Class struggle and identity politics in the era of Trump

Trump’s second election victory has dealt a severe blow to the idea that people see politics through the prism of identity.1 Kamala Harris did not win enough votes from women or black men to secure victory. Commentators and activists are evaluating the extent to which identity politics, far from coalescing opposition to the right, are implicated in its rise. Perhaps the political left was just too “woke”, too busy checking its privilege, to appeal to working class people. The political right capitalised on the long and close association between identity politics and the discredited “extreme centre” of politics by posing as insurgent populists standing up for the people against the elites and their Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies.

The once liberal, surf-boarding Tech Bros of Silicon Valley are shredding their DEI commitments and kneeling at the feet of King Donald Trump. These policies were always tokenistic, but their rapid eradication is a symbol of a wider shift against commitments to tackling oppression. Neoliberal identity politics, which have focused exclusively on increasing diversity in the boardroom, have always been vulnerable to the whims of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs). In January 2025, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told a senior Trump adviser that he was rooting out the DEI programmes at Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads. Zuckerberg blamed Sheryl Sandberg for all the restrictive DEI policies adopted by the company. Sandberg is one of the most prominent of the neoliberal feminists, and the author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Alfred A Knopf, 2013), which advised women to toughen up and push their way into corporate and political leadership roles. Zuckerberg is slamming the door to the boardroom shut in the faces of the neoliberal feminists.

Previously, mainstream politicians and CEOs preached diversity and inclusion while simultaneously presiding over neoliberal attacks on the working class and the poor. This association can influence those seeking to challenge oppression. It can accelerate the transition away from radical insurgency and towards the strategy of voting for the Democrats. Those who rejected this option and voted for Trump are condemned by Democrats as hopeless misogynists and racists, too stupid to understand their own interests. During the election campaign, former president Joe Biden famously referred to Trump voters as “garbage”. Lorraine Ali wrote in the Los Angels Times that she blamed the election defeat on “Karens”, entitled white women: “These women were not hiding their vote for Harris from their Trump-loving husbands. They were hiring a supervisor who understands entitlement”.2 Another prong of the Democrat attack is to accuse voters of failing to understand the existential threat Trump poses to democracy, which necessitates a circling of wagons around the Democrats who provided the only bulwark against fascism.

Frustration with top-down identity politics, where the focus is on changing the faces of the CEOs without doing anything for social inequality, should not obscure the way in which Trump and the far right attack identity politics to facilitate a much more serious attack on all the rights of the oppressed. Migration, trans rights, abortion—these are bridgeheads that will lead to wider roll backs of civil, political and economic rights for us all.

There are two mistaken responses to this dramatic reversal in the fortune of identity politics among progressive thinkers and activists. The first response is to defend the Democrats and the political centre more generally, denounce Trump supporters as bigots and wait for normal service to be resumed. The second one 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. This article will assess these responses to the unfolding situation and then look in some detail at the contribution of Marc J Leger, who gives a theoretical expression to the second tendency.

Passing the Democratic buck

Nearly forty years of neoliberalism have left the US deeply traumatised and divided. Working-class people face poverty, unemployment, inflation and a healthcare crisis. The US is leading the world in suicide rates, incarceration, gun deaths and drug overdoses. Desperation and despair encourages people to look to Trump as someone who promises to change things. Those Democrats thinking Trump was an aberration who would be brushed aside are now busy searching for scapegoats. One element of their post-election analysis highlights the inherent racism and sexism of the electorate—their “misogynoir”. The liberal New York Times reported last November, “For Black women, ‘America has revealed to us her true self’”. Their country would rather elect a liar convicted of 34 felonies than send a woman of colour to the White House, the Times reported.3 So, electoral defeat had nothing to do with Biden’s economic failures or support for genocide—the irredeemably racist, sexist voters are to blame. The conclusion that flows from this analysis is that the Democrats must intensify their own hostility migrants and to drop all ambitions relating to challenging oppression.

Some Democrats have identified identity politics as a potential barrier to appealing to the white working class. The Democratic leadership was happy to embrace identity politics as a weapon against Bernie Sanders during his two campaigns for the Democratic nomination in 2016 and 2020—an attack described as the “Awokening”.4 Sanders’ “class first” campaign was the target of endless attacks from the party establishment and media pundits who derided Sanders and his team as the “Bernie Bros”. When Sanders called for the big banks to be broken up, Hillary Clinton famously insisted that such a move would not end racism or sexism. After Clinton’s loss in 2016, Sanders criticised the Democrats’ focus on identity politics. This was held up as evidence that he had created an Alt-Left that sought common ground with the white supremacists of the Alt-Right.

Now, some of those debating Sanders are suggesting that his politics are what the Democrats need to erode Trump’s popularity. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, “Voters to Elites: Do You See Me Now?”, David Brooks describes how America’s deep social divisions had led to a loss of faith, a loss of trust, a sense of betrayal because the Democrats were oblivious to the great chasm of inequality under their noses. “As the left veered toward identitarian performance art, Donald Trump jumped into the class war with both feet”, he observes.5 The same Democrats who pilloried Sanders’ critique of identity politics are now throwing trans people and undocumented migrants under the bus. A report of a recent meeting of leading Democrats suggests their strategy will be to focus on economic issues and not “chase every crazy squirrel”, in the words of senator Adam Schiff.6 There is every chance that this strategy will be little more than empty rhetoric.

Another element of the Democrats’ response is to focus on the threat Trump poses to democracy and his supporters’ willingness to embrace authoritarianism. The view is expressed by Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of political history of Princetown University, in several articles in the London Review of Books. Müller describes being beset by endless exhortations from pundits to try to understand Trump voters, to earn their respect and not be condescending. These exhortations are unnecessary, Müller argues, because the arrogance of the liberal elites is largely an invention of right-wing media.7 Müller suggests that voters are right to feel betrayed by people who vote to express their “economic frustrations” even if it means a threat to democracy. “It is for Trump voters”, Müller says, “to restore the trust that people have to have in one another in a democracy”.8 Political leaders are thus absolved of any responsibility for the erosion of faith in democracy.

The economistic critique of identity politics

Trump’s first election victory in 2016 led to tensions between class politics and identity politics entering mainstream political discussion. The “talking heads” were quick to blame their complete failure to predict the outcome of the Brexit vote in Britain and the US presidential election on growing opposition to the “crushing hegemony” of “political correctness”.9 These elections were framed as the revenge of white working-class men. Trump mobilised a popular hostility to “globalisation”, to American jobs being outsourced by global elites, and inflation stoked by a politically motivated federal banking system. This was combined with pledges to stop diverting resources to migrants and squandering it on DEI initiatives or Critical Race Theory training. Trump even capitalised on climate catastrophes by claiming the federal emergency agency had spent its money on migrants.

One response to this is to argue for the centre left to adopt the policies of the right, to stop going on about oppression and focus exclusively on appealing to the supposedly socially conservative working class. Labour was advised to reclaim patriotism and traditional family values, defend working-class living standards and drop the woke stuff, especially over immigration. Keir Starmer’s government is bending hard in this direction politically, attacking migrants, abandoning green policies and running scared of all things “woke”, while intensifying attacks on working-class living standards. Abandoning progressive politics and further eroding the living standards of working-class people has already led to a slump in popular support for Starmer’s government, support which was always meagre.

The economistic political current predates the Starmer government. It emerged under New Labour and coalesced around a group called Blue Labour from around 2010. It grew in strength under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership as a left-sounding justification for joining in fundamentally right-wing attacks on his leadership. Economism now permeates the wider Labour Party. London Assembly member Unmesh Desai wrote in Left Foot Forward:

If we do not talk about issues relating to immigration, the legal as well as the abuses, others will. If we do not publicly discuss the pressures on our public services, patriotism, security and defence, the debate will be shaped by those that do by default.10

The Red Wall group of Labour MPs is demanding that Labour adopt a tougher stance on immigration. In February 2025, Labour produced posters in Reform UK party colours, with no Labour logos, bragging about the party’s record on deporting people.11

The danger posed by this economistic current assumed a sharper electoral expression in the campaigns of George Galloway’s Workers Party in the British general election in 2024 and in Sahra Wagenknecht’s party in Germany. Galloway’s Worker’s Party campaigned on class issues and opposed the genocide in Gaza while attacking trans rights and immigration. Galloway claimed to be “for the workers, not the wokers”. He recently flew to Romania to interview Andrew Tate. Wagenknecht spilt from the left-wing Die Linke, which she said had alienated its working-class base by supporting “bizarre minorities” and climate activists. Galloway and Wagenknecht share the belief that the way to undermine the far right is to attack immigration. His party appears to be making little long-term impact while Wagenknecht’s party has won a modest level of support.

The pseudo-left critique of identity politics finds theoretical expression in the works of Marc James Leger.12 Leger’s approach downplays oppression and advances a reductionist version of Marxism. Elements of Leger’s critique of identity politics sound plausible. However, this makes it dangerous as, in reality, it is deeply flawed, is incapable of challenging right-wing politics and leads to profoundly reactionary conclusions. Leger argues that identity politics have distracted the left from its historic task. Faced with possible nuclear conflagration and climate catastrophe, the left’s capitulation to identity politics has reduced it to a “contemptable contrivance”.13 It is not just that identity politics is ineffective in combating the far right—it has helped to generate the resurgence of the far right, he claims. Identity politics has inadvertently amplified the fascist rejection of Enlightenment universalism and class struggle in favour of cultural and social relativism and the classless rhetoric of power and empowerment.14 This claim is hard to substantiate when Trump’s Make America Great Again culture warriors so frequently attack identity politics—and Trump’s victory was widely interpreted as the end of identity politics.15

Leger explores how both liberals and post-modernists abstract inequalities and disparities from the economic conditions that cause them.16 This can direct attention away from the economic basis of oppression and feed neoliberal individualism and tokenism. This is true but hardly pathbreaking. Thirty years ago, Sharon Smith wrote an effective socialist critique of post-Marxist identity politics in this journal.17 A decade ago, Esme Choonara and Yuri Prasad wrote, “What’s wrong with Privilege Theory?”, a Marxist critique of privilege theory and intersectionality.18 In 2018, the authors of a special edition of Historical Materialism argued that “Marxists have long made the case for the analytical connection between the rise of a particular kind of dematerialised identity politics and neoliberal hegemony”.19 A critique of identity politics could be developed in new, interesting ways, but Leger identifies identity politics as a uniquely reactionary development, which distorts his whole analysis.

One example of this missed opportunity is the question of identity politics and imperialism. In the hands of neoliberal politicians, Leger argues, identity politics play a cynical role in foreign policy and have made the left “especially susceptible” to colonial invasions and wars in the name of human rights and women. A lot of the left has spent the last year marching for Palestine, which suggest a certain resistance to “colonial invasions”. It is true that bourgeois feminists like Hillary Clinton and Sheryl Sandberg have used a rhetoric of women’s rights to justify imperialist invasions and the genocide in Gaza. However, this appropriation of progressive ideas is not unique to contemporary identity politics. Some British women allied themselves with imperialism throughout the 19th century, basing their demands for the vote on their capacity to be good servants of the Empire. Some US women appealed for the vote with promises that they could help defend white society from black men. Emmeline Pankhurst famously whipped up support for the British war effort, visiting Russia in 1917 to campaign against the end of the war. The oppressed have always been divided between those who sought to ingratiate themselves with ruling class priorities and those who sought to challenge them. Few modern wars have been fought under the banner of naked imperialism. Usually, they are legitimised as wars against tyranny, injustice and fascism.

Between the 1950s and the 1980s, Leger argues, in unnecessarily obscure language, “a wave of pessimistic intellectuals ratified the abrogation of the inheritance of the revolutionary left”.20 Leger is right that there has been a coming together of post-Marxism and forms of identity-based politics in ways that present a sharp alternative to Marxism. The ideas of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe suffuse new movements, influencing those who have never read Karl Marx. Laclau and Mouffe present an absurd caricature of Marxism as a profoundly reductionist approach that sees the economy as independent of human action. The fundamental flaw in Marxism, they argue, is the idea that “the working class represents the privileged agent in which the fundamental impulse of social change resides”.21

It is entirely right to challenge this view—but there must be more than asserting that Marxism is not deterministic. Marxists do argue that the way people produce what they need forms the basis of society. The machines and technology we use to produce what we need interact with the way that production is organised, who owns and controls what we need. In interaction with this base, enormously powerful institutions develop—the state, the political system, the education system, the media. Huge tensions can emerge between the developing forces of production and the social relations that prevent them from growing in new ways. Whenever there are great crises in the productive economy, there are also intense political crises and ideological debates. Objective class interests can shape how people see the world, but they do not determine people’s ideas, which are shaped by multiple institutions and contradictory experiences. It is not enough to campaign for jobs and homes and hope an objective pull towards unity will undermine racism. France has witnessed successive waves of industrial and social struggles over the last 30 years but the far-right Rassemblement National (National Rally) has continued to grow in popularity. Racism has to be confronted, exposed and challenged as part of building working-class unity.

This is not a priority for Leger. He argues that “the core of socialist politics is not opposition to discrimination, it is the critique of capitalism and the decommodification of big capital and public services”.22 Lenin would disagree. Lenin argued that that opposition to discrimination was at the heart of embedding socialist politics in the working class: “Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected”.23 Lenin adopted this position to strengthen the unity of the working class and help workers to break away from the reactionary ideas promoted by the ruling class. Working-class opposition to oppression would allow oppressed groups to identify their liberation with working class struggle and revolution. The answer to the rise of the far right and the associated racism and Islamophobia is not to advocate the decommodification of big capital. It is to build the biggest movement against racism while developing a revolutionary current that links the fight against racism with that against capitalism.

The Enlightenment and Western civilisation

Leger centres the Enlightenment as the historical moment that established a universalism, something socialists should aim to uphold and build upon. Leger describes the achievement of the Enlightenment as giving formal and institutional expression to secular and reasoned understanding of things common to humanity.24 He emphasises how postmodernism, the “fundamentalist religion of the nominally secular left,” attacks “liberal universalism and distorts socialism”.25 Leger blurs the crucial difference between liberal universalism and socialist universalism.26

Many anti-racist and Marxist scholars have developed Marx’s trenchant critiques of slavery and colonialism to demand that accounts of the bourgeois revolutions do not exclude the associated barbarism of slavery and colonialism.27 They argue that universalism is impossible without reckoning with the legacy of colonialism. As Asad Haider comments, “The project of insurgent universality is not advanced by purported Marxists who engage in uncritical and ahistorical celebrations of the Enlightenment, an old and tired position”.28 This could be directed at Leger.

Leger criticises the “affluent academics and institutions that first supported intersectional challenges to ostensibly white feminism and ostensibly class reductive Marxism [which] have now targeted Enlightenment derived, universalist mass politics as the product of white, Christian and European colonialism”.29 According to Leger, privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality studies now seek to go beyond dismantling the Western cannon and pit themselves against liberal institutions.30 His targets include decolonial and anti-racists scholars who have insisted that the Haitian Revolution, in which enslaved people defeated the British and French Empires, should be given more importance in discussions that have traditionally focused on the bourgeois revolutions in the US and in France.31 Excavating the role of enslaved people as agents of their own emancipation is not a “postmodern problematisation of universality”, as Leger claims. It is a completion of a previously partial universality.

The rising bourgeoisie had an interest in clearing the way for rationality and scientific investigation, and in a degree of individual rights and freedoms. The emerging class had to promise change to mobilise the sans culottes and the urban poor to rise up against the old order. The bourgeoisie, however, sought above all to establish its own power as a new ruling class. Its legacy was, therefore, highly contradictory. Bourgeois rights emerged both as a shield against arbitrary abuses of political and economic power and as a way of making dominant social powers appear natural and legitimate.32 The “universal” values of the Enlightenment excluded women, the poor and all enslaved people from democratic processes. The bourgeois revolutions established societies which were deeply unequal in terms of wealth. They demonstrated the need for economic as well as political transformation. The marginalised groups could nonetheless identify with the liberatory thrust of the bourgeois revolutions.

Alex Callinicos outlines three responses to the Enlightenment: endorsement, abandonment and revolutionising the project.33 It was the very incompleteness of the promise of liberty, equality and fraternity that created the space for socialist and later Marxist critiques of bourgeois society to develop. It was a Marxist scholar, CLR James, who first inserted the Black Jacobins into accounts of the great French Revolution of 1789. A communist scholar, Claudia Jones, developed the idea of the triple oppressions affecting black women workers. Decolonising the Enlightenment does not mean junking its achievements—it means developing a more complete picture of those achievements.

Leger’s economistic interpretation of Marxism leads him to adopt reactionary attitudes towards contemporary movements. He echoes the language of the right by attacking “woke left hysteria” and repeats the tropes formulated by the right-wing culture warriors.34 If fighting racism is about identity and obscures class questions, why support movements against state racism? So, Leger condemns the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement as an example of “clientelist race brokerage” supported by neoliberal elites with a corrupt leadership.35 Moreover, he sees corruption as something unique to BLM rather than something experienced throughout many campaigns and, indeed, something endemic to the leadership of the US labour movement. Any theory that leads away from solidarity with the oppressed needs urgent revision. 36

Socialist strategies for change, Leger argues, must focus on what he calls “universal issues”, such as labour rights, unionisation, employment, social services, health care, housing, education and child and elder care.37 This strategy accepts the identity politics Leger opposes so vehemently because it is based on the idea that only the oppressed have an interest in challenging their oppression. Yet, divisions based on oppression are detrimental to the whole of the working class, which is precisely why all working-class people have a material interest in fighting against racism, sexism and homophobia—they are also “universal issues”. Any working-class movement failing to challenge inequality will fail to achieve its own demands and will be unable to embrace socialist politics.

Putting the politics back into identity

Identity politics refer to movements organised around real or perceived racial, religious, ethnic, social and cultural identities to challenge real or perceived discrimination and inequality. The experience of oppression can encourage people to define themselves by their identities against discrimination, inequality and violence. A shared identity can be the basis for a mass political movement. No Marxist used the term “identity politics” before the 1970s. That was not because they were only interested in studying the impersonal forces that determine how society is organised. On the contrary, many Marxist theoreticians have debated questions we now recognise as relating to identity. Marx wrote about the “Jewish Question”, on the struggle against chattel slavery in the southern states of the US and on British imperialism in India. Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai were among many women who explored gender oppression from a Marxist perspective. Lenin wrote extensively on the importance of socialists identifying with struggles for national liberation. However, “identity” only became an independent framework of analysis in the late 1960s.

“Identity politics” quickly became associated with the new protest movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Identity allowed activists to explore how oppression is not restricted to discrimination in institutions and corporations but also has psychological dimensions that shape their lives.38 The rise of black power and the women’s and gay liberation movements sparked new approaches to colonial, racial and gender oppression. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V Hamilton write in the book Black Power:

Our basic need is to reclaim our history and our identity from what must be called cultural terrorism, from the depredation of self-justifying white guilt. We shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to society, and to have these terms recognised.39

For many young radicals, experiences based on identity are a first step towards understanding oppression and developing collective strategies to contest it. Great periods of upheaval lead people to question a whole range of oppressions they previously took for granted.40 Movements against oppression could rock the system but not deliver it a death blow. To realise the dreams of 1968, the US working class would have had to throw itself into the struggle and shake the system at its core. There were huge strikes and rank-and-file revolts, but the US ruling class withdrew from Vietnam and worked with the trade union bosses to contain the revolt from below. This meant the mass campaigns could not break down the structures of their oppression. During the 1980s, a vicious ruling-class offensive, and the defeat of workers’ and student resistance, meant that exploring identity was seen less as a springboard for social change and more as an end in itself. This end in itself developed a coherent set of ideas that began to fill the vacuum left by the retreat of civil rights, anti-imperialist and working-class struggles.

Identity politics involves the “elevation of select identity groups to moral and political pre-eminence, while implicitly or explicitly subordinating others”.41 This oversimplifies identities as permanent communities with unchanging characteristics and interests that share a common path to social advancement. It also implies that identity is powerful enough to overcome political and economic divisions between members of an identity groups. This political approach leads to the idea that lived experience is the key to social insight and authenticity, that feeling is a better guide to strategy than study, investigation and debate. Experiences can give people insights into how their oppression works, but they do not necessarily clarify the more obscure structures that underpin experiences.

An important aspect of identity politics is intersectionality theory. Intersectionality has entered popular language as a way of expressing a desire to build solidarity between different oppressed groups. It is an alternative to conservative, single issue-based variants of identity politics that are hostile to the aspirations of others and lead to reactionary conclusions. An example of this single-issue approach is the way transphobic feminists are proclaiming Trump as a “Feminist hero” and a “Feminist icon” because he signed an executive order banning trans women from women’s sport.42 Intersectionality is a huge advance on this damaging bigotry.

The efforts of black women, including Grace Campbell, Louise Thompson and Claudia Jones, to theorise the multi-dimensional aspects of oppression date back for at least a century. The intersectionality model developed in the 1970s and 1980s by Kimberle Crenshaw, Angela Davis and bell hooks now informs most discussions about fighting oppression. Intersectionality theorists have created a rich body of work in which they explore the interactions between race, gender and class. Crenshaw’s conception was one of multiple forms of oppression that interact like traffic in an intersection, coming and going in all directions. Patricia Hill Collins refined intersectionality by describing interlocking systems and a matrix of domination.

Intersectional writers have often engaged in a productive dialogue with Marxist scholars. There are intersectionality theorists who dismiss Marxism as reductionist, there are others who look to Marxism to explain class—and there are Marxists who think intersectionality is a necessary corrective to Marxist understanding of oppression. Socialist Sharon Smith argues that intersectionality both complements and strengthens Marxist theory and practice. Intersectionality, Smith writes, is a concept for understanding oppression, not exploitation, which is where Marxism comes in.43

However, there are problems with the intersectional model. Intersectionality theorists reject the idea of a hierarchy of oppression, but this often means that Marxists who insist on the primacy of class are accused of privileging class over other oppressions or reducing everything to class.44 Intersectionality theory assumes that different oppressions have different causes and then encounter and interlock with each other like the pieces of jigsaw puzzle. For Marxists, oppression is not rooted in a range of separate places (patriarchy, white privilege, heteronormativity), but deeply rooted in the capitalist system, from the privatised reproduction of labour, from slavery and imperialism.45 It is a mistake to separate oppression and exploitation, as if they have different causes and therefore different solutions.46

These arguments have been injected with a new urgency by “intersectional hate”. The global far right has constructed coalitions which have established “gender” as a catch-all term, including LGBT+ rights, reproductive rights, opposition to violence against women, trans rights, sexual freedom and the family. Opposition to “gender ideology” is the “symbolic glue” which adheres these coalitions of religious conservatives, ne0-fascists, racists, Islamophobes and climate deniers.47 This analysis was developed by Judith Butler, whose 2024 book Who’s Afraid of Gender analyses how the political right paints gender ideology as a “phantasm with destructive powers”.48 This is conjured up to terrify people into conformity and to externalise fear and hatred onto vulnerable communities. Alongside the catch-all spectre of “gender” are other targets that can embody disparate groups, such as “cultural Marxists” and “rootless globalists”. This “intersectionality of hate” brings together sexism, racism, antisemitism, homophobia and nationalism.49 Trump and the far right do not just hate black people, women, immigrants, Muslims, Jews and gays. They encourage racists to be homophobes, climate deniers to be sexists, transphobes to hate immigrants.50 We cannot overcome the intersectionality of hate with the intersectionality of identity.

Trump has broken from ideas of neoliberal individualism, which were so entrenched in political and corporate America.51 He does not talk about removing barriers for individuals to achieve success. He constructs alliances of disparate groups based on intersectional hate and the creation of collective identities such as nationalism and white supremacy. Trump uses a populist rhetoric that creates the idea of a “people” united against the out-of-touch, liberal establishment. The post-Marxists, who once championed populism as an alternative to class struggle, failed to predict how the right wing could create its own populism. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s fake populism can survive the experience of his pro-business agenda once it is fully unleashed.

How can Marxists end oppression?

The economistic socialists often participate in the right’s nostalgia for a simpler world—one in which “men were men” and “women were women” and the working class drank manly beer, joined unions and voted labour. Marc Leger expresses nostalgia for an imagined prelapsarian world in which Marxism was dominant, and everyone fought for their liberation beneath a red flag. However, globally, Marxism has always been a minority current within the international labour movement. Huge working-class struggles shaped the 19th century—the general strike of 1842 or the New Unionism of the 1880s. Social movements against slavery, for the vote, for national liberation in countries like Ireland, Italy, Poland and India also shaped the politics of the 19th century. The incredibly sustained and militant campaign for female suffrage was deeply divided between socialist women and those who prefigured today’s feminists by insisting that ladies shared the same interests as their maids. Marxism was influential in the international labour movement, but Marxists have always had to fight for their political perspective within broader movements. It was Stalinism that extinguished the liberatory outlook of 19th-century Marxism, about which Leger has little to say.

It is entirely understandable that experiences of violence and abuse may lead women to blame men for sexism, and similar experiences lead black people to blame white people, gay people to blame heterosexuals, and so on. Yet, those experiences will be challenged by other experiences of friendship, community and workplace, and a deeper sense of the inequalities embedded in capitalism and its institutions. Socialists stand with those who want to fight against oppression and build bridges between campaigns, not walls to keep them apart. Socialists argue for the centrality of the working class and the need for socialism because we know that the maximum unity means the strongest movements. Socialists want much more than grudging toleration of the oppressed for the sake of the movement.

The false dichotomy between focusing on class questions and downplaying questions of oppression or focusing on fighting oppression and ignoring class questions must be rejected. The two are interconnected. Oppression weakens the whole working class and weakens its capacity to resist the billionaires who pose as insurgents and feed off despair. Socialists have to stand up to all manifestations of oppression and build the confidence of the working class to realise its collective power. It is only the working class that has an interest in sweeping away all forms of oppression and exploitation. Self-emancipation is conditional on the overthrow of the state and the dismantling of the whole class system.

After witnessing the 1905 revolution in Russia, Lenin wrote, “revolutions are festivals of the oppressed and the exploited. At no other times are the masses of the people in a position to come forward so actively as the creators of a new social order”.52 At the heart of any real revolution is the transformation of the economic relations in society, the socialisation of the means of production by the working class and the reshaping of production to respond to real human needs. This transformation is made possible by and encourages change in every aspect of society—in how people dress, talk, love, raise children and express themselves creatively. Revolutions unleash what is best in humanity, the collective spirit of solidarity in which all forms of oppression are exposed, challenged and consigned to the dustbin. In 1923, Trotsky described how “the revolution is in the first place an awakening of the human personality in the masses—who were supposed to possess no personality”.53 When capitalism ends, real human freedom can begin.

Judy Cox lives in West London. She has recently completed a PhD in women and the Chartist movement at the University of Leeds. She is the author of The Women’s Revolution: Russia 1905-1917 (Haymarket, 2019) and Rebellious Daughters of History (Redwords, 2020).

Notes