Waves come and go. The USA had extremely strong class consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1960s and 1970s the Left was entirely defined by identity politics to the point that we almost don’t even know the Left by any other definition; to think of the Left as something involving class struggle is something that we have to do by referring to history books. This is atrocious.

It’s important to keep in mind that it’s a product of capitalist development. After the USA won World War II, the USA became a hyper-abundant capitalist society. Capitalism completely restructured every aspect of life in the USA to the point of literally planning the development of towns, home living space, consumer products, and popular media in a process we now call a facet of neoliberalism. Capital paved over anything remaining traditional, colonial, indigenous, European, local, or communitarian. Identity politics and the Left of the 1960s has to be understood as an outgrowth of this. It privileges token individuals and specific identities over collective struggle and general conditions. It is the politics of plastic liberal capitalist America.

The 1930s to the 1960s is not the only example of class politics backsliding into identity politics. There are two smaller examples from more recent history and memory.

The post-Recession political culture/dialogue and Occupy Wall Street were the assertion of a new class consciousness. The reimposition of the intersectionality obsession during Occupy was the imposition of the old capitalist politics, ie a reaction, a restoration. The rise of the Social Justice Warrior since Occupy was a reaction back towards 1960s New Left, against the improvement that was the class struggle politics of the initial Occupy Wall Street, “we are the 99%” concept.

In the same way, the 2016 general presidential election’s identity politics was a step back from the Democratic primary’s class politics dominated by Bernie Sanders’ working class economic issues.

This is always a repeating pattern. Civil society in capitalist America has been reductively identitarian since the 1960s. The class struggle Left struggles against capitalist civil society to establish a class politics during temporary upsurges. Dominant capitalist culture then reasserts its dominance to reimpose tokenistic identity politics in order to serve as an attack on the working class.

The Left has continuously made the mistake of thinking that some form of identity politics is compatible with the Leftist class struggle project. Instead this always transforms into the same reductive tokenism as is utilized by the capitalist political system and ends up aligning with that structure.

The goal should always be an identity-neutral equality centered in class politics, and never an acceptance of identity politics. We want class struggle with racial equality and gender equality. It’s hard for the Left to admit that the Left now harbors a huge amount of what is called “reverse” racist, sexist, heterophobic, etc. attitudes. Non-urban, sometimes white, sometimes Christian voters are regularly spoken of as if they are idiotic scum instead of some of the most reliable potential socialists. Whenever this is brought up it is met with massive denial, and the very people who most practice it the most deny it the hardest, suggesting that there is either dishonesty occurring or that they are in denial to themselves.

It’s also hard for the Left to admit that the working class has a broad spectrum of cultural attitudes and we need to connect to the entire working class on economic issues, not just the left-most section of the working class on our purity litmus test of social issues.

Does this seem ridiculous? Why does it have to be an either-or? Isn’t it positive when all issues are discussed simultaneously? Can’t we have class and identity? In reality that isn’t how political dialogue works. During Occupy, for example, identity was used to completely drown out the original class struggle message of the movement. Clinton’s empty “vote for me because I’m a woman” was also a transparent hollowing out of the class content of the explosive class message of the Democratic primary. Coexistence would be nice if it were possible, but the identitarians are usually viciously reductionist, utterly drowning out any competing message, completely taking up the entire space, and take no substantive position on forging a general working class politics.

In the face of the fact that it is in reality economics which is the primary determining force in society – it is actually not race or gender, it is actually the division of the world into billionaires and everyone else, divisions within countries over wealth, which are the strategic issue which can disentangle the global log jam of social issues – that class deserves at least some space, but the identitarians don’t allow it to have any space at all. This is because they don’t represent a politics friendly to the working class. They knowingly or not serve a hostile class politics.

At all times, we must remember that to be class-centric is different than being class-reductionist, and being class-centric is the vital key to succeeding at everything in our movement.