The class reductionist perspective is Orwellian. The reality we inhabit is radically absurd and deceptive.

We have two warring camps of a culture war, both entirely compromised by capital.

On the Right, you have total open and outright bigots, but if anyone calls them on it, they will continually deny the very open and unmistakable bigotry they practice.

Strangely, the Left is similar. On the Left, everyone claims to practice diversity (which the Right also claims), but in reality practice the most vicious reverse bigotry, continually deployed to uphold various bullshit organizational hierarchies. Again, if you bring this up to any leftist, they will rabidly deny it, despite it being the obvious reality.

The Left and the Right are not equivalent, we are told. We are told we are drawing a false equivalency.

Yes and no. Sometimes life is black and white, other times it’s gray.

When picking lesser evils, the Left is preferable to the Right. It’s true the Left sides with the identities which are oppressed. But it is not the same to say that the Right sides with the identities which are the oppressor. The wealth gap between white and nonwhite is smaller than the wealth gap between the rich and the majority.

But this, even still, is not really the real debate.

It is evident, after continuous practice, that class struggle tends to create inter-demographic harmony, while “intersectionality,” based intrinsically on everything that makes us different, tends to rip us apart into warring tribal camps. This explains the paradox of Bernie’s deceptive “centrist” vibe of unity.

Everyone denies the way identity splits the class into various us-versus-them dichotomies, which are directly obstructive to the cross-demographic unity needed. Whatever our best intentions may be, by even bringing up identity, we end up inflaming people’s worst divisions every time. Intersectionality is a Chinese finger trap, a paradox where the harder you pursue it, the more backlash you generate.

However, most of the Left rabidly deny that identity politics always ends up taking up all the air in the room (dropping the occasional class slogan for deniability) and making every debate as ugly as possible.

Most of the Left denies the way that identity politics ends up consuming virtually all of the organizing discussion, time, and space in the anticapitalist Left.

They deny doing the very thing which they themselves practice.

The horror. This is the existential Orwellian grit: realizing you live in a society of universal deception, every word from every mouth a lie. Are they lying? Deceived? In denial? All three?

We all despise identity politics but so few of us come out and say it.

Why has this happened?

It seems some sort of mass delusion has taken hold. We have the theory to explain it. Marxists call it false consciousness.

I am not convinced by the idea that all identitarians are middle class. Certainly some, but not all. I have met so very many extremely rabid identitarians among the working class.

What matters is the effect an idea has on the strength of the class in winning material improvements.

If identity politics is obstructive to the class gaining material improvements, whereas class politics is assistive to the class gaining material improvements, then class reductionism seems appropriate.

But we live in some kind of nightmare timeline, where “class reductionism,” the very term that coheres the ultimately sole reasonable perspective on the political spectrum, was begun as an epithet.

We are existentialists because we look at reality in a completely decontextualized way, free of the preconceptions obligated on us by conventional morality or group loyalty. Our beliefs constantly lose us friends and we keep believing them anyway.

We are existentialists because we are material political actors and organizers, confronting the bizarre realities we are forced to face in anticapitalist organizations which no one outside would even believe. We are those brave enough to admit that the reality people speak of in coalitions is entirely different from what is practiced, that the culture of denial is intense, and the disconnect from reality is wide. We continually battle off disruption from the most vicious identitarian attacks in our organizations, but are expected to fight with our hands tied behind our backs against these attacks, because they are supposedly done in the name of the oppressed. We are expected to deny the problem exists, or minimize the impact of the continual disruption.

We claim to represent the working class, while creating environments where the behavior expectations are so artificial and removed from standard behavior, as to prevent organizations from ever attaining mass character. We are supposed to somehow wage a socialist revolution to save the planet from imminent climate irreversibility, while having to tiptoe around the glaring contradictions obstructing us.

We will no longer take seriously the Orwellian doublethink that we are ethically obligated to tolerate an identity politics that disrupts redistributive organizing, in the name of the oppressed, when redistribution is the precise thing that most benefits the oppressed. No more indulging sabotage.

We are existentialists because you are not really allowed to say these things in most sectors of the anticapitalist Left, despite their plain obviousness. You are also not allowed to say that you’re not allowed to say it, despite the plain obviousness of that as well. We must navigate the existential social bizarreness of having a Left that can’t attain self-awareness of its own behavior, which can’t admit to itself its own reality, its own repressed desire.

Our task is to shatter the spiral of silence.