious reasons, and as evidenced by my writing, I am intellectually indebted to the work of Žižek and Badiou, whose thoughts are addressed in the concluding section of the second part of the book. For instance, I accept Badiou’s distinction between the democratic materialism of bodies and languages, and the communist materialism of what he refers to as political, cultural, scientific and love events. Badiou’s philosophy is not always compatible with Žižek’s work, but both have successfully defended communism against postmodern inroads. My production of two edited volumes on “the idea of the avant garde,” inspired by the “idea of communism” books edited by Žižek and others, champions dialectical materialism against mechanistic models of determinism and the kind of postmodern social constructionism that takes basic ideas from Marxism and applies them any which way with little appreciation of the theoretical binds that one can get into when one assumes that this, that or the other is the ideological naturalization of pre-existing social processes. A Marxist meta-politics is the approach that Cox was presented with and that challenge, which she likely failed to perceive, caused her to come across less as an intellectual, or even a fellow comrade, than the result of ChatGPT.

Although it is at times impossible to know how I am supposed to fit into Cox’s argument, which mentions many topics, my “pseudo-left critique of identity politics,” she argues, gives “theoretical expression” to the politics of people such as George Galloway and Sahra Wagenknecht because it “downplays oppression” and “advances a reductionist version of Marxism.” My work is “dangerous,” she says, because elements of my critique “sound” plausible. Those who read the first part of CS&IP can see for themselves that what “sounds” plausible is based on the statements of the thinkers who are associated with the different strands of thought that are criticized – people like Derrick Bell, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Peggy McIntosh, Richard Delgado, Jean Stefancic, Chantal Mouffe, Walter Mignolo, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, among others. If these people attack universalism, Enlightenment, liberalism and socialism, it is their work that should come under fire, not mine. As a Marxist, I do not need to be reminded of legitimate critiques of universalism, Enlightenment, liberalism, or even socialism, but leftists should be advised about the ways in which post-structuralism more often than not dispenses with socialism, Marxism, class analysis, dialectics and the concept of totality. The fact of the matter is that I am a critic of reductionism, as attested most obviously by my contribution to Identity Trump Socialism, titled “The Use and Abuse of Class Reductionism for the Left.” So does my introduction to Identity Trumps Socialism address this problem. As for Galloway, about whom I have never written, it is the SWP that formed an alliance with the Respect Party, of which Galloway was a leading figure. A split within Respect between the Galloway and the SWP faction would seem to have caused Cox and company to try to settle scores with him by belatedly going after me. As for Wagenknecht, I completely reject her brand of red-brown populism, making the association preposterous.

In the section of her text that I am presently discussing, titled “the economistic critique of identity politics,” Cox plays the usual either-or game, which I have criticized in all four of my books on class and identity. Through a pathetic divide and conquer stratagem, Cox claims that I counterpose identity politics to the struggle against the dangers of nuclear war and climate change. She then says that I consider the left’s capitulation to identity politics a “contemptable [sic] contrivance.” My work nowhere argues for an opposition between class and identity. This is why I accepted that the book be titled Class Struggle and Identity Politics, being the two subjects discussed, and not a policy formula. For someone reading my book, they will see, starting on page 3, that what I refer to as a “contrivance” is the sort of left one has when it is based on the following:

magazines like Forbes celebrate the Bolivian coup leader and genocidal criminal Jeanine Áñez as a feminist icon; Hillary Clinton hails the election of fascist leader Giorgia Meloni as the first woman Prime Minister of Italy; the administration of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau adopts the rhetoric of feminist foreign policy as it doubles military spending to meet Canada’s NATO commitments; the United States Army and the CIA advertise the diversity and woke credentials of its staff; war hawks around the Joe Biden administration call for the decolonization of Russia; Western intellectuals approve of the reclamation of UNESCO monuments like the Byzantine Hagia Sophia for the sake of authoritarian Islamic politics; statues of Enlightenment and revolutionary figures like Voltaire, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are vandalized in the name of a racial reckoning that has no clear political orientation; the leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom prevents its members from defending workers’ interests at the same time that it celebrates the monarchy.[37]

I doubt that Cox disagrees with me on all of that, but this did not stop her from misinforming her readers. The above list of course hardly exhausts the subject of identity politics, which runs the gamut from left to right, and for postmodernists, beyond the macropolitical spectrum. What then are some of the problems for socialist universalism we can attribute to identity politics? Again, Cox did not have to look very far for some examples, which are mentioned in the introduction in a list that is long enough that it would be difficult for her to miss:

The extent to which socialism can be reduced to material incentives [note that my book argues against this] rather than the complete transformation of society is for some a matter of strategy and for others a matter of political difference. Others still replace the question of socialist strategy – the general strike or the parliamentary road – with the kind of activism that presumably solves the problem of alienated representation. The latter, like most culture warriors, do not care to be taken too seriously. That is why such politics is the preoccupation of the middle class, which affords itself the indulgence. This cynicism reflects the neurotic busyness of people who make sure that social change remains constrained within the limits of what already exists. Progressives thereby blackmail the socialist left into countercultural and culture war scenarios. Some of these scenarios now include: attacks on free speech; campus mobs and dubious accusations; shutting people down for minor issues; cancellations for the sake of career building or on the basis of rumour; making identity struggles a matter of exclusion and exclusivity rather than broad social transformation; falsely equating universality with domination; the shift of politics from commonality to marginality; the restriction of pride to minority groups and shame to majority groups; the exclusive ownership of topics and histories of oppression against charges of appropriation; the attribution of exclusive blame for the tragedies of previous generations; demands that people check their privilege rather than assert their rights, defined as unfair privileges; replacing policy with interpersonal dynamics or group therapy; funding expensive consultancies that fuel identity conflicts; competing group oppressions rather than solidarity across struggles; the retreat into tribalism and in-group preoccupations; the appeal to experience and feelings over the better argument or social convention; banalities like X/Twitter activism; the pretence that when you start a national conversation you start from zero; the weaponization of identity and harm to avoid solving solvable problems; forcing people into identity boxes; the denial of people’s achievements for the sake of equity; enjoyment of speaking truth to power while taking on none of the responsibility; the public performance of awareness; gaining social credit through sycophantic rituals of self-humiliation; preferring ally humility to worker militancy; reframing questions of freedom as questions of risk and consent; replacing ideals of progress with crude affirmations of the worst aspects of reality; the falsification rather than illumination of history on the basis of contemporary agendas; politics defined by what you are rather than what you stand for; the repressive desublimation of culture and politics; equality of outcomes rather than struggle over politics and culture. That the far right invents dodges that are worse than the above scenarios gives these an ersatz legitimacy that is only slightly more astute than telling Marxists that they are not Marxist because they buy things.[38]

For apparatchiks like Cox, the more elaborate your Marxist critique of identity politics, the more urgent is the need to put you in a box. Personally, I do not mind it too much if someone does that, only, I would like it to be the correct box. And when I talk about social change, I am not talking about petty-bourgeois conversion strategies like nudist beaches or threesomes.

To return to my preliminary observation, the only thing that makes Cox’s article worth considering is the question of whether Trump’s re-election, and his administration’s attacks on DEI, trans rights or gender theory, etc., insubstantiate my critique of identity politics. Cox acknowledges correctly that I consider postmodern identitarianism and racialism to have inadvertently assisted in the resurgence of the far right, and this, by rejecting Enlightenment universalism and class struggle in favour of cultural relativism and the classless rhetoric of power. I do not in the least agree that my critique can be dismissed because MAGA culture warriors attack identity politics. I could say that if Kamala Harris had been elected instead of Trump my publication would be more relevant today than it was when it came out in the summer of 2024. This is an interesting question, from the perspective of historical materialism, but it is making the same mistake from a different angle. For one thing, it is not that Trump 2.0 represents the end of wokeism, as some claim, but rather, as liberal leftists never hesitate to say, that MAGA is a version of identity politics, only a majoritarian and reactionary one. The relation between them is similar to Hitler’s reactionary national socialist counterpoint to international socialism. What gets left out of the analysis is the fact that because identity politics makes identity central to its politics, it has more in common with bourgeois nationalism, if not with volkish nationalism, than it does with class-based socialism. And this is why feminism, for example, was from the start a bourgeois phenomenon that was by and large rejected by socialist women like Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai, for whom it was enough to consider oneself a socialist or communist. Their approach to “the woman question” made clear distinctions between the needs and aspirations of bourgeois women demanding equal rights with bourgeois men, and the socialist women struggling in factories to feed themselves, their families and survive to work another day. Anyone who is remotely familiar with Marx and Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, or Lise Vogel’s Marxism and the Oppression of Women, would understand that gender and gender struggles cannot be conceived in ahistorical terms.[39]

While socialists should not be stoking controversies over fundamental and objective truths, a more complicated problem is how do we defend universal emancipation in a post-industrial, post-Fordist knowledge and creative economy in which identity operates as a marker of difference and authenticity that is capitalized for the sake of what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge referred to in the 1970s as production public spheres, which includes political parties. The erosion of the bourgeois public sphere and the rise to the status of cultural hegemony of petty-bourgeois dispositions has led to new forms of decadence in the neoliberal era, I argue, and this has inflamed culture wars at the expense of leftist class struggle. From the perspective of historical materialism, these shifts are not simply a matter of moving the dial on anti-oppression up or down but providing an explanation for its prominence in contemporary political discourse. To take one recent example, in order to qualify for the New Democratic Party (NDP) leadership race in Canada, candidates must now receive, according to new party regulations, 500 member signatures. At least half of these must be from individuals who do not identify as cisgender and a minimum of 100 must be from “equity-seeking groups,” inclusive of Indigenous and LGBTQ2S+ members, as well as people with disabilities. Such identity quotas do not simply guarantee that politics reflects diversity, they undermine the principle of one person one vote and distract from reasons why the party haemorrhaged support in the last federal election. They coincide with other rules, like the need for a prospective candidate to pay a $100,000 entry fee, up from $30,000 in 2017.

Cox criticizes me by citing a 1994 essay by Sharon Smith and another, from 2014, by Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad. As it happens, both texts are cited approvingly in CS&IP. This sort of intellectual arrogation is a reflection, in political terms, of the kinds of disputes that are more commonly had over questions of cultural appropriation, with admonitions that people stay in their sectarian lane. Cox also writes that I find identity politics a uniquely reactionary phenomenon. This, she says, distorts my whole analysis. For one, I do not see why the word “uniquely” is used here. I have described identity politics as a politics of the middle class, which is a view that I share with other leftists – Eric Hobsbawm for example. I do not consider it reactionary to fight for civil rights, even if these battles are won within the terms of liberal capitalism. Here, however, things get tricky since civil rights and the extension of the democratic invention can function as a feather in the cap of bourgeois society. What makes this political, for me, is the difference between freedoms and rights within a capitalist universality, the one we have, and freedoms and rights within a communist universality, the one we aspire to. The postmodernists who define particularism against universalism, or difference against norms, on the view that every universality masks particularist interests, are not only poor philosophers, but they leave no room for the universality we aspire to. To put things in the words of Bobby Seale, one does not fight racism with anti-racism, one fights racism with international socialism. Or as Preston Smith, whose work is discussed in CS&IP, puts it:

Racial democracy and race reductionism share an emphasis on race and the rejection of class as the primary explanation for racial inequality. They both define and measure racial equality in terms of racial disparity and seek to achieve a racial parity that leaves intact the class structure both within and outside the racial group.[40]

While the SWP is calling for class struggle and racial democracy, the argument I make is that for socialists, class and race are not simply added to one another. It is difficult in this regard to distinguish Zarah Sultana’s attack against Jeremy Corbyn in the early days of the formation of Your Party, which she defined as resistance to obstruction on the part of a “boy’s club,” from her ambition and use of the intersectionality card to make claims to the position of party leader.

Because I criticize the use by neoliberal governments of feminism and human rights discourse to imperialistically attack foreign countries, Cox reasons that I am against feminism and human rights discourse. She is smugly satisfied to remind me that the left has been marching for Palestine, which, she says, suggests “a certain resistance to colonial invasions.” Not only have I been marching and cycling in Palestine solidarity marches since before the recent assault on Gaza, swallowing a fair dose of tear gas in one instance, but I wrote a letter to my provincial and federal MPs, dated October 9, 2023, two days after the Hamas incursion, warning my representatives against Israel’s declaration of war. More to the point, the Palestinian struggle is discussed in CS&IP in the section on ‘Socialism and Communism’ as an instance of what Rancière refers to as the singular universal. The author I cite in that section, Zahi Zalloua, wrote an endorsement for CS&IP that is printed on the back of the book, where it says that he is the author of the book Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause. Further, CS&IP associates Garveyism, Hindutva and Zionism with fascism. As the co-editor of a book on cultural collaboration between Black Panthers and Zapatistas, Cox has not exactly revealed something profoundly unsettling I had never considered before.[41] I was 16 when I gave my first speech about Marxism, thanks to the encouragement of no one but myself, and the first march I remember attending in Ottawa in the early 1990s was against the American Family Association’s religious attacks on abortion and homosexuality. I was chased out of Rochester in 2001, and after 9/11, because of my Marxist views, which was reason enough for my identitarian and neoliberal peers in Visual and Cultural Studies to make me into a pariah.

Nowhere in my writings have I ever confused or conflated identity politics, according to its best representatives, with neoliberal or reactionary uses of identity politics. The same goes for the postmodern thinkers of so-called French theory, many of whom I had read before later studying them in the course of two graduate degree programmes in critical and cultural theory. When it comes to the thorny issue of what I have described as micro-fascism, few culture wars are openly fought as anti-straight, anti-white, anti-hetero or anti-European, but such politics exist, sometimes in the form of militant organizations but more often as low-level antagonism. On this topic, see the section in CS&IP on Sara Ahmed’s advocacy of academic feminist killjoys. On the left, such struggles, because they are too unserious, too weak, too unpopular or too undemocratic to be expressed openly, camouflage themselves as part of an underground process. In some cases, such as discourse theory, the emphasis on power/knowledge and philosophical nihilism can give rise to dubious views and practices.[42]

Cox considers my suggestion that the French postmodernists were “pessimistic” (my word) to be an instance of “unnecessarily obscure language” (her words), but is it not rather the case that these figures, who did in fact ratify “the abrogation of the inheritance of the revolutionary left” (my words), are the ones who wrote in obscure language – Lacan, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida, Deleuze, Virilio. Lucky for me, Cox agrees that the post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe were wrong to abandon the working class as the privileged agent of social change. She also says that post-Marxism failed to predict how populism, as an alternative to class struggle, could lead to right-wing populism. That failure may be true for Mouffe, but it is not the case for communist critics of populism, which goes back as far as Russian socialists’ critiques of the Narodniks. CS&IP includes populism as a variant of identity politics and has an entire section dedicated to the subject, leaving no doubt that in no way do I advocate or do I identify with either red populism or brown populism.[43] My critique in CS&IP of Jimmy Dore’s populist class-only baiting of Cornel West on trans issues could also serve. Again, lucky for me, Cox mentions in a biographical note that my now defunct blog “takes aim” at leftists who make Luigi Mangioni into a folk hero, as well as at middle-class liberals who blame workers for the rise of the right.[44]

At around this topic in Cox’s text, I am no longer accused of being economistic. But I am now advised that I must do more than simply assert that Marxism is not deterministic. My retort is that the base and superstructure metaphor should be understood dialectically and used for better purposes than a damned when you do, damned when you don’t, catch-22 extortion that allows someone to embezzle from others the prize of Marxist insight. In my 2021 essay on the use and abuse of class reductionism, I describe what I refer to as the game of woke baseball.[45] When a liberal or a postmodernist opposes someone’s Marxist politics they often look for something they can use against them. If someone is straight, or male, or white, for example, they can be the target of what appears to be justified baiting simply because they belong to this group. Or perhaps they have an ugly habit of chewing tobacco. According to structural analysis, this need not be an individual problem since the person is tokenistically made into a representative of their group, which leads back to time immemorial and supposedly allows them untold privileges. In the game of woke baseball the anti- or post-Marxism team accuses the Marxist of some form of oppression – racism, sexism, homophobia, ageism, xenophobia, etc. When the bases are full the ace in the pack is the accusation of class reductionism or economism. This covers all the bases in one fell swoop, winning the opposition a home run. My advice is to not play that game if we do not all of us want to end up like Corbyn and Sultana.

Another topic that is thrown in for good measure by Cox is the way that determinism plays out in terms of technology. She could have mentioned my book on the subject, Don’t Network, but that would require some reading and there is no time for reading when you can busy yourself smearing.[46] “Objective class interests can shape how people see the world,” Cox writes, “but they do not determine people’s ideas.” Again, my discussion of Feuerbach addresses this, as does my mention of Theodor Adorno in the introduction. It is hard to know what it is exactly that Cox wishes to zero in on as she drifts from topic to topic:

• It’s not enough to campaign for jobs and homes and hope unity will undermine racism.

Who says that? Not me.

• Challenging racism in the era of the National Rally “is not a priority for Léger.”

The assertion is neither here nor there and the term priority turns a structural and political concept, the centrality of class, into a matter of temporality. The question is: How do you effectively fight capitalism at today’s stage of neoliberalism with fascist characteristics? Note that in the last section of her text Cox answers this question with the same orthodox terms that I would.

• Lenin would disagree with Léger that the core of socialist politics is not opposition to discrimination but the decommodification of big capital.

This cherry-picked line from p.42 ignores the context of the sentence. The point was to dispute the argument that the socialist left is blind to difference, and further, that when the left fights against oppression it does not do so on behalf of one group against another but in the name of all. Unlike postmodernists, I use the word humanity without apology.

• Lenin argued that class consciousness is not genuine unless workers respond to all cases of tyranny and oppression, no matter what class is affected.

This is true and not true. Lenin defended the right to national sovereignty, but Marx and Engels argued that the workers have no country. Lenin was not a class collaborationist. See also Mao Zedong’s “On Contradiction” regarding the way that dialectical and historical materialism approaches the universality and the particularity of contradiction, the primary and secondary aspects of a contradiction, the identity and struggle aspects of contradiction, and the place of antagonism in contradiction. Mao provides historical examples of this materialist dialectics while at the same time rejecting metaphysics, vulgar evolutionism and mechanical materialism.[47] Lower grade materialists prefer to play intellectual ping pong or simply mash everything up into whatever is convenient.

• Working-class opposition to oppression would allow oppressed groups to identify their liberation with working-class struggle.

Marxist internationalist socialism is not a matter of allyship or intersectional opportunism. Cox overlooks the question of how Marxist autonomists ignore politics and overemphasize forces of production, defining anti-oppression as less a matter of identification than as a molecular process that meets the needs of capital accumulation. Whereas my approach is comprehensive of everything that is discussed in CS&IP, Cox’s review is piecemeal and fragmented.

• The answer to the far right is not the decommodification of capital but building the biggest movement against racism and linking this to anti-capitalism.

Cox has it backwards. The use of identity politics to increase party membership waters down your programme and resumes the politics of the Popular Front. This problem can be noticed also with the politics of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL US).

• Léger centres the Enlightenment as the historical moment that established universalism.

As a reader of Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003), that’s simply not true. What Cox means here is secular universalism as the foundation of liberal democracy, though, as Ellen Meiksins Wood has discussed, a version of secular universalism existed under the Roman Empire.

• Cox says that I emphasize how postmodernism is the “fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left.”

These are not my words but those of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, who are discussed in the section on ‘Liberalism and Neoliberalism.’

• Cox asserts that Léger blurs the difference between liberal universalism and socialist universalism.

This is true and not true. Marxism, which is based in dialectics, both negates and preserves bourgeois idealism at a higher level. Bourgeois materialists only understand negation and opposition. They do not understand the contradictory, Hegelian aspects of the negation of negation. I use the phrase emancipatory universality to contrast with capitalism as the actually existing concrete universal, and I distinguish the abstract universality of particularity from this concrete universality. See my reference in CS&IP to Hegel and my rejection of the self/other paradigm to understand white/black, male/female, straight/gay, etc., oppositions.

• Cox believes that Asad Haider’s idea of insurgent universality corrects universalism by reckoning with the colonial legacy.

I agree with and cite Adolph Reed’s statement that Haider’s book, Mistaken Identity, smells like a “truckload of rotten fish” and take issue with Haider’s postmodern work in more than one section of CS&IP. Among other authors who are mentioned in CS&IP on this topic, I endorse Ellen Meiksins Wood’s discussion of “Eurocentric anti-Eurocentrism,” which touches on the problem with Stalinist regimes in formerly colonized countries.

• Cox suggests that Haider’s idea of insurgent universality could be directed at Léger.

I am not sure why since my work in no way opposes liberation struggles. One of the three sources of Marxism, according to Lenin, and mentioned above in the quote by Trotsky, is French Jacobinism. We could specify Haitian Jacobinism. The other two are English political economy and German idealism. I accept this definition of Marxism and reject the obfuscation of German idealism by postmodern new materialisms, by anti-humanist discourse theory and by recent efforts to reduce Marxism to the tradition of anti-tyranny republicanism.

• Cox says that I criticize the academics that first supported intersectional challenges to ostensibly white feminism and ostensibly class reductive Marxism but who have now targeted Enlightenment-derived, universalist mass politics as the product of white, Christian and European colonialism.

The appropriate reference here, cited in CS&IP, is Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” The New Centennial Review 3:3 (2003), 257–337. I also criticize the trendy and insubstantial work of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. The early work of Angela Davis has merit, in this regard, but she herself warned against feminist theories that make Marxism into a vanishing mediator in discussions of race, class and gender.

• Cox writes: “According to Leger, privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality studies now seek to go beyond dismantling the Western cannon [sic] and pit themselves against liberal institutions.”

Don’t shoot the messenger. See the appropriate sections in CS&IP for source material and corresponding statements made by the proponents of these approaches.

• Cox mentions that I do not think the Haitian Revolution should be given more prominence than the American and French Revolutions. She then pretends to be correcting me by saying that excavating the role of enslaved people as agents of their own emancipation is not a “postmodern problematization of universality” but a completion of a previously partial universality.

These are two completely different assertions. This is what I argue: the Haitian Revolution is as important as any other; the matter of race does not make it more important even if it was drawing on the ideas developed by the colonial power (one can imagine that the Haitian Revolution would never have happened, as it did, without the other two precedents); the fact that secular universalism was given a philosophical foundation by Europeans should not, in and of itself, invalidate these concepts – that’s racist; I consider problematic racialist orientations, such as those of the 1619 Project, which attempt to dismiss the revolutionary significance of Enlightenment universalism, especially with respect to the overthrow of feudalism; the continued existence of slavery, oppression and labour exploitation does not invalidate the historical achievements of the bourgeois revolutions. The effort to bypass Enlightenment universalism and rights discourse is today at the centre of “clash of civilizations” arguments that reanimate pre-Enlightenment geopolitical feuds for the sake of global oligarchic authoritarian capitalism. Wittingly or not, decolonial theory and some strands of post-structuralism contribute to the dismantling of Enlightenment universalism, on which Marxism is based.[48]

• Cox cites Haider saying that the bourgeoisie had its own interests in mind when asserting individual rights and freedoms, establishing societies that were deeply unequal, etc.

This is not news to a Marxist, and Haider’s work is mired in post-structuralism, a term that does not appear in Cox’s text. In other words, aside from being against racism and sexism, Cox does not seem to be aware of what is at stake in Haider’s work, or the work of many of the contributors to Viewpoint Magazine, when it comes to the postmodern liquidation of dialectical materialism. The distinctions between Marxist theory, critical theory and postmodern theory do not matter to Cox, who interprets everything as a matter of unmediated solidarity between oppressed groups, on the one hand, or conflict, on the other. On this basis, Cox leads her readers to think that I do not wish to do anything that would be helpful to women, racial or sexual minorities, and so on. I write:

Universality is a philosophical and not a post-structuralist concept. To understand universality in the terms of discourse theory is to avoid what it is that discourse theory does and does not offer, and to then funnel the riches of Marxist social theory into the coffers of those who would bankrupt socialism. Socialism represents the destruction of class society, not its diversification. The postmodern leftism that is promoted by Viewpoint magazine is the type that makes the black feminism of the CRC the lever that renders socialism suspect. Those who are not convinced that Marxism and socialism will make the world a better place for feminists and anti-racists are those who are not convinced that socialism and Marxism can make the world a better place.[49]

• According to SWP leader Alex Callinicos, Cox says, it was the incompleteness of the promise of Enlightenment liberty, equality and fraternity that created the space for socialist and later Marxist critiques of bourgeois society, giving the work of C.L.R. James and Claudia Jones as examples.

My disagreement is not with people like C.L.R. James or Claudia Jones. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean’s co-edited book of writings by black feminist communists on the so-called “Negro question,” Organize, Fight, Win, is cited as a corrective to the Combahee River Collective model of identity politics.[50] As mentioned, Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial capitalism in his 1983 book Black Marxism is criticized as non-Marxist, despite the grounding of his theory in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James and Richard Wright. The kinds of thinkers that I oppose, in this regard, are people like Gerald Horne and Robin D.G. Kelley, who see little of any value in the bourgeois revolutions, which, as Cox herself says, were necessary stages to later developments. Unlike those like Laclau and Mouffe, and possibly Callinicos, who see the democratic invention as a horizon of fulfilment, the Marxist approach is not about making space for marginalized “others” within liberal democracy, but instead offers a concrete analysis of the totality. What is incomplete, for a Žižek scholar, is not the project of Enlightenment, in the words of Jürgen Habermas, but reality as such, a notion that could also be substantiated through the study of Engels if one prefers the latter.

• Léger’s “mechanistic” interpretation of Marxism leads him to adopt reactionary attitudes towards contemporary movements.

From the above, it should be clear that Cox is out of her depths when it comes to contemporary theory and where I stand on mechanistic forms of materialism.[51] My work is an argument against mechanical notions of teleology and determinism, as well as class essentialism, which are standard critiques from within Marxism. As mentioned, I also criticize autonomist immanentism, not to mention the pitfalls of historicism. As for contemporary movements, much of my participation in protest movements, which includes writing about anti-globalization activism, the Black Bloc, the Quebec Maple Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Gilets Jaunes, Palestine solidarity, or about the work and writings of comrades involved in socially engaged art proves that Cox either knows nothing about me and my work, or is simply a liar. Given how the critique of mechanistic interpretation has become a repeat motif of my work, the statement by Cox, and for those who know my work, reads as a troll. I have been attacked for this work not only by socialist culture warriors like Cox but also by former comrades on the anarchist left.

• Cox says that I echo the language of the right by attacking “woke left hysteria.”

Since 2010, my published work has drawn on Lacan’s Four Discourses to describe differences among forms of socially engaged art, which can also be applied to political formations. It is along these lines that I have accounted for anarchist and horizontalist forms of “hysteria,” according to Lacan’s notion of the Discourse of the Hysteric. The real issue is why can the left not criticize wokeism without being labelled reactionary. Aside from the needs of party discipline, I completely reject the political blackmail and philistine extortion that says you are either with us, the same as us, or against us.

still no clothes …

Cox’s accusation that I “repeat tropes formulated by the right-wing culture warriors” is odd to me since I do not pay any attention to these people or watch their programmes. I do hope I can be forgiven, and not accused of heresy, for reading the writings of Douglas Murray or John McWhorter so that I can do my work properly. In whose interest is it for Marxists not to know what these people are saying? Cox does not list any such tropes, or say what they are, because there are none. However, the endnote that accompanies that statement refers to my critique of Ahmed. This is what I do say about the centrality of class, that is, before Trump got re-elected:

The left is seemingly placed on a defensive footing when political leaders like Hillary Clinton and Justin Trudeau adopt the academic politics of diversity. To the extent that feminists and anti-racists in positions of power serve global capitalism, socialists must insist on the centrality of class and the need to transform the underlying social relations. As the gains that have been achieved from the struggles of the past have been undermined by five decades of neoliberal class restoration, identity struggles have lost some of their novelty and are increasingly made to serve power. In this context, right-wing politicians and the neoliberal media have reanimated culture wars as false solutions to the conflict between labour and capital. Even leftists have begun to adopt conservative and rightist positions in the name of fighting oppression. The supposed similarity between the universalist left and universalist right leads progressive neoliberals and post-political activists to think of the socialist left and conservative right as strange bedfellows. From a Marxist perspective, it is rather the case that even a broken clock tells the correct time twice a day. Or, as Vivek Chibber has jokingly said, Donald Trump’s critique of critical race theory was one of his better moments. Although it may be that the excesses of woke correctness and cancel culture are now played out, it is nevertheless important to elaborate why this is and should be the case.[52]

The argument that identity politics and the struggle against oppression obscure class issues is not one that is advanced by very many people and one reason for this is that anti-sexism and anti-racism are far easier to understand than the critique of political economy. Even grade school children understand that you should be nice to the other kids. This argument is best represented by the work of Wood, who convincingly argued, in my opinion, that capitalism can do without oppression – even if it never has and never does – but it cannot do without labour exploitation. This is why today’s neoliberalism can go either way, with anti-racist initiatives and agendas, as represented by progressive centrism, or with patently oppressive and supremacist agendas, as represented by the conservative and far right.

Since my concern is left politics, and since right-wing racism or sexism are obviously wrong, the problem areas are where liberalism and leftism interact. In another rhetorical use of language, Cox says that I “condemn” BLM as an example of “clientelist race brokerage” that is supported by neoliberal elites. This, I argue, does not address why millions of people participated in BLM-led protests, but it accurately reflects the problem with the BLM leadership, which here again, is an assertion I make that is supported with quotes and references, not that Cox cares about any of that. Moreover, the term race broker is used by Adloph Reed, and the following sentence is a summary of Reed’s arguments: “anyone who is serious about progressive social transformation should be involved in building mass movements around universal issues like labour rights, unionization, employment, social services, health care, housing, education, child and elder care.”[53] In my book on the Obama administration, Too Black to Fail, I distinguish between race activists, post-race thinkers, race managers, race brokers, cultural Marxists (social constructionists) and universalist intellectuals.[54] In my terminology, BLM falls under the category of race activists and what Reed refers to as race brokers I refer to as race managers.

With regard to Reed’s work, Too Black to Fail details the following set of problems associated with today’s race brokerage: 1) the problem of race essentialism (reinforced by uses of language and taxonomy) and the treatment of race as a distinct, transhistorical phenomenon; 2) the reduction of politics to moralism; 3) the advocacy of a flawed strategy with regard to its own stated goals of combatting racial injustice, for example, through reparations; 4) being convinced of the duality of race and class, racialism transforms anti-racism into a middle-class politics that attacks the left; 5) race brokers have no political constituency, leading to performative politics based on affirmations of identity and demands for inclusion; 6) as a product of the Cold War, professional anti-racism has a history of collusion with right-wing politics.[55]

The assertion by Cox that I consider corruption “something unique to BLM” rather than something experienced in other campaigns misses the point about the way the BLM campaign impacted federal politics in recent years, demobilizing what began as OWS and focusing on police violence in the terms of racial disparity rather than in the terms of what police violence actually is in the U.S., which is a class war against the poor, as evidenced by the fact that more than half of the people killed by police are working-class whites. Moreover, BLM was weaponized by business interests in ways that are similar to what happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which is to say, using financial donations to steer development away from those people who are most in need and away from leftist organizations. But BLM is not uniquely corrupt. Not only do I criticize NGOism in general, but my book also criticizes the corruption within the bureaucracy of organizations such as the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Teamsters, which have suppressed their members, supported imperialist misadventures and catered to the Trump administration.

Cox goes on to claim that universal issues like labour rights and social services include identity politics: “This strategy accepts the identity politics Leger opposes so vehemently because it is based on the idea that only the oppressed have an interest in challenging their oppression.” The point that one could make, and that Reed makes, is that on the basis of experience, now elevated to the status of epistemology, oppressed individuals and groups do not necessarily have a unique or clear understanding of their own oppression and what to do about it – and this is as true for workers as it is for any other group. But the issue is simply muddled here because nothing about socialism requires that we ignore problems and oppressions. The counterpoint is whether and to what extent the focus on oppression helps us to clarify the workings of capitalism and how to get rid of it. Whereas forms of oppression are not unique to capitalism, capitalism transforms oppressions in ways that are specific to its profit-seeking strategies. This includes anti-oppression discourses just as much as it includes social democratic labour politics.

In the next section of her text, titled “putting the politics back into identity,” Cox refers to identity politics as movements based on a shared identity organized around forms of discrimination and inequality. Reed once asked the question, with reference to the CRC, why stop there, why not go down to the level of the individual and subjective, which is something that, say, a postmodern nihilist might advocate. The problem is that such movements may or may not have a socialist or left character and may in practice strengthen anti-socialist ideas and practices. Cox acknowledges that there were no identity politics movements before the postwar era. That is true and CS&IP provides an account of its emergence, which Cox does not. Her point nevertheless is that because the phrase was not used previously this does not imply that people were only interested in fighting the impersonal forces that determine how society is organized. This way of phrasing things speaks to Cox’s confusion about Marxism. Marxism understands itself as a science, in both the materialist and the philosophical sense of the term, and Marxism is indeed interested in knowing what impersonal forces, or laws of history, shape social change, building politics precisely on that understanding, which, for example, allowed Engels to make predictive statements that turned out to be worthy of Nostradamus. No matter how socialists may be repulsed by the feudal and slave societies of the past, we understand that what we are up against is a capitalist system that covers the entire globe and that takes on the gendered, racial, religious and national trappings of the bourgeois and working classes wherever they are found. This, as Cox is correct to say, never stopped Marxists from examining the “Jewish Question” or other, but the point is – and this is what makes Marxist historical materialism a distinct approach from intersectionality or similar paradigms – that it is a Marxist analysis of the Jewish Question, for instance, and not a “labour Zionist” analysis. My book mentions as examples of the same point Cox makes the “national question,” the “woman question,” and the “Negro question” noted above.

If one takes the “woman question,” as Cox suggests, then the figures of Zetkin and Kollontai are indeed women who “explored gender oppression from a Marxist perspective.” It is precisely this Marxist perspective I am calling for and what I argue is sorely lacking in the variants of identity politics described in the first section of the book. Post-structuralists and neoliberals typically do not explore gender oppression from a Marxist perspective. Further, Cox’s readers need not be convinced by her only that liberation movements have sought to reclaim their histories, but they do need to be sensitized to the problems that arise when they seek to reclaim these histories from international socialism. On this topic Cox permits herself to enlist International Socialist Organization member Sharon Smith for her purposes, but I am not allowed to do the same for mine. Allow me this lengthy extract from CS&IP:

For [Sharon] Smith, identity politics is contradictory because it is inherently anti-political. The kinds of contradictions it produces are evident throughout the history of new social movements. For example, as a feature of its middle-class and individualistic character, the women’s movement split from the Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s, which by and large had placed its radical hopes on anti-imperialist movements in the Third World. Radical feminists compared themselves to colonized peoples, leading SDS to agree that women were more oppressed than the working class. The lack of gender equality in socialist countries gave feminists cause to break from left politics, resulting in splits along cultural and class lines. Feminist separatists who argued that capitalism was not the cause of women’s oppression advanced the independent analysis of patriarchy, which led to debates on integrated versus dual systems analysis. As feminist politics developed around consciousness-raising groups, organizations dwindled in size and turned against one another. Criticism of everything, from leaders to lifestyles, led to arcane demands, like the Boston-based Cell 16’s insistence that members should be celibate and give up their male children if they have any. According to Smith, feminist separatists targeted their male counterparts, encouraged divisiveness and fragmentation, ignored class differences and extended these problems to the analysis of racism and heterosexism. Efforts to combine analyses led just as often to identity groups going their separate ways. Similar problems informed the Civil Rights and gay liberation movements. Former radicals who joined academia, Smith says, excelled at finding new ways to demonstrate that class politics was reductionist. Discourse theory and the politics of difference, for example, informed the queer politics that later came into conflict with homonormative gays and bisexuals. Likewise, American black power nationalism, which was at one time the most proletarian orientation, eventually made Afrocentrism into a vehicle for upward mobility. Anti-racism, or racialism, is now distinct from the socialist and labour politics that supported the Civil Rights movement since the 1930s.

Identitarian social movements define their struggles beyond the compass of socialist struggles against the capitalist state and collaborate with the centre-right. Its proponents reduce leftist analysis to the caricature of a one-sided economic determinism and a putatively white male worker. By avoiding class struggle, identity politics obscures the workings of capitalism. It also limits the meaning of oppression, which can include phenomena as far from identity as pollution or underfunded schools and hospitals. When these are addressed, the strategy is always to show how such disparate problems affect specific identity groups. Socialism, in contrast, emphasizes the class function of oppression. The notion that class politics is indifferent to issues of oppression is disproved by the history of the labour movement, least of all by the October Revolution, which, Smith notes, granted women political equality, equal pay for equal work, free and legal abortion, divorce on request, the revocation of age of consent laws and relief from domestic duties. It also decriminalized homosexuality and prevented the state from interfering in people’s sexual affairs. For Smith, Marxism offers far more to radicals who want to end oppression than does identity politics. By supposedly radicalizing the level of the personal, identity politics engineered a raft of depoliticizing ideas and behaviours: elitism, exclusivity, moralism, divisiveness, fragmentation, scapegoating, outing, structurelessness, avoidance of the state, anti-intellectual voluntarism, petty criminality, counter-oppression, oppression Olympics, atavism, collusion with the right, biological reductionism, freak power and aesthetic solutions to political problems. It goes unremarked by contemporary activists how all of these problems, which should be part of the recollections of those who experienced the 60s, 70s and 80s, are not rejected but instead incorporated into the post-political tendencies of intersectionality and decoloniality. For Smith, the rise of postwar identity politics is bound up with pessimism about the possibility of solidarity among the downtrodden. Not only is socialist class struggle more effective than identity politics in achieving the reasonable goals of identitarians, it is the only genuine basis for social equality. The critique of oppression must therefore move from the realm of personal experience to the realm of the political without at the same time remaking politics into a revised form of identity politics. Since the experience of oppression does not by itself have a progressive content, one must not have experienced a specific form of oppression to be opposed to it or to militate against it. Socialism is therefore the universalist politics that is best able to address particularist needs and demands.[56]

This one excerpt is enough to dismiss almost the entirety of Cox’s slapdash hack work.

In the remainder of her text, Cox ceases to refer to me and simply gives a potted history of everything that has happened on the left since the 1960s. It is a good example of how books nowadays are written and how history can be used to support very different political agendas and theoretical approaches. Much of what is written in the last section I would agree with. I would add, though, that the Americans did not simply withdraw from Vietnam but were thrown out by a national uprising that was led by communists. I disagree that intersectionality is simply “an alternative to conservative, single-issue based variants of identity politics that are hostile to the aspirations of others and lead to reactionary conclusions.” Even in the best of cases, and because it does not give priority to class analysis, intersectionality functions, as Brian Dixon argued, as a brood parasite that kills its Marxist host.[57] Or as Jodi Dean put it:

Even as appeals to intersectionality attempt to make connections between issues that four decades of neoliberal fragmentation have sought to keep apart, the liberal legal foundations of the concept too often position the individual as the intersection and the issues as questions of identity. Depoliticized at the level of organization, issues are repoliticized in and as individuals. What does an individual think and does she feel comfortable expressing it? What expressions threaten this comfort and undermine her sense of safety? The constriction of politics to managing individual anxieties reframes self-centeredness as moral on university campuses, and across the US. This constriction is but one moment in the more general and systemic displacement of politics by moralism manifest in the substitution of aid work for militant political organization, administration for struggle, and NGOs and CSOs for revolutionary parties.[58]

Most of the time, when intersectionalists discuss class, what they decry is classism, which is not a concept that refers to the abolition of class society, but rather its preservation by showing respect for the exploited. To the extent that intersectionalists tack on labour struggles to their analyses, they treat Marxism as optional. One problem with intersectionality is not only the fact that it draws more from Foucauldian effective history and radical democracy than from Marxist historical and dialectical materialism, but that scholarship and activism become forms of conspicuous consumption, with for example virtue signalling land claim acknowledgements and land back rhetoric that have no practical meaning. The point is not that we cannot consider how different forms of oppression intersect, but that when we do so we have to ask ourselves whether this analysis has anything at all to do with class, with, for example, Mike McNair explaining that Crenshaw’s foundational text on a court case in which the plaintiffs could not make their case as both women and as blacks missed the point that the defendant was a corporation looking to cheat these workers out of better wages and conditions.

Similar complaints have been lodged against the CRC for providing a completely inadequate model for how the working class, rather than middle-class academics and NGO activists, can organize to liberate humanity from an oppressive capitalist system and not simply advance the career interests of what can only ever be a limited number people within the professions, which amounts to around 20 percent of the population in the developed countries. It is this class of people and not the socialist movement that has made the CRC into the holy grail of intersectional identity politics.

Despite all of her protestations against me, Cox comes around to saying that for Marxists, “oppression is not rooted in a range of separate places (patriarchy, white privilege, heteronormativity), but deeply rooted in the capitalist system” and that because of this “it is a mistake to separate oppression and exploitation, as if they have different causes and therefore different solutions.” She cites Martha Gimenez, with whom I could not agree more. Given that Cox now agrees with me, one must wonder what all the fuss was about. At this point, however, Cox returns to the danger posed by the far right as it is now, according to her, weaponizing “intersectional hate,” attacking gender, according to Judith Butler, in such a way as to include LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, opposition to violence against women, trans rights and sexual freedom. This opposition to “gender ideology” is the “symbolic glue,” Cox argues, that unifies coalitions of religious conservatives, neofascists, Islamophobes and climate deniers. Intersectional hate, she argues, “brings together sexism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia and nationalism.”

The word hate does more here than it should. Its primary function is to make us love intersectionality. This is simply two different forms of capitulation. Just as the alt-right’s appropriation of the term “cultural Marxism” seeks to reverse engineer the concept so as to censor postmodern theory, the Frankfurt School, Marxism and Hegelianism in one fell swoop, this notion of intersectional hate reverse-engineers intersectionality, as it were, from one category to another. Neither one of these moves obliges Marxists to roll over and abandon its more sophisticated method and more accurate critiques. These are not simply agendas, they are false flags, ploys, forms of baiting, that win by moving leftists, when we take the bait, further to the right. Cox could easily have found resources in my discussion of Badiou’s theory of the event, which excludes fascism from this category because fascism is based on absolute difference, which I also discuss in terms of Žižek’s addition of ultra-politics to Rancière’s classifications. There is a contradiction between what most workers need and the concerns of postmodern academics, who pander intersectionality as the best way to appear to be concerned about class issues too, but whose main impetus was to protect bourgeois feminism from the accusations of petty-bourgeois racialists.

According to Joel Bergman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, emphasis on hate, madness, fear, violence or abuse represents the confused if not wilfully naïve response of the liberal class to the rise of the far right.[59] This is in no way surprising for Marxists, however, who understand such phenomena as features of capitalist decline. The class compromise that separated unions from communist parties and that defines the postwar liberal order has been in crisis since the 1970s and is now dying. State deficit financing, government debt, overproduction and consumer debt are leading to economic collapse and the re-emergence of protectionism. As fortress Europe and fortress America are beholden to the ruling class, with no left alternative allowed, people turn to right-wing populism as a way out and because it seems to be a form of opposition to the neoliberal establishment. Intersectional hate is not an explanation of what is happening but the lack of one.

Cox argues that we cannot overcome the intersectionality of hate with the intersectionality of identity. These two options are not simply opposed, however. Although intersectionality may discuss kinds of people, say, black lesbian women, or kinds of situations, such as the overlap between colonial histories and histories of labour, it does not refer to an identity but to a research method, essentially, which may or may not yield practical political proposals. In the classic Crenshaw study, the case was thrown out because the process it would have set in motion was unworkable. If there is such a thing as the intersectionality of hate, one could also find it on the disoriented left, for example, with gay men who presume to be natural allies of women against straight men, or black and Latino women, who presume they have something in common against white women. As a right-wing phenomenon, it may identify a new set of scapegoats, but it ends up supporting the cultural agenda of conservative to reactionary politics: middle-class ambition, capitalist universality, majority group priorities, patriotism, family values, religious values, gun rights and tough on crime policing, small government, anti-taxation, and so on. By attacking universalism and adopting postmodern methods of various sorts, intersectionalists have inadvertently reinforced aspects of the conservative anti-Enlightenment tradition that attacks socialism.

The idea of intersectional hate remakes politics into a matter of love versus hate. This makes capitalism vanish from the discussion.[60] Just as intersectionalists would like their causes to be combined for maximum effectivity, the political right reverses the process, pushing these movements back with impunity. One important difference is that the MAGA scapegoat is the liberal middle-class elite. The scapegoat of intersectional discourse, which is indeed a middle-class agenda, is the intolerant, blue-collar, nostalgic, beer-drinking, white, cishetero, working-class male. Another difference is that whereas right-wing elites manipulate demagogically, with no real stakes in this manipulation, middle-class elites have staked a great deal of social, educational and economic capital in their small status advantage over the working majority. The petty-bourgeois middle class has more riding on anti-oppression than the oligarchy does on sexism and racism. From a socialist perspective, the goal of struggle is not to assert identities, which already exist, and which majority groups defend in terms of tradition, but to create a new society, a new universality, beyond the one that already exists. This is why trans issues are both an ideological weapon for the left and a stumbling block. Trans is not the creation of a new universality but the deconstruction of gender norms that already exist. Trans makes the masculine or the feminine disappear or reappear in unusual and unexpected ways, doing very little to make capitalism disappear in concrete terms.

A society that is not Marxist by any means but that is fully on board with LGBTQ rights can be made even less Marxist by attacking LGBTQ rights. Marxists recognize that an injury to one is an injury to all. What we have today is not an anti-capitalist politics but an ethos of “centring” the lives of minority subjects. In historical and practical reality there are countless determinations that would have to be considered, least of all the ways in which elites divide the working class. Judith Butler is not the best person to address this dilemma because she views all social interaction in the terms of a constant iteration of power dynamics, which gives no priority to the capitalist totality in shaping those relations of force.[61] And how did Butler perform when faced with the “intersectional” challenge of the Al-Aqsa Flood? According to Dean:

Rather than centering the seventy-five-year Nakba and Palestinian resistance, Butler criticized Harvard students for a statement they issued holding the Israeli regime “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Butler’s essay foreshadowed the attitude that subsequently overtook US academia, as happened at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and elsewhere. [Her] essay displaces attention from the reality of apartheid, occupation, and siege and onto the affective environment of safe and privileged US universities. Butler’s targeting of the students – their language and feeling, how they expressed themselves – similarly prefigured the congressional hearings that led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.[62]

A Marxist theory of class and identity cannot afford to bounce back and forth across the social space like a pinball, oblivious to how the different obstacles in the system work and simply hoping to score points and causing lights to flash and sounds to bleep out while staying in the game.

nice horse, though …

I largely agree with everything in the last section of Cox’s article, titled “how can Marxists end oppression?,” but I want to cite passages from CS&IP to highlighting the fact that not only do we seem to agree on fundamentals, but that a critique of identitarian wokeism is necessary in today’s post-postmodern context in which one cannot simply identify wokeism with the left and anti-wokeism with the right – keeping in mind that for leftists like me, anti-wokeism is a misleading phrase. A robust critique of the pitfalls of identitarianism is not only possible but necessary to move forward against Trump-style authoritarianism, against progressive neoliberalism, and against the kinds of new social movement activism that have taken up postmodern theories without much concern for how this leads to the destruction of revolutionary Marxism.

In her rejection of economism, Cox creates a stereotype of people who “participate in the right’s nostalgia for a simpler world – one in which ‘men were men’ and ‘women were women’ and the working class drank manly beer, joined unions and voted labour.” As Ehrenreich noted in Fear of Falling about Archie Bunker and other blue-collar stereotypes, the reason that American liberals created this television personality, which was popular with working people, was because in the 1970s, as the neoliberal onslaught began, blue-collar labour still represented a significant force against capital.[63] She writes:

America’s blue-collar workers were in revolt in the late sixties and early seventies, but not along the right-wing traditionalist lines sketched by the media. … For all the talk of racial backlash, black and white workers were marching, picketing, and organizing together in a spirit of class solidarity that had not been seen since the thirties.[64]

By playing working-class men against working-class women and minority workers, the liberal class later engineered the yuppie revolt against the remnants of socialism. The people who tend to invoke this blue-collar homunculus are not socialists but PMC careerists. While participating at the Occupons Montréal OWS offshoot in 2011, those of us at the Victoria Square encampment were encouraged by the solidarity visit of a trade union detachment consisting of men whose clothing was unfashionable and whose strong faces looked tired – this being a weekend excursion. The mostly twenty-something students raised a cheer but when these family men got closer our group grew quiet and embarrassed. No one shook hands and no one started the kinds of conversations you see in documentaries about May 68. The microphone was not given to one of their spokespeople to say a few words. The workers became spectators among the crowd as the organizers carried on with their prepared speeches and suggestions about who should take care of what services.

The division of the proletariat is worse on the global level than it is among the Western masses. Global inequalities are supposedly solved by NGOs. The phenomenon of NGOism is one outcome of the abandonment by the left of revolutionary parties, leadership and programmes. That socialist parties today either do the work of the capitalist bourgeoisie or toy around the edges of social movements is the result of nearly a century of defeats. If NGOs are to influence government policy, they must function as non-partisan lobbies. Just as it matters very little to the movement who you sleep with, it matters relatively little what you drink. If the U.K. has a strong pub culture, then all the better to maintain class solidarity since we cannot all of us be rich. As for nostalgia, I can recall the debates of the 1980s and 1990s about heritage and critical memory, with writers like David Lowenthal, Raphael Samuel, Andreas Huyssen, Donald Horne or Dean MacCannell giving us more to consider than tech futurism and surveillance, and this is not to mention the enormous amount of literary and non-fiction writing on the subjects of history, memory and memoir. Not so long ago, the critiques of postmodern urbanism and gentrification by radical geographers such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Edward Soja and Mike Davis were attacked by countless women scholars working in critical cultural theory, psychoanalysis and film theory, for presupposing a promethean point of subjective exteriority. Not only were these thinkers chastened by Žižek especially, but the left movement had simply had enough of neurotic deconstruction, turning to the work of Michael Hardt with Antonio Negri instead, or to Žižek and Badiou, with the movement of the movements slowly realizing that networked horizontalism is good for some things, like organizing rallies, but not for fighting the oligarchy, which profits from and controls most of our organizing tools.

Cox accuses me of nostalgia for a “prelapsarian” world in which Marxism was dominant. I never myself lived in such a world. Still, what kind of Marxists worry themselves about those people who are already committed to Marxism, hectoring them because they understand better that at the time of Zetkin and Kollontai there were considerable numbers of women employed in blue-collar factory work, a reality that exists today to an exponential extent, this being a fact that Cox’s late colleague, Chris Harman, did not hesitate to remind us. I have never known the world that Cox presumes I am nostalgic for, which of course is not a prerequisite for nostalgia. I would counter that it is the liberal class, including the labour bureaucracy, who are nostalgic for cadres of blue-collar working-class men who are strong like horses, do not know too much, do what they are told and keep their nose in their beer. Precarious knowledge workers also understand the disciplining of academic output and the gatekeeping mechanisms of grading, graduating, peer review, grants, hirings and firings. Why should someone who goes out of his way to elaborate the problems with the latest postmodern trends be considered nostalgic? It is not concern about the working class that causes a party to denounce someone who warns against bending Marxism out of shape and dumping it in the trash-heap of history, it is petty academic one-upmanship. In the late 1990s, one of the department heads where I was undertaking doctoral studies had garnered two Getty Foundation grants, which she used to teach scholars from the former East how to forget about Marxism and adapt to post-structuralism. She also offered advice to these political refugees about fitness and the use of deodorants. Her neoliberalism was not simply nostalgic, it was actual.

Is it wrong of me to think that the SWP and its members have been accused of being backward-looking so many times, simply because they are socialists, that they have at this point internalized the accusation and now wield it themselves to make their line seem fresh and exciting? Am I wrong to think that had CS&IP been written by an East Indian woman, or even a well-to-do middle-class white male, the accusation of masculine, blue-collar, beer-drinking nostalgia would not have been made? That is what makes identity politics pernicious and why academically trained leftists should learn to identify the game of woke baseball. Not to play the game but to see it when it is being played and stomp it out. Socialism does not and cannot advance on the basis of mistaken notions, including those of the far right. If the socialist movement is to proceed by steadily chipping away at its own legacy, picking off comrades who do not play the game, then what is there to achieve? That kind of Marxism is simply demoralization masquerading as stridency. Alternately, the socialist movement is so constantly pressed to prove its bona fides when it comes to questions of gender, race or sexuality, that Cox misses the point of how it is that CS&IP contributes to the movement by identifying the intellectual trends that do more to lead away from socialism than towards it.

In the good old days, Marxists used to lecture people about relative and absolute surplus value, as in the Red Krayola’s Corrected Slogans. They did not admonish comrades to turn the barricades into consciousness raising groups. This, anyway, is what I say at the start of my book:

The “cultural turn” that emerged in the form of “French theory” and that was designed to dislodge the grip of Marxism on intellectual and social life now became the lingua franca of a seemingly progressive yet thoroughly neoliberal academia, wherein one’s identity could hardly be separated from the maximization of life chances within relations of competition. This reflexively postmodern generation accepted the revival of nihilism as the best means to motivate every conceivable tendency. In the decade of preppies and yuppies, a possibly countercultural yet thoroughly integrated generation witnessed the dismantling of the Soviet Union and closed the book on the social, cultural, political and intellectual legacy of the radical left. Marxism and the dialectic were consigned to history and deemed by the apologists of class restoration the junk of used car salesmen. Despite the occasional stirrings of increasingly weaker labour organizations, it would not be until the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the indignados, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street that the left made a significant comeback. However, as new social movement activists and non-governmental NGOs had over the decades adopted the intellectual software of postmodern academia, from phenomenology to semiology, structuralism, deconstruction, discourse theory, post-structuralism and new materialisms, the identitarian race, gender and sexuality agendas – now transformed into diversity and difference politics – mixed rather poorly with the unreconstructed materialism of Marxists. Not that anyone on the postwar left actually thought this way, but women, the post-postmodernists proclaimed, would not go back into the kitchen, gays and lesbians back into the closet, racial minorities to the ghetto or immigrants where they came from.[65]

My point here, on page 3, was not only to dismiss, in advance, the accusation of nostalgia that is not only wielded against Marxists like me, but against all Marxists, and socialists, and communists, and even against social democratic welfarists, but to underscore that this charge comes these days not from liberals but from the postmodern left who for lifestyle and career reasons are closer to Foucault than they are to Lenin.

On this matter of prelapsarian nostalgia, Cox also charges me of not knowing that Marxism has always been a minority current in the international labour movement and that our task is to struggle within broader movements, such as movements against slavery, for national liberation, or for the rights of domestic workers. Maybe, but what this book helps readers appreciate is that to fight as a Marxist it helps to make distinctions between what is Marxist and what is not, what strengthens the internationalist class struggle, and what weakens it. Cox says that I have little to say about how Stalinism crushed the liberatory outlook of nineteenth-century Marxism but she would not have to convince me of that. In my critique of Fukuyama’s book on identity as a politics of resentment I mention the following:

there are many historical factors that Fukuyama could consider but that he does not, including: 1) the fascist appropriation of historical materialism, 2) the Stalinist betrayal of communism, 3) the weakness of Popular Front strategies, 4) the Cold War and the rise of mass consumerism, 5) the petty-bourgeois rejection of ideology, 6) the postmodern end of ideology, 7) neoconservative and neoliberal attacks on the welfare state, economic justice and international law, 8) the post-politics and culture war agendas of new social movements, 9) network logics and media spectacle, 10) mass awareness of the possibility of species extinction through climate catastrophe and nuclear war. The socialist left not only has a better analysis of history, but also a more practical answer to the economic dislocations that are caused by globalization. However, because of the association of the left with progressive neoliberalism, Fukuyama does not attribute its decline to the neoliberal assault on social welfare but rather to the left itself. (…) With the rise of countercultural movements in the 1960s, the shift away from labour towards a therapeutic model for improving self-esteem and actualizing individual potential made identity politics into a neurotic placebo. Demanding to be treated the same as others, yet differently, identity and intersectionality became incoherent solutions to neoliberal precarization. As the liberal left made its peace with capitalism, the diminished hopes for reform were channelled into entrepreneurialism, personal responsibility and social climbing. Fukuyama overlooks the many ways in which the demands of identity groups have been accommodated in different ways by socialism, neoliberalism and authoritarianism. Although much of what he says about the left’s cultural agenda is accurate, Fukuyama protects the category of universality from political criticism. He is right to say that identity politics on the left has given rise to reactionary tendencies, diverted attention from serious problems and cheapened culture and politics. However, this is not strictly speaking a problem of the left so much as a problem of neoliberal capitalism. The foibles of leftist political correctness are about as enlightening as mass-manufactured support for the plutocracy and hostility to socialism. Fukuyama’s critique of culture wars is advanced for the sake of liberal democracy, which is not only threatened by populist reaction but also by working-class dissatisfaction.[66]

Is Cox’s complaint that I do not say enough about Stalinism a legitimate critique of a book that in no way presents itself as an introduction to Marxist theory and that warns the reader in advance that it is also not a historical study. I write:

While this book presents the complexity of the class and identity debate as it currently exists, one of its functions as a guide is to identify the several strands of contemporary theory that are not Marxist or socialist but that are at times associated with the left. While in the U.S. the term left is often used to imply “not conservative” or “not Republican,” it is used here in contrast with both liberalism and conservatism. Marxism argues that where capitalism is the predominant form of social, political and economic relation, class retains a distinct explanatory value. This is as true for considerations of identity and oppression as it is for the vagaries of social status or occupational dynamics. While each of the sections in Parts I, II and III describes the topic at hand, this book does not provide a complete analysis of any of these new trends, nor does it function as an introduction to Marxist theory. What this guide nevertheless provides is a comprehensive introduction to the class and identity debate as it has developed in the twenty-first century. It demonstrates that there are different meanings and political uses of the all-encompassing term “identity politics.” It also demonstrates that there is much that is excluded, ignored and suppressed when culture war controversies are manufactured and discussed in the media. What this book also makes clear are the ways in which diversity is used to legitimize the politics of the ruling class. My purpose, overall, is to distinguish those ways that are part of the liberal-democratic-capitalist order and those that challenge that order. In basic macropolitical terms, the Marxist approach rejects the means by which culture wars have sidelined the radical left and trapped politics within an intramural skirmish between the extreme, neoliberal centre and the various incarnations of the political right: conservatism, libertarianism, right-wing populism, postmodern nihilism, the alt-right, the political far right and outright fascism.[67]

How does this or previous excerpts confuse liberal universality with socialist universality? If this book gave itself a task it was to more clearly distinguish the two by examining the various ways in which identity politics blurs the two. And the reason Cox is upset is because it very likely has made some progress in that endeavour. This does not necessarily make our task easier as socialists, but it also does not necessarily make it more difficult since it hopefully has helped to make things clearer, with, of course, all social processes having many determinations and never standing still.

To say that socialists want to build bridges between struggles against oppression and struggles against exploitation should go without saying, and without badgering intellectuals like me with criticism so blunt that its effect is to numb rather than sharpen the faculties. The important thing is what we, the working majority, have in common, and not the particularities that make our “onto-epistemologies” so incommensurate and otherworldly that to share common ground through norms of interaction can be construed as a form of oppression.

Cox says that “socialists argue for the centrality of the working class … because … the maximum unity means the strongest movements.” This is what I write:

However comprehensive in its reach, Marxism is not absolutist. The fact that class is central to Marxist analysis but not exclusive can lead to much confusion and dissent among leftists. Ellen Meiksins Wood had one of the most coherent approaches to this problem. In “Why Class Struggle Is Central,” she argues that this problem combines the distinct issues of political goals and political strategies. If you are a socialist, class struggle and the abolition of capitalist exploitation must be your objective. Postwar left theorists, like Louis Althusser, André Gorz and Ernesto Laclau, sought to establish the autonomy of politics from political economy and the division of labour. Criticism of the lack of class consciousness among workers and reference to the fact that radicals need not be members of the working class led such postwar leftists to search for alternative sources of social agency. Discourse theorists added to this the shift from the Marxist critique of political economy to the more malleable notion of power. These two tendencies, structuralist and historicist, argue that workers are not necessarily socialist and have no objective interest in the abolition of capitalism. Once someone has accepted these assumptions, Marxism is retroactively and falsely presumed to be a deterministic and teleological model of social change. Marxism is a political project whose objective is the transformation of social relations as well as the conditions of production and reproduction in a global capitalist system. Although there is nothing inevitable about its aims and objectives, socialism works to mobilize the working class as its essential constituency. The working class is the only social group that has not only an interest in abolishing capitalism but the capacity to do so. […] Radical democracy, intersectionality and populism are different versions of this larger political project option. Wood makes the important point that commitment to all emancipatory struggles is the easy answer.[68]

And,

The simple approach to “all of the above” issues within a generally progressive perspective works to displace the centrality of class. Rather than make the Marxist case for the centrality of production relations, however, Wood suggests that the burden should be placed on those who claim to offer a more comprehensive alternative to the materialist conception of history. For the most part, advocates of identity politics tend to displace the transecting perspective of class with a vague notion of democracy. They also tend to ignore the problems of capitalism, which, Wood argues, “is uniquely indifferent to the social identity of the people it exploits.” Social experiments which demonstrate that in the U.S. a black man without a criminal record is less likely to gain employment than a white man with one evade the Marxist point that the capitalist exploitation of labour is inherently indifferent to social differences and status inequalities. The fact that liberals view white working males as deplorable, and conservatives construe them as the deserving poor, changes nothing to their condition. While differences of identity are valued in different ways in different contexts, identity is not bound up with the capitalist mode of exploitation. That is why capitalism has the option of using racism or anti- racism, sexism or anti-sexism, depending on circumstances. According to Wood, capitalism uses differences of identity in two ways: first, to obscure class relations and divide the working class; second, to provide the cheapest available labour force, which means separating production from the organization of the household. Racial and gender oppression are neither specific nor essential to capitalism, she argues, which is why feminist struggle (and I would add, even in its intersectional modality) does not have the same objectives as class struggle. Whereas the abolition of class society is more feasible than the abolition of racism or sexism, all forms of oppression make it more difficult for socialists to abolish capitalist social relations. That is why socialists are not culture warriors and that is why culture warriors bait socialists into conflicts that culture warriors use to highlight their own beliefs, aims and strategies. The notion that liberal capitalism better serves the emancipatory objectives of women and minorities is evidently false for most women and most members of minority groups. Only the leaders of interest-group politics think that capitalism better serves them, despite all evidence to the contrary. Socialism is the correct politics for feminists and anti-racists because unlike capitalism, socialism does not and cannot make use of oppression. When it does, it ceases to be socialism. Socialism, Wood surmises, is therefore the most comprehensive and universal project of human emancipation. On the question of power and hierarchy, it may be that in some contexts class relations are less oppressive than race and gender relations, but the structure of that power will be either capitalist or socialist.[69]

I have recommended this 1987 text by Wood many times over the last few years because it is simple and has hardly aged despite the intervening postmodernism.

It goes on. Cox writes: “socialists want more than grudging toleration of the oppressed for the sake of the movement.” The sloppy non-Marxist reasoning here is the same as the rest of Cox’s article: because of histories of oppression, which persist in various ways, majority groups owe something to minority groups. More concretely, because of Trump attacks on DEI and trans rights, the petty-bourgeois left should take a page from the neoliberals and take a few additional steps towards the centre. One must compromise on principles and programme to keep up with the Joneses. The purpose of Marxism is not to create a homogenous cultural bloc. Marxists do not ask for “tolerance” of differences, whether grudging, correct, symptomatic or sycophantic. As Žižek asks:

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems of inequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist’s basic ideological operation: the culturalization of politics. Political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation, and so on, are naturalized and neutralized into cultural differences, different ways of life, which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but must be tolerated.[70]

The overemphasis on different ways of life contributes to the breakdown of shared values, which enables the barbarism of the right. Marxists call for solidarity, not the competitions in suffering and body politics that have become common coin on the pseudo-left. We have had it with the narcissism of small differences. If those whose identitarian pride prevents them from working productively, democratically and collectively, they can leave. We do not need them. More importantly, we will not mobilize those who are prepared to fight by catering to those who look for discrimination everywhere, in everything, all the time.

Cox adds: “This false dichotomy between focusing on class questions and downplaying questions of oppression … must be rejected.” I agree entirely, but the reason why, as Žižek puts it, is because culture war is the means through which class struggle is fought in a post-political culture in which open conflict between labour and capital cannot occur, and, as Adolph Reed would add, this culture war is the politics of the middle class. In my own work, I have made this simple by dismissing both the either-or position, class versus identity, exploitation versus oppression, and the do-both position. In CS&IP I write:

It is not realistic, [Richard Seymour] argues, for straight white men to tell people to drop their identity and think of themselves as workers. However, one would have difficulty finding leftists who are telling anyone to do that. The problem is rather with middle-class professionals who specialize in diversity and side with neoliberal institutions against the legacy of socialist strategy. Sadly, Seymour and materialists like him pretend that our choice is between an ‘either-or’ option, class against identity, and a ‘do both’ option, class with identity. The latter is very problematically defined as taking identities as starting points for politicization and a universal project. What class analysis and class struggle have to do with this is anyone’s guess since such views are more compatible with liberal pluralism than socialism. Seymour rejects the strategic priority of class, which he ascribes to the idea of reductionism and expressive totality. This contradicts his assertion that identities have a material basis in the process of capitalist production. And the latter contradicts his assertion that identity is based in corporeality. This eclectic approach to materialism is more or less reductionist when the mood strikes.[71]

And,

While the moralizing both-and (race and class) posture of post-class activists is certainly misconstrued, it is not enough to advocate political-economic analysis and labour struggle above everything else. On this score, [Walter Benn] Michaels has some important ideas to add to [Adolph] Reed. It takes a postmodernist to understand one – or at least someone who has done the reading. In The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History, Michaels offers a refreshing critique of what he refers to as contemporary post-historicism. The essence of today’s ideology, he argues throughout this book, is the shift from belief, defined as political commitments and values, to difference, understood in terms of being and identity. Post-historicism defines the shift from questions of epistemology to ontology. The fact that we now speak about how it is that absolutely everything matters, from race to words and butterflies flapping their wings on the other side of the planet, indicates that our sense of materialism has lost sight of its object and has become a commitment to meaninglessness. The postmodern shift from writer and text to reader and interpretation, or from production to consumption, makes writing and production less meaningful than the variations among readers who read and interpret differently. Since different interpretations of something are solipsistic and do not tell us anything certain about it, the world of post-history can be defined as a world in which the affect and identity of human subjects have become more important than the results of their reasoning. However, ontology can make matters of epistemology more confused since there is no subject that is fully independent of symbolic reality nor fully reducible to it.[72]

Cox cites Lenin to support her assertion that oppression weakens the working class: “revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and the exploited.” Yes, but Lenin was not talking about post-left postmodern identity politics, as I am. As she nears the end, she writes that the heart of revolution is the transformation of the economic relations of society, the socialization of the means of production by the working class and the reshaping of production to meet human needs. Generous reader than I am, I will not cherry pick these lines to sacrifice comrade Cox on the altar of economism, class essentialism or determinism. I am rather going to interpret this in relation to the entirety of her text – this being the way that scholars are supposed to work. The latter socio-economic transformations affect everyday life, she says. If only I were a not a Marxist cultural theorist with a foundation in the work of Lefebvre, I might understand such things. Alas.

“Revolutions unleash what is best in humanity,” Cox concludes, with a few more words from Trotsky. There is an important difference between revolution and the Burning Man festival, which is one reason why I defended Žižek against Gabriel Rockhill’s academic sadism, and with a previous essay about similar and equally anti-intellectual attacks against him titled “No Strawman for the Revolution,” understanding that what Žižek offers his readers is not orthodox boilerplate.[73] At the start of CS&IP, I write:

If one was to take Kwame Anthony Appiah’s short essay on “The Politics of Identity” as an impromptu reference to what identity means for politics today, we would have to consider the counter-intuitive hypothesis that identity politics is often not about identity at all. Rather, according to Appiah, identity politics tends to be concerned with the identity of other people. In identity politics, therefore, we find that women are opposed to men, blacks to whites, gays to straights, Americans to Mexicans, Christians to Muslims, etc. We can extend this to include considerations of age, ability, Indigeneity, body size, parental status, pregnancy, marital status, home ownership, and so on. As part of modern politics, these oppositions are involved in haphazard and confused ways with the creation of an ideal or at least better world.[74]

What does it mean that today’s left movements in the West are thoroughly dedicated to identity? Towards the end of the book, I write:

For Marxism, which has a Hegelian foundation, there is no particular group that can occupy the place of universality. In a secular world, the universalist function of Christianity, for example, is replaced by secular universalism. Universality can be claimed in defence of the rights of the excluded, but universality itself is not a category of belonging. That is why there is nothing in Marxism that opposes whites to blacks, men to women, gays to straights, or members of different nations to one another. Marxism is a theory of universal progress and solidarity directed against the totality of capitalist relations.[75]

Am I guilty of class essentialism, or of knowing too much? Is it possible for people to learn from Marxists outside the SWP or must knowledge come only from those who are willing, like an army drill sergeant, to shout down a room consisting of a few undergraduate students?

The excesses of post-structuralist anti-foundational nihilism, and its popular expression in the form of wokeism, have led countless thousands away from the left and turned countless millions against the left. This trend was facilitated by the neoliberalization of educational and cultural institutions, to the point that rank and file staff are now having to protest the slide towards authoritarianism that has been made to seem progressive through the veneer of diversity – with for example the Obama Foundation waiting until October 2025 to show concern about the MAGA he has fuelled, aided and abetted. Even though Israel has illegally occupied the Palestinian territories for decades, killing civilians and supporting expansionist settlers, the best among the establishment left have defended the right of Israel to defend itself against Hamas. This has discredited the notion of a popular front with bourgeois parties against Trumpism and the far right. Trump has targeted the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society, referring to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid as “egregious, socialist, semi-communist, probably not full communist.”[76] Meanwhile, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), along with the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs are pursuing the policies outlined by the Alternative for Germany (AfD), shaming basic social assistance recipients – especially the Citizens’ Income that many immigrants rely upon – as freeloaders, a view that was previously considered unconstitutional and that in no way addresses the ways in which the state protects the financial interests of the billionaires, with Chancellor Friedrich Merz boasting of the lowest corporate tax rates ever. These social cuts are justified by a NATO war against Russia and China that everyone knows cannot be won. The goal is not to win wars, but to use domestic or foreign security concerns to justify cuts to universal programmes, which allows the ruling class to more easily control surplus labour. Cutting these universal programmes disproportionately affects women, immigrants and pensioners.[77] In the U.S., universal programmes disproportionately benefit racial minorities. This is why Adolph Reed has consistently challenged racialists to say just how it is that universal programmes do not disproportionately benefit blacks, this being a conservative view put forward by people like Crenshaw and the members of the Congressional Black Caucus in their attacks on the 2016 Sanders campaign.[78]

In this political context of petty, middle-class extortion, the political right has capitalized on legitimate aversion to wokeism to fuel illegitimate forms of anti-wokeism that strengthen the hand of the oligarchy. Just as the term “political correctness” was originally a term of opprobrium on the left, and only later reverse-engineered by the liberal centre and right, the Marxist left has criticized postmodern theories since the 1980s, suffering setbacks at the hands of feminists and post-colonial theorists in the 90s, but winning the argument again in the 2000s, that is, until the mid-2010s when foundation and institution-backed identitarians flooded civil society with a vacuous agenda of “showing up” that was entirely suited to the needs of the establishment.

Did Somebody Say Sectarianism?

Knowledge of the trajectory of the Socialist Workers Party since its inception helps to explain why the SWP feels the need to denounce me, an independent scholar without any institutional backing or party affiliations. After seeing the video by Esme Choonara, I contacted the SWP YouTube channel and I also contacted the main SWP website, asking for an elaboration and an occasion to discuss. I received no reply. After I later learned about the article by Cox, I wrote to the editors of the journal International Socialism to see if they would allow me a reply in its pages. Again, I received no immediate reply. I then decided to contact some colleagues and comrades in the U.K. and the U.S., including a few SWP members who had given feedback to Cox on her article, to field their opinions about the SWP and why the party would adopt this stance towards me. These are some of the answers given to me about why this has happened: 1) they are tarring anything that has anti-woke content with the same brush, perhaps because some public figures – such as Nina Power, Elena Louise Lange, TERFs and other ‘red-brown’ people – have swung to the other side; 2) ever since a scandal over sexual assault allegations around 2013 the SWP has been anxious to not seem old fashioned and to appear dedicated to anti-sexism and anti-racism, embracing everything new irrespective of its compatibility with Marxism, including the work of Judith Butler or the method of intersectionality; 3) such sectarian groups are elitist and distant from the actual concerns of the working class; 4) since around 2000, former Trotskyist groups like the SWP and the ISO have promoted elitist identity politics that do not address the issues of race and gender effectively and that are in actuality unpopular except for those who follow the intersectional gobbledygook; 5) it is simply fallacious to identify my work with economism when there are more appropriate and more prominent figures who represent this tendency within Marxism; 6) SWP members who read the review before publication only read it for grammar and suggested that Cox should do more to represent and explain my ideas before subjecting them to criticism, which she neglected to do; 7) the Cox review takes for granted the interests of those who advocate for intersectionality, reinforcing a very familiar hegemony; 8) Cox makes the mistake of locating politics, including feminism, anti-racism and LGBTQ rights, within identity and not in socialism; 9) the SWP is seeking allies in other movements and with fashionable middle-class politics so that they do not become isolated; 10) Cox and the SWP are not engaging with my work in good faith and the text does not deserve a response; 11) Cox does not answer the problem at hand: can Marxism be combined with postmodernism against neo-fascism, and can postmodernism be criticized at the same time?; 12) there are other scholars doing the same kind of work and asking the same kinds of questions who are not populist or reductionist; 13) a party that has catered to identitarianism within its social base cannot countenance a trenchant critique; 14) the SWP is an inveterately opportunist organization, with a slavish relation to the Labour Party and trade union bureaucracies, including Communist Party functionaries, and have capitulated to “democratic” imperialism. I am grateful to my colleagues and comrades and for these confidences.

The current agenda being pursued by the SWP UK is the outcome of decades of backsliding, about which there is indeed no reason for nostalgia. The party started out as the Socialist Review Group (SRG) that was formed in 1950 around leading figure Tony Cliff. Although a member of the Trotskyist movement since the 1930s, Cliff and others disagreed about the nature of the Soviet Union, aligning with those who viewed the U.S.S.R. as a form of “state capitalism” rather than a “degenerated workers’ state” that is governed by a bureaucratic elite, as Trotsky had argued. In The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, Trotsky rejected the view that the bureaucracy was a new ruling class, contending instead that its political power should not be confused with ownership of the means of production, which remained under the control of the workers’ state.[79] Trotsky viewed this development as a postponement to the revolutionary process but not, as such, the culmination of this process, calling on workers to overthrow the bureaucracy. Cliff followed the reasoning of people such as Max Shachtman and argued instead that the Stalinists were a new class formation, leading to the defence of Stalinism as a means to realize the benefits of industrialization that would have taken much longer to accomplish under a bourgeois system. This meant a split from those groups associated with the Trotskyist Fourth International (FI) and a national partition of class struggles. Cliff’s earliest achievements as a political leader occurred under the banner of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), alongside Ted Grant and Gerry Healy. He turned politics away from revolutionary theory and towards Stalinist tendencies based on national economic stabilization. This meant collaboration with not only the Labour Party and trade unions bureaucracies, but also with middle-class intellectuals.

For Cliff and his followers, the working class does not play a necessary role in history. This is borne out in Cliff’s view of foreign policy. During the Korean War, this faction refused to defend North Korea against American and British imperialism, declined to mobilize opposition to the war and instead adopted a neutral “neither Moscow nor Washington” position that caused them to be expelled from the RCP and the FI. Abandoning the notion that the working class is the privileged agent of revolutionary change, Cliff considered that the proletariat played no significant role in both the Chinese and Cuban revolutions. According to Cliff, these revolutions invalidated Trotsky’s theory of permanent world revolution. This signalled a shift away from revolutionary theory towards reformist politics that over the years became focused on activist forms of protest. If capitalist expansion benefits the working class, they concluded, then the Labour Party expresses the interests of the class.

The postwar period saw the embourgeoisement of the working class in the form of newly educated layers that had prospered in the context of Keynesian welfarism and capital’s compromise with labour. These layers gradually became part of the trade union apparatus that was incorporated into corporate management and the financial institutions of command capitalism. What the labour aristocracy offered the capitalists was a compliant labour force in exchange for material incentives, which were made available on condition of profitability. In 1962 the SRG was renamed the International Socialism Group (IS), growing to approximately 1000 members and then to 3000 during the mid-1970s. It was renamed the SWP in 1977.

By the 1970s, the class compromise between labour and capital had eroded and national production shifted towards globalized production, causing the labour aristocracy to lose legitimacy as it was increasingly called upon to impose concessions on the rank and file. Caught in an impossible position, most labour leaders simply sold out to the establishment, resisting pressure from below to engage in class struggle. Offshoring, downsizing, privatization, decades of contract betrayals and wage stagnation caused union membership to decline. One example of how weakened this enterprise has become is the involvement of the SWP in the call for only one day of strike action on Wednesday, February 1 in 2023, representing the joint action of approximately one million workers from approximately 20 unions. The event was under-reported by the unions themselves. It is not that a one-day general strike is insignificant, but the failed action demonstrates the reliance of the SWP on the trade unions – with the dog in this case wagging its SWP tail. This set-up allows for no possibility of a socialist challenge to the trade union apparatus.

But the SWP is not only based in the petty-bourgeois trade union leadership. It also has a basis in academia and local government. Here also the left movement has been savaged by public management and neoliberal austerity. Although it appeals to militancy, with routine invocations of revolutionary theory, its actual social function is the defusion of social anger, especially dissatisfaction with the union bureaucracy. For example, the SWP stumped for University and College Union (UCU) leader Jo Grady in 2022, who was instrumental in calling off a national strike by close to 70,000 post-secondary education workers over wages, work conditions and pensions. Whatever other strike actions are on hand, the SWP treats all of them as forms of activist protest, with pathetic pleas made to those who make the decisions. The pressure placed by Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Marine LePen, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei and others on this left sector leads it ever more permanently in the holding pattern it has wedged itself into.

When it comes to the links between academia and the decline of left politics, the case of Cultural Studies guru Stuart Hall is instructive. Associated with the journals Marxism Today and New Left Review, Hall became an indirect cause of the rise of New Labour. As with those strands of British Stalinism that were oriented towards the Labour Party and the trade union bureaucracy, such as the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the New Left that emerged in the late 1950s had a reformist-nationalist agenda. The “English” humanist Marxism that developed at this time rejected vanguardism in favour of corporatism. Or as Cliff once put it: “To a large extent, what makes the Labour Party tick is what makes the British people tick.”[80] This explains why Cox is anxious to emphasize the notion that Marxism has only ever been a minority formation – because this is SWP policy. In Cliff’s words:

Marxists should not set themselves up as a party or embryo of a party of their own. They should remember that the working class looks to the Labour Party as the political organisation of the class (and no doubt when a new wave of political activity spreads among the working class, millions of new voters will flock to its banner and hundreds of thousands will join it actively).[81]

Inspired by the Cuban revolution – which for Cliff was an example of his theory of “deflected permanent revolution” – and the prospect that revolution could be carried out on the basis of a social force other than the working class, Hall and the newly created Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) advanced a pseudo-Gramscian notion of hegemony focused on popular culture as the social basis of nationalist politics. Cultural Studies replaced class as the focus of politics with race, gender, sexuality and subcultures, all of these subsumed by developments in consumerism and new technologies. This focus on identity is the benchmark of Hall’s legacy, second only to his critique of Thatcherism, which he interpreted in the terms of Euro-communism, moving even further away from trade unionism than previously. According to this view, because the working class had failed in its historical mission, as claimed by Marxist science, Labour had to seek new avenues. Since the neoconservatives had made appeals to chauvinist notions of Britishness, which was thought to satisfy blue-collar workers, the new Labour leadership would need to find the sources of their power elsewhere.[82] This meant, on the one hand, finding support from capital, and on the other, reassuring capital that new progressive agencies could be found in the petty-bourgeois layers that had been produced by postwar consumerism and the academies. Hall’s last act was the co-authored Kilburn Manifesto, a damp squib aimed against socialist politics.

There is an unstated marriage of convenience between reformist politics and fascism. With the belief that only corporatism is possible for the working class in developed capitalist countries, which leaves the role of social change to new agencies, students especially, the only thing that gives protest politics the semblance of militancy is opposition to the corporate elite and the far right. The SWP’s heyday, in this regard, is the Anti-Nazi League that the SWP developed in 1977 to counter the rise of the National Front, a fascist political party that had some success in local elections, much like today’s AfD. Supported by celebrity musicians and actors, the SWP led a campaign against racism that culminated with Rock Against Racism concerts, which involved the leading musicians of the punk era. However, by that time, not only had all traces of labour militancy died out but feminist and anti-racism agendas threatened to lead ever further away from socialist ideals and organizations. The neoliberal road to serfdom was paved with soft fascism and consumerism. Over several decades, neglect of labour militancy has strengthened the hand of the capitalist class, which uses the bipartisan game to steadily increase the power of the state and the oligarchy. In the case of Hitlerism, the far right in Germany came to power without much concern on the part of the Comintern and the German Communist Party (KPD). Similarly, the Democratic Party in the U.S. has done very little to prevent a criminal coup leader from returning to power. The fact of the matter is that SWP cadres are not worried about Trump and the far right since no amount of climate chaos, militarized nuclear threat or economic inequality should lead back to Trotsky, whose revolutionary Marxist politics must be shown to have been wrong.

Given its political orientation, the SWP greeted the collapse of the Soviet Union with a shrug and little concern for the devastation wrought by privatization upon vast swathes of the populations of the former East. The outcome was not interpreted as the consequence of Joseph Stalin’s socialism in one country policy. In the end, however, Trotsky turned out to be no more wrong about the stability of Stalinism than Marx was wrong about the stability of capitalist political economy. The SWP acknowledges this today, but as a historical matter only.

As New Labour in the U.K. and the New Democrats in the U.S. declared the end of welfare as we know it, turning to policing the working class rather than creating employment, anything left of centre found itself out in the cold. Another protest initiative created by the SWP was the Stop the War Coalition, which was created in the aftermath of 9/11, mobilizing millions, but failing to prevent the invasion of Afghanistan, the destruction of Libya, or later, the Ukraine and NATO offensive against Russia, which precipitated the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The SWP’s involvement with Galloway’s Respect coalition in 2004 collapsed only a few years later, leading to severe splits within the SWP from which it is thought to have never recovered. Problems caused by further splits in 2009 were compounded by allegations of sexual assault and rape made against the party’s national secretary in 2013. The party’s mishandling of the case led some members to criticize the leadership and eventually leave the party. The “Comrade Delta” scandal led to a period of cancel culture directed against the SWP by various other movement organizations, leading to the exodus of some 700 members. It was charged for example by the Bristol Socialist Worker Student Society in 2014 with having allowed an atmosphere of racism and transphobia to develop. By 2018, the party had established new mandates against harassment and oppressive forms of behaviour. They should add to this a policy against sloppy research.

This brings us to the SWP’s “Marxism 2025 Festival of Socialist Ideas.” Among the lectures, three workshops were dedicated to the significance of the Bolshevik Revolution and the question regarding the claim that is sometimes made that Stalinism was the inevitable outcome of Leninism.[83] According to the Socialist Equality Party (SEP), which represents the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), Tony Cliff and the SWP have long sought to associate themselves with Trotskyism while at the same time distancing themselves from core tenets and the viability of the Fourth International.[84] In their analysis of the rise of Stalinism, none of Trotsky’s writings were cited by the presenters, reducing the role played by Trotsky at this time. Presenter Dugald Macfarlane, a SWP member from the Scottish National Party, discussed Stalin’s and Nikolai Bukharin’s theory of socialism in one country without discussing Trotsky and the Left Opposition, whose policy proposals, which the Stalinists opposed for the sake of maintaining their grip on power, should inform any and all considerations of Stalinism in the 1920s and 30s. Macfarlane, as well as chairperson Jan Nielson, replied to a heckler, who denied Trotsky had any principles of his own and had allied with the German Gestapo, by commenting only on the person’s impoliteness and not the substance of these and other false charges. According to Michael Barnes and Laura Tiernan, Macfarlane finished his talk by stating that Stalin represents the best example of communism to date. Similar provocations were ignored at another session. For these authors, the fact that SWP members are not interested in elaborating the differences between Trotsky and Stalin indicates that this giant of revolutionary Marxism exists only for the purpose of attracting new members and that nothing of the FI is allowed to interfere with the SWP’s subordination of proletarian politics to the alliances that have been made with the labour aristocracy and with Stalinist organizations, confusing the politics of the united front with that of a popular front.

The SWP is more comfortable around Stalinists than they are around Trotskyists, which is why at the 2018 Marxism Festival, Joseph Choonara hosted a discussion with Stalinist historian John E. Kelly. As Daniel Gaido put it in his review of Kelly’s The Twilight of World Trotskyism (2022),

The central thesis of Kelly’s book is that social revolutions are both undesirable and impossible, that revolutionary organizations in general and Trotskyist organizations in particular are doomed to fail due to their ‘ultra-radical programmes and policies.’ In that sense, the subtitle of Kelly’s book could well be A Bourgeois Take on Trotskyist Woes.[85]

The reformist roots of the SWP explain the political decisions the party has taken from its inception to the Marxism 2025 festival. At these events, the SWP promotes the fiction that the new Your Party initiative is intent on doing something different from other similar failed initiatives such as Greece’s Syriza party, Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise and New Popular Front, Germany’s Die Linke, Spain’s Podemos, Italy’s Five Star Movement or the American Green Party. One of the people consulted by Cox for her attack piece, central committee member and national secretary Lewis Nielsen, celebrated Sultana’s plans to tag team with Corbyn in the initiative to stop social cuts and prevent the far right from further dividing the world. However, rather than fight the neoliberal centre, Corbyn has done the same as most social democrats elsewhere and offered only gentle criticism of this or that policy, doing what Sanders and the “squad” have been called upon to do, which is keep the working class under the thumb of the left wing of the bourgeoisie. This tendency of left populism combined with new social movement anti-oppression and NGO lobbying is increasingly under the control of foundation and corporation funding. The question, then, is not how the various groups of the left can coordinate to put on demonstrations, but whether this movement of movements is fighting for socialism. Why was the pointless phrase No Kings chosen for anti-Trump rallies rather than No Fascism, or No Capitalism? Is it because, as Yanis Varoufakis and Jodi Dean have argued, we are entering a new type of technofeudal society? Rather than building socialism outside the major parties, the protests are a plea for democracy.

This is where the far right comes into play. Since this middle-class milieu is more apt to work within the system than against it, which allows it to capitalize on its professional credentials, it can harp on about the oligarchy, and about oppression, without at the same time addressing the only kinds of mobilization that can do anything to reverse course. A Marxist political movement and a communist society is not envisioned. What is envisioned are mass mobilizations to show those in power that the people disagree with their policies. In this respect, right-wing regimes have an advantage over the left: they play into the spectacle of culture wars and they control the levers of power. The nostalgia that Cox mocks is precisely the nostalgia that the SWP markets to young, prospective members who have enough class consciousness to be disillusioned with the system. As Barnes and Tiernan report, Kelly called for a shift from abstract actors like the working class to other forms of oppression based on race, gender and sexual orientation. The SWP’s adoption of this agenda is consistent with its abandonment of revolutionary politics, which because of the intersectional-decolonial agenda that is grounded in postmodern theory now goes all the way up to the revolutionary achievements of the bourgeois revolutions.

Whether groups like Your Party are deceptive or simply out to lunch, the working majority is not running to them in droves because these groups look the same as those new social movement groups that are defined by gender, racial and professional lifestyles. In the current NDP leadership race, it is Avi Lewis, a former music television host and legatee of NDP equity, Stephen Lewis, who represents this perspective. The partner of global activist personality Naomi Klein, these two are as photogenic as the previous leader and their platform consolidates the party’s shift away from socialism. For all their considerable social and educational capital, what is necessary to understand about such candidates is that they will not rock the boat. Meanwhile, the NDP candidate that has been selected by the party’s Socialist Caucus, Yves Engler, is having his candidacy obstructed by the Leadership Election CEO, and this, as Engler is being smeared by politicians and media commentators.[86]

The answer to what is to be done is not far from the Trotskyism that causes so much consternation among members of the SWP. We must establish worker control of the major means of production, including the energy sector, the banks, transportation, infrastructure as well as everything that already is or should be a public utility or service – schools, hospitals, elder care, social housing, water, transportation, communication networks, the postal service, parks, etc. Full employment and or a living wage, with worker control of production and prices, must be enshrined as a human right, along with culture and leisure time. The wealth of the oligarchy must be expropriated and the category of billionaires abolished. Rank and file committees, working through the process of democratic centralism, with leaders that are subject to recall, must be built beyond the reach and influence of the comprador political parties and trade unions officials. These committees must coordinate across national boundaries to liberate all peoples from the stranglehold of the exploiting class. War must be outlawed, and the development of ecologically sustainable production methods made a priority, working globally to lift developing and formerly colonized countries out of poverty. The methods of fascism that make race and nationality central to politics must also be fought against on the identity politics pseudo-left, which creates false divisions in society that function to maintain class hierarchy. Diversity and respect for difference can only flourish where society is freed from the shackles of class exploitation and an economy based on consumerism. We must not tolerate the opposition to communism by supposed socialists, who, like Henri Berson’s creative evolution, inch their way forward in ways of “becoming” that are completely irrelevant except to themselves.

My last word to Cox is the same thing that Callinicos said to Varoufakis at the 2025 festival: “I think we have the same enemies. I’d like that we can just agree to call them bastards.” It is difficult to say this, though, when you are denounced as a pariah rather than engaged as a comrade you disagree with but who has something to say that may be worthy of consideration.

Notes

1. SWP TV, “Marxism vs identity politics,” YouTube (August 22, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGWKoiSyZ78&t=1s.

2. Marc James Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (London: Routledge, 2024). See also Francis Fukuyam, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2018).

3. Judy Cox, “Class struggle and identity politics in the era of Trump,” International Socialism (May 13, 2025), https://isj.org.uk/class-struggle-and-identity-politics-in-the-era-of-trump/.

4. See Marc James Léger, ed. Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (London: Routledge, 2023).

5. Marc James Léger, Vanguardia: Socially Engaged Art and Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 63.

6. This topic was doing the rounds in the context of Trump’s re-election. See for example: David Broder, “Identity Crisis,” Jacobin (October 30, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/10/identity-crisis/; Liza Featherstone, “All That Remains of Neoliberal Identity Politics Is Fascism,” Jacobin (October 31, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/10/all-that-remains-of-neoliberal-identity-politics-is-fascism; Melissa Nascheck, “Why Elites Love Identity Politics,” Jacobin (January 14, 2025), https://jacobin.com/2025/01/elite-identity-politics-professional-class; Alice Cappelle, “in defense of ‘wokism’,” YouTube (February 4, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0G1_L5qxCo; Jessica da Silva and Salomé Sané, “Reclaiming Wokeness and Wokeism: Confronting Political Attacks on Justice and Equity in Canada,” Greenpeace (February 18, 2025), https://www.greenpeace.org/canada/en/story/68567/reclaiming-wokeness-and-wokeism/; PoliticsJOE, “Woke is dead: this is the future of politics | Ash Sarkar interview,” YouTube (February 18, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av74Yj6CJno; Revolutionary Communist Party, “The death of ‘woke’ | Communist Radio #13,” YouTube (February 28, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQRI316MadA; Jennifer C. Pan, “The Trouble With Equity,” Jacobin (May 13, 2025), https://jacobin.com/2025/05/racial-equity-corporate-anti-racism.

7. Marc James Léger, “Fascism and the Suspension of Belief,” Blog of Public Secrets (November 15, 2024), formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/fascism-and-the-suspension-of-belief-1.html.

8. Adolph Reed, Jr., “Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss,”nonsite (November 11, 2024), https://nonsite.org/going-forward-from-the-edge-of-the-abyss/.

9. Reed, “Going Forward from the Edge of the Abyss.”

10. Marc James Léger, “Lessons from the Biden Debacle,”Blog of Public Secrets (November 11, 2024), formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2024/11/lessons-of-the-biden-debacle.html.

11. Marc James Léger,Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (Ottawa: Red Quill Books, 2022), 316.

12. See for example, Communist Revolution, “Perspectives for the Canadian Class Struggle,”YouTube (November 12, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mqHUg2pEnM&t=1146s; BreakThrough News “Trump’s ‘Populism’ Fraud: Cabinet Stacked for Ultra-Right, Billionaire Agenda,” YouTube (November 13, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrQ4DrdKf_c.

13. PBS NewsHour, “WATCH: Oprah Winfrey’s full speech urging voters to choose joy by choosing Harris at the DNC,”YouTube (August 21, 2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOYKC3blHY.

14. See Nancy Fraser, “From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond,” American Affairs 1:4 (Winter 2017) 46-64; Bill Clinton cited in Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency (New York: Crown, 2021), 22. Fraser’s essay is included in Léger, ed. Identity Trumps Socialism.

15. Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989).

16. See Marc James Léger, “United Colours of the UAAC: More on the Politics of Diversity in Canada,”Third Text Online (May 31, 2023), http://thirdtext.org/mjleger-politicsofdiversity.

17. Leon Trotsky, “What Is National Socialism?” The Modern Thinker (October 1933), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm.

18. On the problem of race reductionism for class politics, see Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012); Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2013); Touré F. Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (London: Verso, 2020).

19. See for example, Lillian Cicerchia, “Diversity and inclusion within what and for whom? And other questions about the political economy of academia,” Versobooks (March 22, 2021), https://www.versobooks.com/en-ca/blogs/news/4871-diversity-and-inclusion-within-what-and-for-whom-and-other-questions-about-the-political-economy-of-academia?srsltid=AfmBOorBnCdAPXVIvI5oOJMxM_BoaXE3J4KNp9r4ctM_Abhkcg8AvepA; Lee Fang, “The Evolution of Union Busting: Breaking Unions With the Language of Diversity and Social Justice,” The Intercept (June 7, 2022), https://theintercept.com/2022/06/07/union-busting-tactics-diversity/; Jennifer C. Pan, Selling Social Justice: Why the Rich Love Antiracism (London: Verso, 2025). On how NGOism brings radical movements further away from socialism and closer to the needs of corporations, see Peter Dauvergne and Genevieve LeBaron, Protest Inc.: The Corporatization of Activism (New York: Wiley, 2014); Benjamin Y. Fong and Melissa Nascheck, “NGOism: The Politics of the Third Sector,” Catalyst 5:1 (Spring 2021), https://catalyst-journal.com/2021/05/ngoism-the-politics-of-the-third-sector.

20. Vivek Chibber, “Requiem for the Obama Coalition,”Jacobin (November 7, 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/11/obama-democrats-2024-election-race.

21. Chibber, “Requiem for the Obama Coalition.”

22. See Marc James Léger, “Dark Academia: A Reply to Elias Khoury,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 18:1 (2024), 3-4. I later realized that the print version of Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Leiden: Brill, 2021) had been hacked with dozens of mistakes that provide subtextual allusions to this ongoing saga. For this reason, neither the Brill hardcover version nor the Haymarket paperback version are authorized by me. The only version I authorize is the post-print PDF version I re-edited and posted on my Academia page at https://www.academia.edu/124262430/Bernie_Bros_Gone_Woke_Class_Identity_Neoliberalism.

23. Touré F. Reed, “Kamala Harris Didn’t Lose Because of Racism,” Jacobin (June 18, 2025), https://jacobin.com/2025/06/harris-trump-democrats-race-reductionism.

24. Reed, “Kamala Harris Didn’t Lose Because of Racism.”

25. Laura Tiernan, “Corbyn’s ‘Your Party’ reboot at the World Transformed: Europe’s pseudo-left politicians display their bankruptcy,” World Socialist Web Site (October 15, 2025), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/10/15/ehwu-o15.html.

26. See Marc James Léger, “Postmodernism on Steroids,” Communis (August 12, [June 2024] 2025), https://communispress.com/postmodernism-on-steroids/.

27. Jodi Dean, “Donald Trump Is the Most Honest Candidate in American Politics Today,” In These Times (August 12, 2015), https://inthesetimes.com/article/donald-trump-republican-president.

28. See John Hillman, “Slavoj Zizek – What are network states?” YouTube (June 27, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCS5gukFzV4.

29. See on this subject Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed, Jr., No Politics But Class Politics, eds. Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora (London: Eris, 2022).

30. Marc James Léger, “Join a Political Group,” Journal of Aesthetics and Protest #8 (2011), available at https://www.joaap.org/issue8/leger3.htm.

31. Marc James Léger, “Working-Class Politics at the Margins,” Blog of Public Secrets (November 17, 2021), formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2021/11/working-class-politics-at-the-margins.html. The text was simultaneously made available as a draft entry on my Academia page.

32. See Marc James Léger, “Fighting Oligarchy, or Here We Go Again?” Blog of Public Secrets (March 23, 2025), formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2025/03/fighting-oligarchy-or-here-we-go-again.html. This text was simultaneously posted on my Academia page.

33. See Heidi Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital & Class 3:2 (1979): 1-33; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). For Marxist critiques of Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism, see Greg Meyerson, “Rethinking Black Marxism: Reflections on Cedric Robinson and Others,” Cultural Logic, vol.6 (April 2000), https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/192628; William I. Robinson, Salvador Rangel and Hilbourne A. Watson, “The Cult of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: A Proletarian Critique,” The Philosophical Salon (October 3, 2022), https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-cult-of-cedric-robinsons-black-marxism-a-proletarian-critique/; Cedric Johnson, “The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism,” nonsite (January 29, 2025), https://nonsite.org/the-wrong-duree-the-politics-of-cedric-j-robinsons-racial-capitalism/.

34. See Lydia Sargent, ed. Women & Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1981).

35. See David R. Roediger, Class, Race and Marxism (London: Verso, 2017) eBook. See also David North and Tom Mackaman, eds. The New York Times’ 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History (Oak Park, MI: Mehring Books, 2021).

36. Although I have never been a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party, I did publish with them one article about the Sam Kerson murals that were eventually covered over at the Vermont Law School – a case of woke cancel culture that is similar to the efforts to destroy the New Deal murals at the George Washington High School in San Francisco. David Walsh contributed an essay to volume two of The Idea of the Avant Garde, and an article by Joseph Kishore was added to my contribution to Bruce Barber’s Spectres of Marx project. See David Walsh, “To Create a Genuine Artistic ‘Avant Garde’ Means Confronting Critical Historical Issues,” in Marc James Léger, ed. The Idea of the Avant Garde – And What It Means Today 2 (Bristol: Intellect, 2019), 413-22; Marc James Léger, “Gramsci as Object-Cause of Symbolic Castration: Reflections on Spectres of Marx,” in Bruce Barber, Spectres of Marx (self-published catalogue to accompany a Global Art Affairs Foundation exhibition in Venice, 2015), 14-41.

37. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 3-4.

38. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 13.

39. See Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, [1892] 1995); Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Towards a Unitary Theory (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1983). My own views on the woman question and social reproduction theory are forthcoming in an essay on the films of Sean Baker.

40. Preston H. Smith II, “Which Black Lives Matter?” Catalyst 4:3 (Fall 2020), 137-8.

41. See Marc James Léger and David Tomas, eds. Zapantera Negra: An Artistic Encounter Between Black Panthers and Zapatistas (Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2017). See also the video I made against plans for war against Iran, which focuses on a march organized by the Palestinian Youth Movement and includes artists participating in International Indigenous Peoples Day at Marc James Léger, “Hands Off Iran | Palestine Solidarity | Montreal June 21, 2025,” YouTube (June 25, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qytAkPgj_Y.

42. See Richard Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

43. On the populism involved in the Rage Against the War Machine rally, see Léger, “The Rage Against Socialism Rally,” Blog of Public Secrets (February 18, 2023), formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2023/02/the-rage-against-socialism-rally.html.

44. On the Luigi Mangione case, see Léger, “Pseudo-Events for Pseudo-Left Intellectuals,” Blog of Public Secrets (December 12, 2024), formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2024/12/my-entry.html. My position on this is basic Marxism. See for example, Leon Trotsky, “Why Marxists Oppose Individual Terrorism” (1911), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm.

45. First published as Léger, “The Use and Abuse of Class Reductionism for the Left,” Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory and Practice Vol.25 (2021 [January 2023]) 1-15, https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/clogic/article/view/197794.

46. See Marc James Léger, Don’t Network: The Avant Garde after Networks (Brooklyn: Minor Compositions, 2018).

47. Mao Zedong, “On Contradiction” (1937), available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm.

48. These issues are discussed in the section on decoloniality. See, more recently, George Hull, “Epistemic ethnonationalism: identity policing in neo-Traditionalism and Decoloniality theory,” Acta Academica 54:3 (2022): 131-55; Miri Davidson, “On the concept of the pluriverse in Walter Mignolo and the European New Right,” Contemporary Political Theory 24:3 (November 2024): 469-89; Pranay Somayajula, “Decolonization and Its Discontents,” Monthly Review 77:1 (May 2025), https://monthlyreview.org/articles/decolonization-and-its-discontents/.

49. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 146.

50. See Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, eds, Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing (London: Verso, 2022).

51. A key text elaborating my critique of empiricism and mechanistic determinism is “Bugaboos of Baroque Marxism,” Blog of Public Secrets (January 6, 2024), https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2024/01/bugaboos-of-baroque-marxism.html. This article was simultaneously posted as a draft on my Academia page.

52. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 85.

53. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 149.

54. See the chapter on “Racialism and Its Discontent” in Léger, Too Black to Fail.

55. Léger, Too Black to Fail, 191-5.

56. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 26-8.

57. See Brian A. Dixon, “Looking Down That Deep Hole: Parasitic Intersectionality and Toxic Afro-Pessimism, Part 2 of 3” Black Agenda Report (February 1, 2018), https://www.blackagendareport.com/looking-down-deep-hole-parasitic-intersectionality-and-toxic-afro-pessimism-part-2.

58. Jodi Dean, “Who Can Be Defended?” Communis (October 7, 2025), https://communispress.com/who-can-be-defended-2/.

59. Revolutionary Communist Party, “A Communist Explanation of The New World Disorder,” YouTube (October 14, 2025), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9LNaDldatI.

60. See Slavoj Žižek, “World Blown Into Space,” in Zero Point (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), 31-8.

61. See Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000).

62. an, “Who Can Be Defended?”

63. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 101-20.

64. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 121.

65. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 3.

66. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 106.

67. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 16.

68. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 205.

69. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 206.

70. Slavoj Žižek, “Tolerance as an Ideological Category,” Critical Inquiry 34:4 (Summer 2008): 660.

71. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 29-30. I was not aware at the time I wrote this that Seymour is a former member of the SWP. He left the party in 2013 and did his London School of Economics doctoral studies under the supervision of Paul Gilroy.

72. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 155.

73. Marc James Léger, “Credo Quia Absurdum: No Strawman for the Revolution,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 10:3 (2016) 1-27, available at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/IJZS/article/view/983/983. See also Léger, “Just Stop Žižek,” Blog of Public Secrets (January 26, 2023), posted on my Academia page and formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2023/01/just-stop-zizek.html; and Léger, “Contains Žižek Philosophy with a Politics Surprise,” Blog of Public Secrets (January 27, 2023), formerly available at https://legermj.typepad.com/blog/2023/01/contains-zizek-philosophy-with-a-politics-surprise-.html.

74. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 4.

75. Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, 201.

76. Ben Johansen, “White House to ax more ‘egregious’ programs Friday,” Politico (October 14, 2025), https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/white-house-to-ax-more-egregious-programs-friday-00608022.

77. Human Rights Watch, “‘It Tears You Apart’: Poverty and Gender in Germany’s Social Security System,” HRW (March 24, 2025), https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/03/24/it-tears-you-apart/poverty-and-gender-germanys-social-security-system.

78. See Adolph Reed, “The Trouble With Uplift: How black politics succumbed to the siren song of racial uplift,” The Baffler No.41 (September 2018), https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-trouble-with-uplift-reed; and Reed, “‘Let Me Go Get My Big White Man’: The Clientelist Foundation of Contemporary Antiracist Politics,” nonsite #39 (May 11, 2022), https://nonsite.org/let-me-go-get-my-big-white-man/#foot_src_40-15246.

79. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (1936), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/.

80. Tony Cliff, “The Labour Party in Perspective,” International Socialism #9 (Summer 1962), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1962/xx/labour.htm.

81. Tony Cliff, “The Labour Party in Perspective.”

82. On this subject, see Ambalavaner Sivanandan, “All that melts into air is solid: the hokum of New Times [Cultural Studies],” Race & Class 31:3 (1990): 1-30.

83. See Michael Barnes and Laura Tiernan, “Stalinist provocateur goes unchallenged at Socialist Workers Part’s ‘Marxism 2025’ Russia Course,” World Socialist Web Site (July 30, 205), https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/07/30/sfkw-j30.html.

84. See for example, John Molyneux, Leon Trotsky’s Theory of Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Alex Callinicos, Trotskyism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990), available at http://www.marxists.de/trotism/callinicos/index.htm; Tony Cliff, Trotskyism After Trotsky: The Origins of the International Socialists (London: Bookmarks, 1999), available at https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/cliff/trotskyism_after_trotsky-cliff.pdf; Esme Choonara, A Rebel’s Guide to Trotsky (London: Bookmarks, 2006).

85. Daniel Gaido, “Book Review: John Kelly, The Twilight of World Trotskyism,” Marx & Philosophy Review of Books (January 11, 2023), https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/20735_the-twilight-of-world-trotskyism-by-john-kelly-reviewed-by-daniel-gaido/.

86. Yves Engler, “Mainstream smears mean the system fears your ideas,” yvesengler.com (October 11, 2025), https://yvesengler.com/2025/10/11/mainstream-smears-mean-the-system-fears-your-ideas/.

Featured image: Illustration by the author.

Marc James Léger