The 2024 US election issued several resounding messages around the world, and one with apparently profound implications for the Western Left was: identity politics is dead. A torrent of commentary on this theme has since been produced by writers from across the political spectrum¹. The standard argument of these thinkpieces is that President Trump and the reactionary movement he leads have killed identity politics, and the associated anti-oppression stance of “wokeness”. This has left the Democrats, and much of the Left, with hard strategic questions to answer. How, we are invited to ask, can the Left operate in a world where workers regard some of our central concerns (the rights and recognition of migrants, trans, and Black people) as performative sanctimony? Underlying much of this commentary is the basic assumption that identity politics are a politics of the Left, and that anyone with ongoing commitments to the BlackLivesMatter movement and trans rights ought to be perturbed by the proclaimed demise of performative wokeness.

Discussion about the meaning of this new political moment is made more difficult as its key term, “identity politics”, is conceptually nebulous. It is routinely constructed by whoever happens to be using it as a way to gesture toward a set of politics and practices that they dislike. Meanwhile, straightforward defences of “identity politics” as such have become vanishingly rare. Its nebulousness can be seen, for instance, in the ways that Leftists have come to discuss gender. Some transphobic Leftists are likely to regard any effort to organise around trans identities as evidence of an “identity politics”, whereas trans-affirming Leftists might use the term to describe more specific forms of trans rights activism that they dislike. In this latter, more subtle, vein of anti-identity politics critique, we could list its definite characteristics as including: anti-oppression campaigns that paper over class differences and neglect to make use of class-struggle methods; theorisations of oppression that neglect its material roots in the capitalist mode of production; activist practices that moralistically and condescendingly lecture at workers about their complicity in oppression; and an undue preoccupation with the ascriptive identities of people in positions of leadership or visibility. “Identity politics”, therefore, is a way to comment on individualised essentialisms. To be guilty of identity politics in this negative sense is to fixate on representational diversity, lived experiences of oppression, and the recognition of multiple privileges, in ways that hinder meaningful and militant collective action.

Having outlined this negative framing of identity politics, it becomes clear that many on the Left do not regard it as a politics of the Left at all. This remains true, even as anti-identity politics discourse is often being driven by the Right, and its primary targets are racialised and gender-nonconforming comrades. In this essay, I will survey the major book-length commentaries on the topic of identity politics published in the US and UK over recent years². My effort is not only to summarise and clarify the critiques of identity politics that have been articulated by prominent voices on the Left, but to characterise the political challenge posed by its widely-touted death. Left discussions have, for several years, tended to be highly critical of identity politics, and worthwhile contributions to the discussion have been made from starkly different standpoints. But I have found that none of the extant material poses in an adequately concrete manner what it would mean to transcend, or move beyond, identity politics. Haunting this question is another closely related one, which is about the precise relationship between this neologism and the more familiar categories of Marxist analysis, such as “self-determination” and “subjectivism”. 

Ultimately, I argue that at the heart of the identity politics debate is the problem of universality, and that a meaningful discussion of universality on the Left must engage the crucial organisational challenge of constructing a mass party of communism. If, in the Leninist tradition, the party is the mechanism by which struggles become articulated together in a revolutionary program, and if communism is the universal movement toward freedom, then it is precisely in the radical Left that we find the real antithesis of identity politics.

Recovering radical universalism

Among the most sharply critical commentators on identity politics is Kenan Malik, an Observer columnist and scholar whose reputation rests on authoritative work published in the 1990s about the development of racial ideas in the modern world. Malik has made numerous subsequent interventions into debates about race and multiculturalism³. While Malik has a longstanding affiliation with the socialist Left, these commitments have for several decades been combined with a free-speech libertarianism that has taken controversial forms. Positioning himself as a supportive critic of the radical Left, he has repeatedly adopted talking points pushed by the Zionist and anti-trans lobbies⁴. Malik’s writing on trans rights, for instance, sees the issue as arising from a conflation (by trans rights activists, but peculiarly not by their cis opponents) of ‘identity’ with ‘existence’⁵. While his books focus on racial identity politics, and this is also where this discussion will focus, Malik’s wider writing on the theme illustrates that opposition to a politics of self-determination in one realm (anti-colonial nationalism) easily translates into others (gender self-identification).

Malik’s most recent book, Not So Black and White (published in 2023), presents a wide-ranging overview of race as a central justificatory logic for capitalist inequalities⁶. Framing the book as a reckoning with identity politics, Malik defines this not so much as a specific response to experiences of oppression, but as a type of relationship to individual identity that was first developed among white ruling-class defenders of racial hierarchy and has become dominant as a form of anti-racism since the 1960s. Opening the book with a discussion of Malik’s own experience as a British anti-racist activist in the late twentieth century, he laments that ‘contemporary politics’ is ‘circumscribed’ by personal identities. He longs instead for a Left that ‘breaks the shackles of identity’ in favour of a radical, solidaristic vision of human universality that he sees as having defined historical anti-racisms of the Left⁷. Malik’s core article of faith is that opposing racism necessarily requires that we refuse race: our political work must operate with rhetorical and ethical approaches that undo the divisive, particularist, and necessarily anti-universalist categorisations characteristic of racecraft. 

Malik’s effort to ground anti-racist politics in radical traditions of ethical universalism is an attractive one in many regards. He is clearly concerned to push against a still-potent attitude among iconoclastic Leftists who treat Marxism’s intellectual roots in the European Enlightenment as a mark of shame that needs only to be overcome. Instead, on Malik’s account, Enlightenment thought was an incubator of both deeply violent racisms and powerful, revolutionary anti-racist logics. So far so good. But Malik’s libertarianism leads him to stake rather too much on the rhetoric of universalism and proclaimed fealty to the radical Enlightenment tradition. His account of intellectual history institutes a somewhat rigid genealogy of Enlightenment influences: some of them (derived from German Romantics like Johann Herder) have led to particularist ideas about the essential character of national and racial groups, while others produced universalist visions of human freedom. Though he does acknowledge additional complexities, on numerous occasions Malik is forced to contort history to fit this scheme. 

Malik’s effort, for instance, to trace the emergence of an identity politics of the Left relies heavily on an ungenerous reading of the Black Power movement and its icon Malcolm X as, in some sense, Black Herderites. ‘The differences’, Malik argues, ‘between MLK and Malcolm X expressed the tension between universalist and identitarian perspectives.⁸’ X’s Black nationalism, according to Malik, advanced a particularistic approach to politics which – contrary to common perception – left a conservative political legacy in the form of a ‘racialized view of equality and identity’⁹. Malik regards Martin Luther King’s appeal to universal sensibilities, and his emphasis on cross-racial material concerns (poverty, war), as the more authentically radical stance, toward which X journeyed at the end of his life. Malcolm’s role as a nationalist leader was threatening to the radical universalist tradition. 

This is a rather selective understanding of these figures and the traditions of which they were a part. As scholars have attested, and Malik admits, these men ultimately shared far more common ground than a binary vision permits us to see¹⁰. Malik treats the mid-1960s turn to Black nationalism in the US as a totemic moment in which identity politics began to triumph on the Left, to the enduring detriment of its universal mission. But this history has come to be understood quite differently in most scholarship.

Malcolm X’s willingness to talk clearly and directly about white racism won him the opprobrium of respectable opinion (Black and white), but it was precisely this approach that made him dear to young and impoverished people of colour around the US and the wider world. X’s anti-universalist invective as a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam addressed the rank hypocrisy of white liberals and the hopeless conservatism of their Black apologists far more directly than King did with his morally potent sermons. The truth of X’s words resonated with people whom King couldn’t reach – but also, importantly, Malcolm’s message was appreciated by many who worked with King, including Rosa Parks¹¹. 

Historians have rejected the stark opposition of King and X, of the civil rights and Black Power movements, in ways that Malik pays lip service to even as his account revives those distinctions. For instance, while Malik admits to an evolution in X’s thought in the final year of his life, he doesn’t attend adequately to the apparent contradiction that X remained committed to Black-only organization even as he worked to embed a vigorous internationalist orientation among Black activists in the US. More starkly, X was the foremost figure working to reframe the Black freedom struggle in universalist terms as a problem not merely of civil rights (to be achieved by legal reform in the settler nation-state) but of human rights (guaranteed by still-young institutions of global governance, such as the UN, in which peoples of colour might form a majority)¹². This combination of a sustained Black nationalist politic with a thoroughgoing universalist ethic undoes the positioning of X’s politics as a divisively identitarian. 

Universalism was also a central element in Malcolm X’s political inheritance. His internationalist orientation remained embedded in the vanguard of the Black Power movement that exploded after his assassination¹³. Meanwhile, the much-touted antagonism between Black Power champions and their erstwhile white comrades has also been reinterpreted by scholars. Say Burgin, for instance, sees Black Power activists’ injunction that whites should ‘organize your own’ as a constructive effort at strategic reorientation in response to a crisis in the civil rights movement, rather than a divisive pivot away from the movement’s agenda¹⁴. The problem, in Burgin’s account, was often the hypersensitivity and wilful obliviousness of white activists, rather than the belligerence or particularism of Black Power advocates.

Much of Malik’s account of Leftist identity politics is built around a misguided imagining of this key historical episode, and it encapsulates the broader weaknesses of his book. Malik never seriously troubles the reader with the possibility that a particularistic identity politics might: 

• be responsive to real strategic and tactical dilemmas that emerge in the process of anti-racist struggle, especially given the trenchant reality of white racism and whites’ common disposition of fragility in the face of a militant Black politics;
• might be more politically effective in reaching and radicalising members of an oppressed and minoritised group; 
• might be reconcilable with – or even grounded in – a kind of radical universalism that meaningfully decentres white people by prioritising Third Worldist revolutionary alliances over interracial appeals made to workers and youth in the imperial core.

In the absence of such considerations, Malik’s effort to recover a radical Enlightenment tradition becomes a useful though limited contribution. It is a shortcoming that is not Malik’s alone, but is representative of a certain type of Leftist nostalgia for an apparently undifferentiated and harmonious movement that apparently flourished before the fragmentations of the late 1960s and the advent of neoliberal subjectivities. Such nostalgia makes rather more of interracial demonstrations in support of the Scottsboro youths, organised by Communists in the 1930s, than it does of seemingly identitarian episodes in the history of the Old Left. We might, for instance, name the Black Belt Thesis, by which the Communist movement sanctioned Black separatism as a democratic right, or the Yokinnen Show Trial, wherein the US Communist Party publicly investigated allegations of racism against a white comrade to illustrate the Party’s seriousness about fighting racial chauvinism¹⁵. Rather more can be said of Malik’s book, which additionally permits far too much legitimacy to the cynical claim that the Left has become tolerant of anti-semitism, and mangles critiques of whiteness that are widespread on the Left. 

As we shall see, Malik’s concern with the recovery of a language of universality is a commonplace one. Philosopher Todd McGowan, for instance, has been concerned to situate universality as the defining commitment of the Left, who he claims have always sought to realise the universality of rights that were merely proclaimed in the Enlightenment¹⁶. More prominently, thinkers grouped around Adolph Reed Jr. (among them are his historian progeny, Touré Reed, as well as the sociologist Cedric Johnson and the literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels) have, over the course of decades, marshalled rich arguments to attack what they see as anachronistic revivals of militant Black politics. Most potently, they have polemicised against ‘race reductionist’ interpretive frameworks in the social sciences¹⁷.

Their oeuvre has especially emphasised (as Malik also does) the ways that state violence and economic inequality that are frequently discussed in the US as racial disparities are in fact reflections of class power. This means that, though the major effort to confront police brutality in the US in the recent past was organised around a slogan about defending Black life, vulnerability to police violence is in fact shared among the multiracial working-class, and is highly differentiated among Black Americans according to their class status¹⁸. Of course, these commentators are right to observe that anti-racist politics manifest specific class perspectives, some of which work to obscure and diminish the stark reality of intraracial inequalities that exploded after twentieth-century civil rights victories. These movements cleared the way for a larger Black middle class and even modest levels of Black participation in the highest echelons of the US’s imperial power. When anti-racism flattens these stark differences to address an undifferentiated Black community, it certainly does operate as a mode of class conciliation.

Yet the more contentious argument made – indeed, foregrounded – in the writing of Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels (notably in the 2023 collection No Politics But Class Politics) is that, by addressing such problems in the grammar of race, they necessarily become mere debates about the proportionality of police violence across racial communities. On this account, anti-racist discourses do not merely introduce a danger (subsequently realised in mainstream discussions) that bourgeois politics might supplant socialist perspectives on racism. Instead, the pervasiveness of anti-racism itself is regarded as symptomatic of a specifically neoliberal style of politics. Quoth Reed: 

I’m increasingly convinced that […] the race line is itself a class line, one that is entirely consistent with the neoliberal redefinition of equality and democracy. […] Even the ‘left’ anti-racist line that we must fight both economic inequality and racial inequality, which seems always in practice to give priority to ‘fighting racism’ (often theorized as a necessary precondition for doing anything else), looks suspiciously like only another version of the evasive “we’ll come back for you” (after we do all the business-friendly stuff) politics that the Democrats have so successfully employed to avoid addressing economic injustice.¹⁹ 

Such critiques work rather more effectively when they are directed at liberal social scientists than they do as responses to police and prison abolitionists, whose political visions are stridently anti-neoliberal.

Reed might generously be assumed to be making his critique of identitarian Black politics from a classical Marxist standpoint that centres on irreconcilable class conflict. But the class focus of his commentary in fact dovetails with a social-democratic objection to more radical politics advanced by anti-racists²⁰. Reed was ‘a very visible Sanders supporter’ in 2016, and ‘Sanders’s universalism’ – defined, apparently, by ‘his focus on income and wealth inequality’ among US citizens – exemplifies the reformist strategic vision that in fact underpins the work of Reed and his co-thinkers²¹. 

We can see how Reed’s anti-identity politics argument works to legitimate rather than challenge bourgeois state power through his position on migration controls. Reed has substantially underplayed the racist and colonial character of immigration limits as merely administrative functions. Indeed, for Reed, ‘open immigration is a ruling class policy’²². His position is one which accepts the legitimacy of bourgeois state power when it regulates the entry of migratory workers, and is preoccupied with electoral dynamics in a way that accommodates conservative prejudices against the language of anti-racism. Reed’s is a critique of anti-racism that approximates more closely to the revisionist Right of European Marxism than to that movement’s revolutionary Left.

Reed has been at the forefront of an important, decades-long tradition of critique that has sought doggedly to draw attention to the reality that every anti-racism is at the same time a class politics. Yet, Reed’s own position vis-à-vis anti-racism does not represent a straightforwardly proletarian one. As Kim Moody has argued, the style of politics championed by Reed and his co-thinkers has valourised historical examples that substitute ‘the trade union bureaucracy for the working class in the practice of “building alliances”’.²³ Their return to class analytics is not at all equivalent to the championing of a militant, internationalist, class-against-class labour politics, but rather a hankering for the heyday of labour-liberal coalitions that advanced an ostensibly universalist social-democratic project at the expense of super-exploited workers in the Global South.

The appeals made by this school of Left-universalists is for a thoroughly anti-identitarian politics which, according to Reed’s account is in fact a symptom of neoliberal hegemony or, on Malik’s, an aping of the Enlightenment’s most reactionary figures. Both styles of criticism offer something of value. In Malik, there is a broadly agreeable account of race and nation in bourgeois intellectual history; in Reed, there is a welcome insistence on class politics and sociological rigour to situate race and class in their present constellation, rather than by analogic references to familiar histories and anti-racist heroes. They are nevertheless hobbled by significant intellectual failings and unprincipled compromises (especially on the question of nation-state power) as well as tendencies to misremember the historical Left as anti-identitarian and relentlessly majoritarian.

Identity politics reclaimed?

The strident anti-identity politics attitude adopted by Reed, Malik, and others is representative of a substantial contingent of Leftist thought in both the US and UK. Yet in many areas of life where the Left is strongest, this is not the kind of engagement with identity politics that has won the widest influence. Among the campus Left, for instance, intellectuals such as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò have popularised a different account of the origins of identity politics, which focuses on the term’s coining by the Combahee River Collective (a group of queer Black socialist-feminists) and the subsequent misappropriation of identity politics by diverse political forces. This general approach is shared among most of the texts discussed below, but for now we will focus our comments on Táíwò’s book, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), which is among the most widely read Leftist critiques of identity politics.

The introduction to Elite Capture offers a sympathetic gloss of the Combahee River Collective, whose origination of identity politics, Táíwò emphasises, was ‘supposed to be about fostering solidarity and collaboration’²⁴. It is notable, however, that Táíwò’s book shares one important premise with those previously discussed: that identity politics now represents a troubling political challenge to the socialist Left. Even as there is a significant distance between the respective views of Táíwò, Malik, and Reed, all of them take for granted the view that identity politics has become a source of confusion, vexation, and division.

For Táíwò, ‘elite capture’ is the key concept that can describe how identity politics has been transformed from a mechanism for radical solidarity-making into a divisive tool of ruling-class elites and an everyday mode of gestural anti-racism. Elite capture, he argues, is a commonplace social process, in which control and attention accrue to those who already enjoy various benefits (property, time, authority)²⁵. Táíwò generally avoids using Marxian sociological descriptors, such as ‘ruling class’, to understand elite capture. Instead, he regards it as a ‘system behaviour’, operative in all kinds of complex social organisms, and as such his discussion often avoids historical and sociological specificity to instead unravel how this process occurs in general²⁶. Táíwò sees identity politics, meanwhile,  as a mode of resistance to multiple modes of oppression that has undergone a process of elite capture: those who already possess significant resources relative to others in their resistance movements and communities have redefined emancipatory struggles around the extent of opportunity and authority that community elites enjoy. Táíwò makes this argument not by framing the beneficiaries and champions of identity politics as cynical or hostile, but as sincere and well-intentioned participants in emancipatory projects. 

Táíwò nevertheless finds the commonplace concerns and practices of contemporary anti-racism to be insufficient, especially targeting his critical gaze on practices of deference: that is, the conscious ceding of space in discussions, publications, and representational processes, to those who are understood to be members of an oppressed group. He argues instead for a ‘constructive politics’, which displaces concern with individuals’ taking up of space by foregrounding the need to engage, directly and collectively, with communities impacted by capitalism’s injustices. For Táíwò, the success of a progressive campaign ought not to be measured by the symbolic or representational visibility of, e.g., Black individuals, but by the achievement of meaningful and material collective goods for that community (e.g., the reconstruction of a safe water supply for residents in the mostly Black city of Flint, Michigan). Whereas ‘deference epistemology’ did nothing to alter ‘power asymmetries between the people and the imperial state system’, ‘constructive politics’ can ‘help make the game a little more competitive.²⁷’ 

To his credit then, Táíwò deals directly with political practice. He also draws from radical Black political traditions for his intellectual resources, and these are noticeably less US-centred than either Malik or Reed. The book includes fascinating discussions, for instance, of the Guyanese activist Andaiye and the Guinea-Bissauan revolutionary Lilica Boal. Táíwò’s work nevertheless grants a little too much grace to the forms of politics that it critiques. His sympathetic gloss on the Combahee River Collective rightly observes that these were activists committed to alliance-making, though he avoids discussing the organisational and philosophical bases on which the group were operating. 

The CRC sought to develop a radical politics not by starting with an appreciation of ‘objective’ social processes and structures of political economy, but from investigation into the particularity of its members’ lives and experiences. This approach proved fruitful for the development of more sophisticated and textured understandings of how multiple structures of domination are experienced simultaneously and can generate surprising political connections. But it markedly differs (and indeed conflicts) with the priority traditionally placed in communist organisations on an outward-looking and scientific analysis as the grounds for effective political work. In his memoir, the US Communist Party activist William Patterson reflected on his youthful response to systematic racism as having been excessively ‘subjective’, by which Patterson meant that his deep emotional response to discrimination and abuse ‘began to control my reaction to all social problems’²⁸. Patterson’s comment is reflective of what has been a commonplace view in communist movements, that the priority of subjective experience over systematic (dialectical) study of social problems will tend ultimately to undermine solidarities. Surely, those of us who identify (broadly) with Patterson’s politics ought to recognise the incompatibility between his critical view of the ‘subjective’ approach and the CRC’s centring of subaltern subjectivity as the firm basis for a radical politics. If we do so, the danger of an un-solidaristic identity politics can be identified as emerging from the same document that also seeks expansive alliances against domination. 

A more critical approach from Táíwò would also be beneficial in other regards. Táíwò quotes recent reflections from Barbara Smith, a member of the CRC, in which she identifies the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign as a good example of coalitional identity politics. The remark elicits no comment from Táíwò, despite widespread criticisms directed against Sanders for his triangulation on key anti-racist issues and his embeddedness in the imperialist Democratic Party²⁹. Overall, Táíwò does not linger in any critical or evaluative way on the CRC’s political and philosophical interventions, and instead pivots into an argument that their ‘identity politics’ has been the target of a commonplace and generic social phenomenon (‘elite capture’). The successful elite capture of identity politics seems to have little to do with the content either of the CRC’s ideas or with any specific mechanisms of capitalist rule in the US, such as the co-optation of progressive social movements by the pro-capitalist and imperialist Democratic party. Repeatedly, opportunities to clarify, critique, and possibly correct, the CRC’s political method are missed.

Similarly, Táíwò’s concept of elite capture and the abstract or metaphorical character of much of his discussion leaves little space for more concrete explanation of how identity politics works in the hands of the powerful. Instead of polemically exposing how identity politics have been incorporated as a central element in capitalist order, Táíwò dwells rather more on generic explanations for social conformity, which are approached via curious digressions. While he draws on Frantz Fanon and Amílcar Cabral in ways that point toward more polemical arguments, his book isn’t concerned with explaining how preoccupations with individual identity and representational practices have proven complementary to capitalist stabilisation since the mid-twentieth century. The increased reliance on indirect, neocolonial rule (by granting veneers of sovereignty and social equality to oppressed groups) might easily be understood as a concrete, historically significant example of elites capturing insurgent movements through changed representational practices. Yet it is left unexamined. Similarly, the individualised nature of identity politics might easily be interpreted and critiqued for reproducing the abstract character of capitalist domination. As representational diversity has increased – with much fanfare from identitarian quarters – structural inequalities can more easily be made to appear as the consequence of bad choices and harmful cultures. This fairly obvious route to a Marxist critique is also neglected. 

It is of course unfair to criticise Táíwò for not having written a different book than the one he has, and I recognise the danger here of doing so. The differences between Táíwò and I may, after all, be the disciplinary ones that divide a philosopher from a historian. Ultimately, too, Táíwò makes an effective and commendable argument about the need to move past ineffectual kinds of identity politics, while generously recognising the ways that one’s politics are necessarily shaped by individual experiences of suffering. But given his book’s status among the most celebrated and accessible Leftist critiques of identity politics over recent years, it is hard not to wish that he approached the topic more directly, and dwelled rather more on some key political points. 

My wish for a somewhat different approach extends, finally, to Táíwò’s closing comments, which offer a practical sense of what his argument means. Here, Táíwò calls on his readers to act politically in ways that certainly move beyond an individualised identity politics by contributing their labour to the building of mass organisations. Here, perhaps, is a crux. Táíwò spends much of the book in a metaphorical room. His concern is to redirect his readers from the question of who, in this room, is speaking, and to instead focus on the millions of oppressed people who are simply not present in the Left’s political spaces at all. Táíwò’s vision for engaging these masses hinges on the organisation and development of community campaigns, labour unions, renters’ unions, etc. Such organisations are, of course, good things that we need and which deserve to flourish. Is movement-building and mutual aid, though, the extent of our organisational agenda? Does the flourishing of these institutions adequately mitigate processes of elite capture, or the fragmenting effects of identity politics? These two issues – of organisational forms and of movement co-optation and fragmentation – are at the core of the whole Left debate on identity politics.

Finding the source of division

Regarding the notoriously fragmenting effects of identity politics, an essential intervention has been made by Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond in their book, Fractured: Race, Class, Gender and the Hatred of Identity Politics. While their work has been unfortunately neglected in North American discussions, it represents one of the most theoretically cogent and historically informed contributions available. The book’s more theoretical passages (concentrated in the early and final sections, and constituting the least valuable sections of the book) exclude it from enjoying as wide a readership as Táíwò’s, but for intellectually confident readers it represents an important resource. Charnley and Richmond reconfigure the discussion of identity politics by framing it as simply one moment in a long historical saga of class – and racial – formation. They recognise ‘the hypervisibility of a liberal multiracial public sphere’, and the ways that ‘Black political elites’, ‘corporate feminists’, and ‘queer/trans’ reactionaries ‘have used their historical identifications with progressive movements to cement their place in “hegemonic neoliberalism.”’³⁰ But the argument of Charnley and Richmond is that ‘the hatred of identity politics’ is the result of longstanding fractures in the British and American working class. The divisions thrown up by identity politics are, according to Charnley and Richmond, recapitulations of an old problem about how the proletariat can be constituted as a revolutionary subject, despite the psychic and material investments that many proletarians hold in racialised, gendered, and other, hierarchies.

Tracing the intellectual history of identity politics on the Left (like Táíwò, via the CRC and Black feminism), Charnley and Richmond emphasise that this formulation was an effort to reckon with the difficulty of class composition in the face of concrete, material stratifications. Their framing of the issue in these terms is aided by a series of rich historical discussions spanning the UK and US, which serve to illustrate the longstanding barriers to a universal class consciousness in both countries. More particularly, they demonstrate how the process of working-class composition across the Atlantic has unfolded in a complex entanglement with the concomitant formation of whiteness as a cross-class identity that sanctioned and delimited rights. ‘As long as there has been resistance and social movements against capitalism,’ they argue, ‘there have been political collectivities struggling to compose themselves as an identity of common interests.³¹’ This historical narrative drains the rosy nostalgia from commonplace attacks on identity politics as a source of unwarranted and unwelcome divisions. Instead, Charnley and Richmond situate identity politics as a response to the longstanding failure to constitute a universal revolutionary subject, which they present as an effect of racialised and gendered stratifications among the global proletariat. Whereas Adolph Reed Jr., et al, position anti-racism as a neoliberal politics designed to vacate class from political conversations, Charnley and Richmond locate anti-racist struggles as (still) indispensable requisites for the formation of a revolutionary movement in the imperial core. 

Their effort is welcome and necessary, though their reframing would benefit from a certain Reedian correction. That is to say, while various modes of chauvinism have certainly been salient impediments to class unity, Richmond and Charnley ultimately treat the present era as sociologically non-specific. The notion, for instance, that ‘white identity politics’ has been a constant reality of class struggles in capitalism is both a necessary corrective, and a flattening of conjunctural contours³². By historicising identity politics in relation to longer trajectories of class/racial formation, gendered hierarchies, and nationalist bordering, the authors largely ignore the specific mechanisms of bourgeois rule in the neoliberal era. Reed, Malik, and others, are correct to highlight that during the past 50 years, powerful elites and privileged intermediate layers have been consolidated from among colonised and racially minoritised populations thanks to the compromised victory of civil rights and anticolonial struggles in the twentieth century. This means that these populations have undergone an intense process of class stratification that has necessarily shaped the politics of antiracism. Such novel stratifications and mechanisms of co-optation, however, remain marginal to the account of political fragmentation in Fractured³³. Similarly, while Charnley and Richmond incorporate some criticisms of ostensibly anti-oppression practices and attitudes that have divisive or harmful effects (‘all about “me, myself and I”’), these only appear via quotations from the Black feminist authors of The Heart of the Race³⁴. Those criticisms are not developed by Charnley and Richmond toward any recognition of the ways that identitarian approaches to issues like racism have proven harmful over recent decades. Ultimately, the book reworks the discussion about identity politics in ways that are richly informed by transatlantic social histories, but which also tends to homogenise distinct eras, thereby muting constructive critiques of contemporary anti-racism.

In this regard, Fractured finds a surprisingly worthwhile companion piece in Minority Rule, the first book by Novara Media editor and Leftist TV commentator, Ash Sarkar. While Charnley and Richmond’s perspective is surely at odds with Sarkar’s, the difference between their respective approaches is a productive one. Charnley and Richmond’s Fractured foregrounds a dense scholarship that demonstrates how material stratifications of race and gender have been fundamental to the historical composition of the working class and its political organisations. They present this as the central reason for the failure to realise the working class as a universal emancipatory subject. Sarkar’s Minority Rule, on the other hand, is written to be an accessible political commentary, published by a major commercial press and firmly grounded in the cultural present, that treats identity politics as an ideological tool yielded over recent decades by the Left but wielded by the Right in ways that undermine class consciousness³⁵. In the conversation between these widely divergent prognoses can be found a fertile basis for understanding.

Sarkar proceeds from a critique of the culture on the Anglophone Left, which she sees as having been beset by three preoccupations: first, the purported ‘irreducible difference’ between identity groups; second, the often unspoken assumption that minority groups have ‘competing interests’; and third, ‘that lived experience is a form of unassailable political authority.³⁶’ Sarkar’s anecdotal evidence of this claim has caused some online commentators to regard it as merely a slanderous fiction, but the behaviours and tropes that Sarkar identifies will be recognisable to anyone who has been adjacent especially to the campus Left over the past decade. Direct and sharp criticism of the behaviours legitimated by these preoccupations is welcome and necessary. Nevertheless, her account is unclear about precisely how significant she sees these behaviours as being to an understanding of the Left’s recent defeats. For instance, while Sarkar’s opening chapter focuses on these unhelpful preoccupations, she later ridicules the notion that rhetoric about white privilege is a reason for the Left’s failure³⁷. If Sarkar regards the latter as untrue (and indeed laughable), it isn’t clear why the earlier, detailed commentary on the Left’s identitarian political culture was so necessary? 

Sarkar’s approach feels inconsistent in a second regard. The confected anti-Semitism scandal that wrecked the socialist leadership of the Labour Party in 2016-19 is surely the most notable example of a faux-victimisation campaign in modern Britain. It was also one in which Sarkar and her Novara Media colleagues played a harmful role as unaccountable media representatives of the movement, whose defences of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership nevertheless accepted the premises of the ‘scandal’³⁸. It is disappointing that Sarkar fails to acknowledge her organisation’s vulnerability to the same dishonest manoeuvres that she now sees so clearly, especially given her willingness to reflect frankly on her other past mistakes. 

Setting this absence aside, the divergent emphases in Fractured and Minority Rule leave an appealing space between, from which we can derive a healthy appreciation of what identity politics (and the hatred of it) has meant to the Left. From Charnley and Richmond, we find an effort to push back against the contemptuous and condescending dismissal of identity politics as the source of unwelcome division. In doing so, they make clear that the central story of intra-class division and political disarticulation in transatlantic labour movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is about the violent avowal of whiteness and heteropatriarchy to the exclusion of minoritised workers. Intra-class divisions, they correctly observe, have been grounded in real structures of inequality and violence that helped to define the working class in exclusive ways that still need reckoning with. Critics of identity politics have yet to demonstrate that their routes out of the mire of liberal identitarianism can produce a unified political force without making opportunist accommodations to imperial, racial, and gendered hierarchies.

Sarkar, whose media organisation has certainly given voice to such opportunist proposals, nevertheless sounds a necessary wake-up call that the Left’s reckoning with those structures of exclusion needs to be done better. Specifically, she insists that the Left dispense with individualised victim-narratives and over-investment in debates about perceived infractions against progressive sensibilities. In this regard, Sarkar’s prognosis bears comparison with that offered by Anton Jäger. In an article for Tribune, Jäger deploys the term ‘hyperpolitics’ to describe the mediatised politicisation of everyday life at the expense of meaningful struggles over resources and principles; in other words, the fighting of online culture wars instead of street-based class wars. Jäger’s hyperpolitics, like the identity politics that we find in Sarkar’s account, thrives in a relentlessly fast-paced digital attention economy, and can register victories in that field, though such victories prove to be empty given the attritional impact that this hyper-discursive mode of political struggle has on meaningful organising work³⁹. 

The divisive challenges facing the contemporary Left, then, are both those identified in the historical chapters of Fractured, and those described in Sarkar’s account of the culture war. Insofar as fractures and divisions within the class are approached – either for understanding or remedy – via the capitalist attention economy, the Left will find that the unity sought by everyone will be elusive. A more patient, reparative, and robustly analytical culture is required if anti-oppression politics are to be sustained beyond the digital hyperspace.

The unspoken problem

For all these valuable insights, the discussion on identity politics has yet to significantly improve upon the earliest offering in the wave of contemporary literature on the topic: Asad Haider’s 2018 Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology. Drawing on the collective work of the editors at Viewpoint magazine (notably, Salar Mohandesi’s essay ‘Identity Crisis’), Haider’s book constitutes a noble effort to combine theoretical erudition with autobiographical reflection and historical summary⁴⁰. In the space of a very short book, Haider draws on resources as diverse as Huey Newton and Catherine McKinnon to understand how a personalised and essentialised identity politics gained wide purchase on the Left. He cognises many of the key points developed in the later works that we have engaged above: the inadequacy of a ‘return’ to class that seeks to spurn race as an explanation of social inequality; the myopic and destructive consequences of treating identity as irreducible and essential, especially in organising contexts; and the ways that the original articulators of identity politics were seeking to address actual and meaningful barriers to unity. If one is to read only one work on identity politics, Haider’s is the best. This is not only because it combines intellectual sophistication with accessibility more effectively than any other, but because Haider’s conclusion ought – very urgently – to be our starting point.

Haider ends Mistaken Identity by emphasising the concrete possibility of achieving an ‘insurgent universality’ via ‘mass movement’. He argues that the challenge lies not in working through ‘the consolations of identity’ but in the practical discussion of ‘program, strategy, and tactics’.⁴¹ Here, uniquely, Haider comes close to making explicit a point that has been obscured in all the other books on identity politics: that ‘universality’ for Marxists has traditionally not been treated as a specific rhetorical mode (e.g. that dispenses with talk of race to instead focus on class), or a philosophical commitment that is betrayed by revolutionary nationalisms, but as an organisational and practical challenge. The articulation and organisation of universality as a programme of action is the central contribution that Marxists ought to make to the working-class movement.

In the foundational document of modern communism, Marx and Engels define the role of communists thus: to ‘point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality’, and ‘always and everywhere [to] represent the interests of the movement as a whole⁴²’. If we are to remember this most basic document of our movement, we recognise that it is by articulating diverse social forces into a programmatic unity that we become communists. If identity politics is a mode of atomization specific to post-Fordism that works to disunite (or in theoretical terms, disarticulate) the social forces for revolution, then its antidote must be found in the revolutionary party. Such a party cannot simply be proclaimed by a handful of dedicated people, but nor does it automatically emerge from the inevitable waves of class struggle; it must be actively forged from the movements of the revolutionary class. Without the mass revolutionary party as our organisational horizon, talk of universality remains merely abstract and can never escape its liberal roots. 

On this point, we can return to Táíwò’s Elite Capture. Like Haider, Táíwò closes his book by focusing on how we might win real victories as part of mass organisations. The injunction to act, and to do so collectively, is refreshing and necessary, though the difficulty with Táíwò’s conclusion is that it treats movement-building as itself equivalent to the realisation of a concrete universality. This is also the average political position in the magazine of Black radical politics that Táíwò co-edits, Hammer & Hope. Haider’s work at his own publication, Viewpoint, meanwhile, persistently sought to theorise the universal as a politics that emerges out of movement activism, in a form that he identified as the party. 

It is a longstanding truism of Leninist theory that labour unions, renter unions, and community campaigns are not, in themselves, universalising, but sectoral and partial. The more limited preoccupation with the health of these organisations of practical struggle was a characteristic of the liberal-reformist ‘Economists’, against whom Lenin polemicised in What is to be Done?⁴³. Since this famous polemic, it has been a common understanding among Marxists that the existence of mass organisations was requisite, but not at all adequate, to realise the unity of the class. While the revival of mass organisations of the working-class would certainly, in our present conditions, be an important blow to the kinds of atomisation that afflict us, it is an indispensable truth that such forms of collectivity are not equivalent to, or substitutes for, the organisation of the working class as a revolutionary subject. 

The eminently practical character of Lenin’s radical universalism is worth quoting here: ‘the “first attempt” of the Russian Social-Democrats […] strove to unite the strike movement with the revolutionary movement against the autocracy, and to win all the victims of oppression and political and reactionary obscurantism over to the side of Social-Democracy.⁴⁴’ Lenin’s understanding was one which clearly differentiated between economic struggles conducted by sectoral organisations and the specifically communist mission of organising a universal political subject against capital. The lack of such a distinction in works like Táíwò’s book risks obscuring the horizon of revolutionary rupture itself. Revolutionary socialist politics cannot be deferred to a point after the achievement of a defensive infrastructure of unions and mutual aid groups. They must be integral to these institutions.

Additionally, if our concern is to guard against elite capture, the articulation of a common program and strategy for all progressive insurgent forces is surely an important aspect of this task. Precisely because they are partial and sectoral campaigns, unions and similar organs of class power tend to make accommodations to state and capital to win victories. This (quite specific, capitalistic) kind of elite capture is often closely related to the identitarian problem addressed by Táíwò, as the officials within those organisations are treated by the state as representatives for their social group at the expense of meaningful, bottom-up, and member-led control. Bureaucratised and tamed organisations are ripe for the kinds of depoliticised and reductive identitarian conversations that seemingly the whole Left recognises as problematic. Indeed, anyone who has spent a great deal of time in a trade union in recent decades has likely witnessed how an identitarian politics of representation and inclusion can be manipulated to oppose mass, militant action. While a mass party is certainly subject to similar pressures as these other kinds of combat organisations, its extensive program for social transformation, reliance on high rates of member involvement, and regime of political education, would make such co-optations more difficult.

To be clear, my argument is not that the divisions being addressed in the literature on identity politics can simply be wished away or overcome by proclaiming a revolutionary party.  Rather, that the practical transcendence of identity politics requires the articulation of mass struggles through the party form, and the failure to clarify this point is an important limitation of nearly every major publication on the topic. While each of the writers discussed here are clearly aligned to a Leftist emancipatory project, and their books celebrate historical Marxists, none define clearly and convincingly what kind of politics (organisation, program, strategy, tactics) can usurp the identitarian ones that all seem to recognise are insufficient. To have a constructive discussion about the Left’s future and its universal mission, participants ought to define where they stand, to what they aspire, and which organisational forms they consider necessary to achieve it.

This essay was completed shortly before the tragic passing of one of its subjects, Asad Haider. I had hoped to share the piece with him, having enjoyed his gracious encouragement with a previous essay. Instead, I shall note only that Haider’s writing is an essential archive of contemporary Marxist thought. I dedicate this essay to his memory, and hope that it helps to sustain interest in Haider’s work.

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1.  A somewhat representative sampling of these arguments being made across the political spectrum: Richard Seymour, ‘Identity Politics is Dead, and the Far-Right Knows It’, Novara Media, 30 December 2024, https://novaramedia.com/2024/12/30/identity-politics-is-dead-and-the-far-right-knows-it/; Liza Featherstone, ‘All That Remains of Neoliberal Identity Politics is Fascism’, Jacobin, 31 December 2024, https://jacobin.com/2024/10/all-that-remains-of-neoliberal-identity-politics-is-fascism; Nick Brancaccio, ‘A Broken Worldview: Identity Politics at a Dead End’, CommunistsUSA.org, 27 January 2025, https://communistusa.org/a-broken-worldview-identity-politics-at-a-dead-end/;  Conor Friedersdorf, ‘How to Move On From the Worst of Identity Politics’, The Atlantic,15 December, 2024, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/democrats-election-loss-identity/680993/; ‘Are We Witnessing the Death of Identity Politics’, National Center for Public Policy Research, 16 October 2024, https://nationalcenter.org/ncppr/2024/10/16/are-we-witnessing-the-death-of-identity-politics/; Thomas Chatterton Williams, ‘Identity Politics Loses Its Power’, American Enterprise Institute, 1 August 2024, https://www.aei.org/op-eds/identity-politics-loses-its-power/.  ↩︎
2.  The focus is on books published between 2018 and 2025. ↩︎
3.  Kenan Malik, The Meaning of Race: Race, History and Culture in Western Society (Macmillan, 1996). ↩︎
4.  Kenan Malik, ‘The British Left’s Jewish Problem’, The International New York Times, 3 May 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/opinion/the-british-lefts-jewish-problem.html; Kenan Malik, ‘If you defend free speech, you must defend it all and not silence those you disagree with’, The Guardian, 28 May 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/28/defence-of-free-speech-should-not-depend-whose-side-you-take-in-culture-wars. Both articles are also available, unpaywalled, on Malik’s website. ↩︎
5.  Kenan Malik, ‘Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie captures the hypocrisies of too many ‘social justice’ zealots’, The Guardian, 20 June 2021, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/20/chimamanda-ngozi-adichie-captures-hypocrisies-too-many-social-justice-zealots. ↩︎
6.  Kenan Malik, Not So Black and White (Hurst, 2023). ↩︎
7.  Malik, Not So Black and White, p. 2. ↩︎
8.  Malik, Not So Black and White, pp. 284, 271. ↩︎
9.  Malik, Not So Black and White, p. 278. ↩︎
10.  Most notably, Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (Basic, 2020). ↩︎
11.  See Jeanne Theoharis, ‘“A Life History of Being Rebellious”: The Radicalism of Rosa Parks’, in Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed by Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, and Dayo F. Gore (NYU Press, 2009) 139-164 (p. 140). ↩︎
12.  See Roderick Bush, The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (Temple UP, 2009) chapter 6. ↩︎
13. Sean L. Malloy, Out of Oakland: Black Panther Party Internationalism during the Cold War (Cornell UP, 2017). ↩︎
14.  Say Burgin, Organizing Your Own: The White Fight for Black Power in Detroit (NYU Press, 2024). ↩︎
15.  See Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (UP of Mississippi, 1998). ↩︎
16.  Todd McGowan, Universality and Identity Politics (Columbia UP, 2020). ↩︎
17. Touré Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (Verso, 2020); Cedric Johnson, ‘The Panthers Can’t Save Us Now’, Catalyst, 1:1 (Spring 2017), https://catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/panthers-cant-save-us-cedric-johnson; Adolph Reed and Walter Benn Michaels, No Politics But Class Politics, ed by Anton Jäger and Daniel Zamora (Eris, 2023). ↩︎
18. See the arguments in Malik, pp. 291-296. ↩︎
19. Adolph Reed, ‘The Limits of Anti-Racism’, in No Politics But Class Politics, ed. by Anton Jager and Daniel Zamora (Eris Press, 2022) pp. 51-52. This essay was originally published in 2009. ↩︎
20. One of Reed’s political models is the anti-Communist, socialist Democrat Bayard Rustin. See Adolph Reed Jr., ‘Bayard Rustin: The Panthers Couldn’t Save Us Then Either’, Nonsite, 8 January 2023, https://nonsite.org/bayard-rustin-the-panthers-couldnt-save-us-then-either/. ↩︎
21. Walter Benn Michaels, ‘Interview One, 27 May 2021’, in No Politics But Class Politics, ed, by Anton Jager and Daniel Zamora (Eris Press, 2022), p. 255. ↩︎
22. Adolph Reed, ‘A Response to “Immigration, African Americans, and Race Discourse”’, New Labor Forum 15:1 (2006) 59-61 (p. 59). ↩︎
23. Kim Moody, ‘Cedric Robinson and the Other Sixties Nostalgia’, New Politics, 1 March 2019, https://newpol.org/cedric-johnson-and-the-other-sixties-nostalgia/. ↩︎
24. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (London: Pluto, 2022) p. 6. ↩︎
25. Táíwò, pp. 22-23. ↩︎
26. Táíwò, p. 10. ↩︎
27. Táíwò, pp. 107. ↩︎
28. William L. Patterson, The Man Who Cried Genocide: An Autobiography (International Publishers, 1971) p. 32. ↩︎
29. Táíwò, p. 8. ↩︎
30. Michael Richmond and Alex Charnley, Fractured: Race, Class, Gender, and the Hatred of Identity Politics (Pluto, 2022) p. 5. ↩︎
31. Charnley and Richmond, p. 41. ↩︎
32. Charnley and Richmond, p. 41. ↩︎
33. We might generously presume that this neglect is an effect of the authors’ sensitivity to their own positionality as white commentators, who may therefore feel less assured of presenting such critiques. I would nevertheless argue that any adequate explanation of identity politics – its appeal and its pitfalls – has to reckon in some substantial way with class stratification among minoritised groups. ↩︎
34. Charnley and Richmond, pp. 213-215. ↩︎
35. Her perspective seems to be very similar to Táíwò’s, though her criticisms of identity politics are much more direct. ↩︎
36. Ash Sarkar, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War (Bloomsbury, 2025) p. 32. ↩︎
37. Sarkar, p. 196. ↩︎
38.  See, for instance, this clip. ↩︎
39. Anton Jäger, ‘How the World Went from Post-politics to Hyper-politics’, Tribune, 3 January 2022, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2022/01/from-post-politics-to-hyper-politics. ↩︎
40.  Salar Mohandesi, ‘Identity Crisis’, Viewpoint, 16 March, 2017, https://viewpointmag.com/2017/03/16/identity-crisis/; Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology (Verso, 2018). ↩︎
41. Haider, p. 114. ↩︎
42.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin, 2002), p. 234. ↩︎
43.  Lenin’s dismissive regard for ‘trade union consciousness’ has been subject to frequent critique, but the argument he made was a compelling one about the political and theoretical, as well as practical or economic, tasks of revolutionary organization.  V.I. Lenin, Essential Works of Lenin: What is to be Done and Other Writings, ed. by Henry M. Christman (Dover, 1987) p. 74. ↩︎
44. Lenin, p. 76. ↩︎

Owen Walsh