US President Trump’s electoral victory in November 2024 has led to a series of debates on the broad left about the legacy and meaning of identity politics or ‘wokism’, now such a target for right-wing polemic. This debate has been periodically animated by interventions such as a podcast by socialist theorist Vivek Chibber, a long-term critic of the tendency. In promotion for her new book, Novara Media journalist Ash Sarkar – someone influenced by identarian politics by her own admission – arrives at some similar, critical conclusions. Both have depicted it as an off-putting, hectoring and uncomprehending approach to changing society. Their critics have responded in anger, variously defending the tendency’s essential ideological claims, denying its existence, or both at once.
This argument has gone back and forth on the left for some years now. In fact, the phenomenon itself arguably peaked several years ago, and has been in steady decline since. In recent months, the debate has had the feel of a post-mortem. There’s little doubt among those serious about trying to create a viable socialist movement that this subcultural tendency has created significant problems for that project in the last ten to fifteen years. But post-mortems are important, because it would be very easy to misdiagnose the problem, and therefore the solution. Also, as I explain below, this particular tendency on the left has a hydra-like quality, and tends to return after periods of retreat.
Adherents to the creed generally insist on the centrality of various forms of social oppression (rotating with fashion), and the responsibility for that oppression among two groups especially: the general public, and the left itself. These targets suggest the essential elitism of the tendency. It often views moral reform and re-education as a priority, before or even in opposition to political action.
This approach, and its activist culture of purity and denunciation, should not be mistaken for ‘ultra-leftism’. It is seldom ‘extreme’ either in terms of its political demands or its tactics. On the contrary, demands for the policing of language and exclusivity in moral values are generally tied to quite conservative political programmes. Consider, for instance, the adherence of many in this current to ruling institutions like the EU in Europe, or the Democratic party in the United States, at least in moments of crisis where these institutions are challenged from the right.
This reflects the class character of some advocates, often found among the most educated and credentialised groups in the workforce. But it also denotes a general political pessimism experienced by broader layers. Defence of the vulnerable in the face of overwhelming moral corruption, in power but also in the population at large, is its constant refrain, and this inevitably leads it over and again into a one-sided alliance with the status quo.
Nor should it be understood as an attempt to augment a ‘class-centric’ traditional left politics with other categories – such as race, sex, sexuality, disability and so on. The modern socialist movement has, from its inception generations ago, included many manifestations of oppression in its diagnosis of the problems of society. It could hardly be otherwise, since it emerged in anti-democratic, pan-national dynastic empires that used many forms of social oppression to maintain order. Radical currents (often influenced by Marxism) have long championed opposition to the oppression of women and national and racial minorities, and organised broadly political platforms demanding the democratisation of society and the end to censorship and enforced conformity.
The identity-politics tendencies of recent years have added nothing to this tradition. Broadly anti-intellectual, the perspectives it has produced on social oppression are unsophisticated at best, shading into reactionary anti-universalism at the extremities. Its general political pessimism means that it often winds up promoting its ‘anti-oppression’ ends through powerful ruling-class institutions, which are in fact the real enemy of oppressed populations, or rather retreating from political confrontation altogether to engage in moral denunciation of individuals.
Because it reflects pessimism and de-politicisation, it is also naturally highly sectarian, dismissing opportunities to reach out to wider social forces. In fact, it is often too sectarian to be described as such, because it is so disputatious, so hostile to organised politics that it fails even to develop sectarian forms of organisation. Group denunciation rapidly devolves into individual denunciation, to the point that any co-operation becomes impossible. This is one of the reasons why my own generation (millennials) has created so little lasting political infrastructure. Because identity politics tends to burn out its adherents by destroying their relations with others, and because it has been allied with an opposition to building ‘hierarchical’ organisation, it tends to come and go in waves. Each new generation emerges in the vacuum created by the disappearance of the last, and goes on to recapitulate its same pathologies, headless of past calamities.
A problem of organisation
This tendency can be understood in many dimensions. It certainly has some basis in social class position, in changes in mass communication, and in the general growth of anti-social tendencies fostered by neoliberalism. But it is too rarely understood as a problem of the decline of organised political tradition, requiring an organisational response. A general decline of associational life in recent decades is both part of the historical emergence of this tendency, and a consequence of its activities, even if only in the small way of disrupting left politics. It is therefore worth understanding it in terms of the problems of organised politics, before concluding with general notes on a political response. As noted, it tends to come and go in waves. The accumulation of political-organisational traditions resistant to it is therefore the only way to guard against future resurgences and new strains.
The pretence of the identitarian activist – more a device for stirring controversy than a real hope – is that one day they will be in a mass movement alongside people who all agree with their most cherished cultural and moral values. Nothing like this has ever happened in history, and never will. The demand for purity, even among a small activist milieu, misunderstands the complex and contradictory nature of the formation of ideology.
Ideas reflect conditions in the world, and because of this, they must reflect contradiction. Workers compete with each other for jobs, and they sometimes combine against their employers. Workers therefore reflect both competitive and solidaristic tendencies, depending on their given situation. The family is both a site of solidarity, where people protect their sense of human value from an exploitative social order, and a site of oppression, where hierarchies of power can lead to abuse.
Beyond these classic examples are innumerable others, which combined make up the entire social experience of human beings in capitalism. No social setting is immune from these pressures, and attempts to make them so will always fail. It’s worth adding that the ‘activist’ is not a special category of person apart from this general tendency. Everyone reflects these contradictory pressures, including in ways of which they are not conscious, or don’t understand. Attempts to turn the activist into a pure moral actor above oppressive attitudes will, likewise, always fail.
Reflecting these conditions, society is a wild jumble of competing and constantly shifting cultural, moral and political attitudes. Any engagement with a mass movement makes this immediately clear. In the huge movements against the Iraq War for instance, socialists with a more-or-less coherent anti-imperialist politics made up a small if important (often leading) minority. At least as prominent were various shades of social-democrat, liberal-leftist, pacifist, left nationalist or Irish Republican, hard liberal (for example, those who proposed the EU as an alternative to ‘anglophone’ imperialism), various religious tendencies, conspiracy theorists, those from Ba’athist or Islamist traditions, and many more. Naturally, demanding a shared view of any given social or moral issue from this crowd of millions is hopeless.
These designations hide a much deeper extent of contradictory consciousness. Most people, whether they subscribe to a label or not, have no coherent doctrine or worldview. They syncretise their experience into a working hypothesis about the world, melding left and right, ‘progressive’ and reactionary. It is not unusual to find racist and anti-racist attitudes co-existing in the same person at the same time.
Unable to cope with the ambiguity of popular consciousness, practitioners of identity politics respond with petty authoritarianism. Aware of the deep social roots of this ambiguity, they become obsessed with its supposed point of generation in inter-personal relations and institutions. The notion that ‘the personal is political’ has transformed into the idea that ‘the personal’ is the real form of ‘the political’. The obsessions (now somewhat dated, this tendency shuffling its language at regular intervals) with identifying one’s own ‘privilege’ or historic guilt, with ‘micro-aggressions’ or with ‘amplifying the voices’ of oppressed or marginalised groups, is characteristic. Sometimes, advocates try to advance this perspective in the form of programmatic demands to ‘abolish the family’ or some similar utopian/dystopian remedy. Here as elsewhere, the demand is being made of the general population, not the concentrations of power in the state or capital. Obviously, this is a perspective completely unsuited to mass politics.
A political response to the problem of contradictory consciousness needs to embrace a stark ambiguity: it is precisely those people who represent an incoherent worldview who we ultimately hope can deliver radical political change. This is not just a hope for the future, it is the actual history of human civilisation. The advances of working-class people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not won by people who had overcome their contradictory consciousness. To take one example of very many, the Red Clydeside revolt in Scotland in 1919 coincided with a vicious race riot in Glasgow, in which militants attacked workers from Sierra Leone, with the encouragement of some socialist leaders. In speeches and proclamations, hostility to foreign labour was expressly tied to the movement’s wider campaign for workers’ rights.
Nor have workers shed these tendencies at the peak of militancy. Recent scholarship on the Russian Revolution, for instance, has demonstrated just how tenacious racism and other bigotries proved, even as part of powerful radical working-class counter-tendencies emphasising solidarity and collective empowerment. Often, these realities are greeted on the left as cautionary tales against complacency and mythologised history. We must, the argument goes, remove the sheen from our heroes and recognise the hold of regressive ideology, which can only be restrained by even sterner vigilance by enlightened activists. The more challenging conclusion, that contradictory consciousness is immutable, is also the one that demands a response beyond moralising.
A battle of ideas through organisation
We should begin by inverting the basic equation of identity politics: pessimism about politics, optimism about inter-personal moral reform. We should be pessimistic about the capacity to remove contradictory consciousness from the minds of individuals. It is an impossible task, completely ignoring both the nature of the phenomena, and the time and space problems involved in the supposed remedy. It is also arrogant and elitist. Identity-politics advocates have made no demonstration that they are fit to educate anyone.
We should, conversely, be optimistic about politics. In history, members of exploited and oppressed classes have not only transformed their societies through mass political action, they have also transformed themselves. The two processes are inherently linked – the conditions we find in the world, and the actions we engage in to alter those conditions are equally the material from which consciousness is formed.
Mass ideology, therefore, constantly evolves at scale. It can develop all the more rapidly and decisively when it is being changed consciously by actors engaged in collective action. However, this process is uneven. Participants in historical change have different starting points, class positions, and relationships with the changing society. Though no part of any population is unaffected by the confusion and contradictions of the process, some will inevitably arrive at more militant political attitudes than others. Banding together these elements is the essential organisational task that has preoccupied socialists for generations, through different forms and with different degrees of success.
Without this effort, there is no hope of counter-balancing the uneven development of political consciousness in society. Polemicising alone, socialists simply will not be heard. This is especially a problem because mass movements of opinion often work on the basis of collective psychology. Just as enthusiasm sweeps into new movements suddenly, so sudden collapses, fits of paranoia and recrimination are also common. Even under the best circumstances, the chaotic plurality of opinion opens the door to regressive and healthy dynamics to operate at one and the same time, as in the above examples.
The object of an organised intervention is political. We are not trying to create ‘good people’ for their own sake, either in the general population or in the organisation itself. The internal standards of organised currents should maintain discipline to sharpen the effect of political intervention, not create paragons. An orientation on mass politics has the additional benefit that it can protect socialists from insularity and purity spirals. Socialists, like everyone else, are prone to error and ideological confusion. Testing perspectives against broader layers offers one method of self-correction. Again, we should be pessimists about our attempts at improvement, either of ourselves, or others. But we should be optimists that mass politics can allow us to arrive at new understandings, and more effective approaches to social change.
Finally, this approach has the benefit of being able to address other wrong turns on the left, of which there are very many to come. One will likely be an anti-woke critique which misidentifies recent trends as ultra-left, overly-political, adverse to traditional or national values or insufficiently narrowly focussed on ‘bread and butter’ issues. In the mind of the identitarian, most people are essentially conservative, and this is a problem to be remedied by moral instruction. For some critics, most people are essentially conservative and this is to be accepted. Both these attitudes ignore the contradictory, changeable nature of people and rely instead on a phantom, static working-class persona, to which they refer in a one-way conversation. What is needed instead is a combative socialism, accepting of the ambiguous political consciousness of the people on whom our project depends entirely, but clear-eyed and organised around the politics it wants to shape.
