Postmodern identity politics will not solve the crises of capitalism: a reply to my critics in the Socialist Workers Party

An article by Judy Cox titled “Class Struggle and Identity Politics in the Era of Trump” was published in issue 186 of International Socialism.1 Although not presented as a book review, the text has, as one of its main purposes, the refutation of my views of the class and identity debate as presented in Class Struggle and Ientity Politics: A Guide (CS&IP).2 Regarding my book, Cox’s article is full of errors, disingenuous misdirection and disinformation. Anyone who has read my book can appreciate this much. It was also mentioned by Socialist Workers Party (SWP) member Esme Choonara during a presentation at Marxism 2025 on the subject of “Marxism vs Identity Politics,” which was posted on the SWP TV YouTube channel in August 2025. In her lecture—whose overall line of argument I share—Choonara says that my work should be rejected along with the views of others who believe that the left’s emphasis on identity has caused the rise of the far right. Both leave me to worry that socialist comrades are being biased against my work. I appreciate the opportunity to publish this reply in International Socialism, noting that a more detailed version of my response has been published elsewhere.

To briefly touch on Choonara’s presentation, I would never say that the left’s emphasis on identity politics has “caused” the rise of the far right. Not only is this blunt formulation mechanistic, but it is also not the way I conceive the problem. The question I ask is whether postmodern versions of identity politics strengthen the left. If so, why? If not, why not? Although one’s conclusions are important, so are the arguments given. It is these arguments that must be addressed if they are to be refuted. On the other hand, much of what Cox’s article does is ignore those aspects of Marxist historical materialism that we share, pretending to correct me on issues that are, in fact, addressed in my book. The effect of Cox’s article is to obfuscate rather than clarify the Marxist understanding and critique of postwar identity politics.

Although my response in this forum will not address sectarian disputes, there are political reasons why Cox may have chosen to misrepresent my work. With this preamble, I advise comrades that if they wish to know my views, they should not rely on anything Cox has written about IP. 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. Hence, the least we could say is that it is not a book review. Note that nowhere in my work have I ever opposed Marxism to identity politics but instead have provided a Marxist critique of its most nefarious manifestations. Having said that, the most pertinent aspect of Cox’s article is the question of whether the second Donald Trump administration, or the advance of far-right parties and movements worldwide, signals the death knell of so-called “wokeism” or simply gives cause to those with which we could associate that term to double down on it.

Is “left” wokeism to blame for Trump 2.0?

One of Cox’s concerns is the reasons why Trump was re-elected. On this subject, she could have mentioned my book Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism, which investigates the debates around class and identity that marked Bernie Sanders’ two presidential nomination campaigns. Here, I never frame the question in such a way as to suggest that identity politics caused or did not cause his campaign to fail. The introduction nevertheless makes two assertions that are relevant to our discussion: First, I write that “identity politics is increasingly an anti-left politics of the middle class, whose petty-bourgeois ideology is now distributed across all social classes” and second, “leftists and liberal progressives must cease accepting the failures of neoliberalism by taking refuge in the real and imagined threat of right-wing authoritarianism”.3 Key to that analysis, as well as my arguments in Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation, is Nancy Fraser’s concept of “progressive neoliberalism”, which refers to the combination of White House, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Pentagon interests with such phenomena as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, wokeism and wokewashing, cancel culture and sensitivity training, which were incubated in postmodern academia and have found applications in institutional, business, government and mass media protocols.4 Although the George Floyd Protests had a significant impact on the 2020 elections, the unpopularity of woke excess with voters led democratic socialists in particular to call for a left populist agenda focused on universal issues like a liveable wage, job protections, public services and more free time. With regard to race issues, Adolph Reed Jr has repeatedly called on racialist critics of such universal policies, including Kimberlé Crenshaw, to explain just how it is that these programmes do not meet the needs of a black agenda.

Given the fact that the far right is not being met with communist internationalism but the only kind of left we have today—which is a postmodern left with liberal plus identitarian/nationalist characteristics—the belief in the inevitability of far-right politics in left circles leads to a persistence in the belief that identity politics is an entry point into radical politics. An example of this can be found in Oprah Winfrey’s speech at the 2024 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 Make America Great Again (MAGA) notion of a golden age of white supremacy, robber barons and Rooseveltian imperialism.5 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 New Democrat establishment that pushed 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.6

Despite the momentous rise of (black) civil rights, second wave feminism and gay liberation in the United States—all of these not unrelated to the existence of the Soviet Union as well as postwar consumer prosperity—the “cultural turn” in postmodern academia since the 1960s and 1970s has led to forms of anti-Marxism, anti-universalism and anti-normativity within, firstly, activist circles, and later, through the emphasis on diversity in media, business, government and education. These “third” and “fourth wave” agendas, which are intellectually based in political relativism and philosophical nihilism—phenomenology, semiology, discourse theory, radical democracy, deconstruction, schizanalysis, autonomist Marxism, post-feminism, racialism, queer theory, intersectionality, decoloniality, privilege theory, post-humanism and new materialisms—suggest that pragmatic progress can be made in the realm of identity politics, whereas class struggle suffers one defeat after another. Readers may not know what these academic trends are, but intellectuals and activists on the new social movement left certainly do, and it is this disconnect between the elite sectors of the liberal left and the broader public that the right exploits with bogeyman terms like “cultural Marxism”.

The ruling class benefits from identitarian culture wars as much as it does from labour exploitation. 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 wing of the ruling class instigates labour struggle. They prevent working-class opposition from developing, co-opt or destroy its leadership, sabotage its means of organisation and use government power to send strikers back to work.

Central to this discussion is the significance of universal rights principles, equality and freedom, which the right arrogates to itself while refusing to live up to its demands, and which the post-left rejects on the suspicion that every claim to universalism perniciously masks specific interests. Every Marxist philosopher understands that universal and particular are not simply opposed but that universality is the common terrain within which different particulars contend. The question is not which identity group wields power but what universality will mediate interests—a capitalist universality or a socialist universality. Since we have a global capitalist universality at present, socialism appears as a form of emancipatory universality, a claim on a future that does not yet exist. Identity, which is based on ontology rather than specific political commitments, refers to a reality that already exists and over which people for the most part have little power. In his writings on fascism, Leon Trotsky rejected the identity politics of the fascist right as a form of “zoological materialism”.7 The same could be said about today’s race reductionism or the body politics of performativity theory feminism. 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 make identity the basis of their politics to understand.

Today’s professionals, academics and journalists are socialist to the extent that they are sometimes part of unions that are now deeply invested in DEI advocacy, which has little bearing on the forces that weaken them and in fact contributes to their own inefficiency as well as union busting efforts. At the level of representational politics, Vivek Chibber argues that 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.8 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 Republicans. In 2016, this included a notable increase among LGBT+ voters. In 2024, the Democrats’ lead with non-college educated voters shrank (down to 33 percent from Biden), as did the Latino vote (from 71 percent in 2008 to 53 percent in 2024). As Chibber concludes, 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.

Cox asserts that the second election victory of Trump has “dealt a severe blow to the idea that people see politics through the prism of identity”.9 According to Touré Reed, the electoral failure of Kamala Harris led many among Democratic Party supporters to argue that racism explains the second Trump victory. Other explanations 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, the failure to protect rights, Obama-style bootstrap moralism, anger over persistent racial disparities and flyover avoidance of regions hard-hit by decades of austerity.10 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.

Whereas Cox 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 capitalise on the association between DEI policies and neoliberal centrism, Reed affirms the emphasis on universal policies as the best policy orientation.11 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 neoliberals, the political right and the broad liberal left to conflate identity with politics. What is needed instead is an approach that politically articulates questions of identity to social class and to political economy. This does not ignore questions of nationality, religion, gender, race, 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 paradigms. Rather than ignore the construct of “race,” Reed calls for a materialist analysis of how “race” helps to ideologise contradictions by harmonising with late capitalism.

Today’s neoliberal parties of the centre-right are perceived as having the same capitalist agenda as the neoliberal parties of the far right. The only visible difference is between rhetorical anti-racism and demagogic racism—both used as strategies to divide the working majority. However, unlike the neoliberal technocrats, Trump represents a return of the repressed dimension of politics. 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. However, this strategy weakens class politics to the extent that these movements are not organisationally anti-capitalist. According to Slavoj Žižek, many who voted for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) at the local level voted for Trump at the federal level.12 This is because AOC and Trump appear to voters as people whose speech is not calculated and cautious. Instead, they seem to be unafraid to disturb the conventions of respectability and decorum.

Žižek insists that ideological jouissance explains Trumpism only so much. Trump is a cynic who openly displays his dishonesty as a form of honesty. Cox writes 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 bending to Trump and catering to his demands that they root out these programmes. Democrats, she argues, 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” but that they are the only probable alternative in the existing bipartisan setup.13 The further problem is not “frustration” with “top-down identity politics” as represented by diverse faces in high places.14 Neoliberalism is not a form of identity politics. Neoliberalism is a form of politics that wields identity to political ends. 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. A significant difference between AOC wokeism and Trump demagogy is the fact that the MAGA scapegoat is the liberal middle-class elite. The scapegoat of woke professionals, which is indeed a middle-class agenda, is the intolerant, blue-collar, nostalgic, beer-drinking, white, cishetero, working-class male—a stereotype that is served up by Cox.

Refutation of Cox’s claims

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 discussing this aspect of my work, Cox and I are simply not on the same page. I have not only addressed these issues in countless ways in CS&IP but also in my other books and essays, none of which are mentioned by Cox. 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 wrong. The reversal of fortunes of wokeism 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. Belief in the end of ideology and of revolutionary class struggle within the academic sector became more programmatic 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. The first approach is to respond to Trump’s re-election by defending the political centre and denouncing Trump supporters as bigots, anticipating a return to normal. 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”.15 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” wing of the Democratic Socialists of America, for example, as well as the editorial departments of Jacobin and Catalyst. The views of people associated with this tendency are presented in the part of CS&IP dedicated to this segment of the political spectrum, which I contrast to the views discussed in the sections “Fascism and Conservatism”, “Liberalism and Neoliberalism”, “Anarchism”, and “Postmodernism”. My own position comes closest to the work of those authors who are discussed in “Socialism and Communism”. 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 and Friedrich Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.16

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 organisation, the Centre for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), whose analysis, I argue, does exactly what Cox describes as the second option.17 I write in that text that the economic issues the CWCP emphasises 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.

Another related text is my critique of the Fighting Oligarchy tour led by Sanders and AOC, which addresses the anti-wokeism response of a pro-Democrat neoliberal think tank called Third Way to the first raft of Trump executive orders and cuts to federal administrations, recommending that the party re-brand itself along Republican lines (for instance, by highlighting dreams of economic success rather than reflecting worry about stagnant wages and high prices).18 My article considers how this strategy revisits the autonomisation of middle-class politics 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 lifestyle identitarianism.

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 criticise identity politics from a left position have made important contributions to the struggles that have taken place since the years after Occupy Wall Street (OWS)—a period that, it is worth noting, is the primary focus of CS&IP. It is this post-OWS era that has seen the rise of Black Lives Matter, 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 so-called great awokening that the Combahee River Collective and Crenshaw became common coin on the so-called woke left and the short-lived surge of universalist macropolics was denounced as reductionist and nostalgic, if not masculinist, phallogocentric, white supremacist and cishetero-patriarchal.

A few years down the post-OWS road, as Trump played his 1776 whitewash against the equally tendentious, and equally wrong 1619 Project, a smattering of left voices, derided by David Roediger as “class splainers”, challenged the postmodern left by offering a principled critique of wokeism from the universalist left.19 I sought to bring the best of these together in the edited volume Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism, 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.20 The original table of contents included David Walsh, the arts editor of the World Socialist Web Site. I can list approximately 30 more leftist intellectuals whose work combines universalism with emancipation. In contrast, almost all the research that is published today on the class and identity debate falls within petty-bourgeois, liberal-left and postmodern parameters. Many historical materialists seek to combine Marxism with the usual good causes, but this tokenism often makes their work irrelevant when it comes to the advancement of theory and practice.

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, non-governmental organisation and political party sectors that demand the subordination of theory to pragmatism. In my view, 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. However, problems of identity and discrimination 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 postmodernisation of the left. This does not refer to women’s struggles, struggles for civil rights, anti-imperialist liberation struggles or struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. In CS&IP, after a section on the development of identity politics in the postwar era, it refers 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.

The second part of CS&IP looks at how these new postmodern trends, or the class and identity debate more generally, have been the subject of discussion, elaboration and critique across the political spectrum, including postmodernism and anarchism. 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. The book is hence designed to help readers navigate the entirety of the social space.

The third section of CS&IP identifies three caveats against the idea of a postmodern left: first, postmodernism’s tendency to reject universalism; second, the difference between socialism and identity politics; third, the problems of cynicism and eclectic materialism. The conclusion provides several theses that summarise my critique. The conclusion alone is enough to dismiss Cox’s text as an inadequate description of my work. The introduction adds my rejection of the emphasis on the last and eleventh of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach” to this, demonstrating the fact that Marxism should not and cannot be confused with voluntarism, pragmatism, empiricism and immanentism. 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 while also contributing to the advancement of Marxist philosophy.

It is impossible for me to refute all of Cox’s arguments and accusations against me in the number of words allotted to me here. Please allow the following replies in point form:

– My work does not give theoretical expression to the views of George Galloway or Sahra Wagenknecht; as far as red-brown alliances are concerned, the first part of CS&IP has an entire section dedicated to the rejection of populism.
– I do not advance a reductionist or economistic version of Marxism, as noticed for example in my essay “The Use and Abuse of Class Reductionism for the Left” and in my overall approach, which one could consider a form of political Marxism.

– My criticism of intersectionality, decoloniality, critical race theory and privilege theory is based on the writings of the respective theorists themselves, which are amply cited.

– Cox’s reference to what I argue concerning the left’s capitulation to identity politics, defined as a contemptible contrivance, actually refers to neoliberal uses of identity politics; see pp3-4 in CS&IP.

– Cox ignores all the examples I provide of contemporary culture war excess, with a long list provided on p13 in CS&IP.

– MAGA attacks against identity politics do not invalidate leftist critiques.

– Although Cox pretends to correct me by saying that socialists have dealt with identity politics in terms of problems like “the Jewish question”, CS&IP mentions “the woman question”, “the Negro question” and “the national question”.

– Sharon Smith’s 1994 essay and the Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad essay of 2004, both mentioned by Cox, are cited approvingly in CS&IP.

– Cox writes that I find identity politics to be a “uniquely reactionary development”; that assertion conflates identity politics with civil rights struggles, as well as socialist approaches to issues of oppression; it also ignores my critiques of trade union corporatism, for example, or NGOism, multitudes horizontalism, left populism and pseudo-left accommodationism.

– Cox seems to think that I am against feminism and human rights discourse, reminding me of the struggle for Palestine; not only have I struggled for Palestinian rights, the Palestinian struggle is discussed in the section on socialism and communism in CS&IP as an instance of what Jacques Rancière refers to as the singular universal; further, CS&IP associates Garveyism, Hindutva and Zionism with fascism; I am also the co-editor of a book on cultural collaboration between Black Panthers and Zapatistas, among many other writings on activist and new social movement causes, socially engaged art and Marxist cultural theory.

– When Cox describes the problem of determinism as it relates to technology, she could have mentioned that I have written an entire book on the subject: Don’t Network.

– The notion that class interests do not determine people’s ideas is not lost on CS&IP, which cites Marx on Ludwig Feuerbach to that effect as well as Theodor Adorno and Alain Badiou; I am also the editor of the two volumes of The Idea of the Avant Garde.

– Cox writes that challenging racism is not a priority for me; the assertion is neither here nor there; as Bobby Seale put it: you do not fight racism with anti-racism but with internationalist socialism; essentially, I am a critic of identity first politics as well as dual and multiple systems approaches.

– Cox’s cherry-picked line about Lenin on p42 of CS&IP ignores the context of the assertion, which disputes the argument that the socialist left is blind to difference.

– Cox writes that Lenin opposed all forms of oppression; Lenin defended the right to national sovereignty, but Marx and Engels argued that workers have no country; Lenin was not a nationalist 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.

– Cox calls for solidarity between working-class struggles and struggles against oppression; so do I, but I do not confuse socialism with allyship and intersectional opportunism; Cox ignores completely the question of how Marxist autonomists devalue politics and overemphasize forces of production, defining anti-oppression as less a matter of solidarity than as a “molecular” process.

– Cox thinks that the answer to the far right is building the biggest movement against racism and linking that to anti-capitalism; I think that using identity politics to increase party membership waters down your programme and resumes the politics of the Popular Front, which in the post-Soviet era is even less operative.

– Cox claims that I centre Enlightenment as the moment that established universalism; this is true for secular universalism, but as a reader of Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, this is simply not true, and Ellen Meiksins Wood discussed the universalism of the Roman Empire.

– Cox writes that I emphasise how postmodernism is the “fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left”; these are not my words but those of Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.

– I do not blur the difference between liberal universalism and socialist universalism; I use the term emancipatory universalism to contrast with capitalism as the actually existing concrete universal, and I distinguish the abstract universality of particularity from this concrete universality, using Hegel’s philosophy to reject the use of the self/other paradigm to understand white/black, male/female, straight/gay oppositions.

– My critique of Asad Haider relates to his postmodern methodology and CS&IP does not avoid the question of colonialism; on this subject I cite the work of Wood, and I also endorse Lenin’s text on the three sources of Marxism, which Haider clearly does not.

– Cox is unconcerned with the post-structuralist liquidation of dialectical materialism.

– Although I do not think that the Haitian Revolution is more important than the French and American Revolutions, nowhere do I suggest it is not important or less important; what is not mentioned by Cox are the racialist attacks on the legacy of Enlightenment universalism.

– Cox mentions Claudia Jones and the notion of the incompleteness of the Enlightenment project; CS&IP cites 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: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, as a corrective to the CRC model of identity politics.

– Cox accuses me of a mechanistic interpretation of Marxism, which she says leads me to adopt a reactionary attitude towards contemporary movements; all of my work is in fact an argument against mechanistic notions of teleology, determinism and historicism; Cox knows nothing of my work, which includes writings about anti-globalisation activism, the Black Bloc, the Quebec Maple Spring, Occupy Wall Street, the Gilets Jaunes, Palestine solidarity and so on.

– Cox writes that I echo the language of the right by attacking “woke left hysteria”; Cox is oblivious to the fact that since 2010, my published work has drawn on Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses and 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.

– Cox accuses me of repeating “tropes formulated by the right-wing culture warriors”; she does not provide examples because there are none; CS&IP rejects Jimmy Dore’s baiting of Cornel West on trans issues.

– Cox writes that I “condemn” BLM as an example of “clientelist race brokerage”; this relates to my discussion of the work of Adolph Reed; my book, Too Black to Fail, which is not mentioned by Cox, deals with this issue at length.

– Cox ignores the problems with BLM and attacks me for pointing out the movement’s shortcomings.

– Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai considered themselves to be socialists and not feminists, a term they rejected as an expression of bourgeois politics.

– Cox’s accusation that I am nostalgic for a Marxist movement that never existed derives from the programme of the SWP.

– Cox concludes by arguing for the centrality of class struggle, which is what CS&IP argues from start to finish.

– Cox cites Lenin, who wrote that “revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and the exploited”; Lenin was not talking about post-left postmodern identity politics.

In the last portion 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. I would argee with much of what is written in the last section, except the parts about intersectionality. Her discussion of rightist intersectional hate is not an explanation of what is happening but the lack of one. 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”.21 She cites Martha Gimenez, with whom I could not agree more. Given that by the end of her text Cox agrees with me, one must wonder what all the fuss was about.

A critique of identitarian wokeism is necessary in today’s post-postmodern context: one cannot simply identify wokeism with the left and anti-wokeism with the right. A robust critique of the pitfalls of identitarianism is not only possible but is necessary to move forward against Trump-style authoritarianism, against so-called 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 liquidation of revolutionary Marxism. In this political context of petty, middle-class extortion, the political right has capitalised on legitimate aversion to wokeism to fuel illegitimate forms of anti-wokeism that strengthen the hand of the oligarchy.

Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist based in Montreal. He is the author of several books in contemporary art theory and on the class and identity debate.

Notes