Marc James Léger, Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (Abing- don: Routledge, 2024), 274 pp., $39.19
After capitalist democracy was advanced by the West as the lesser of two cold war evils, identity politics became the official vehicle for progressive social change. In the United States, the Democratic party’s repackaging of the neoliberal status quo was cast as the “progressive” option against Trumpian ethno-nationalism. Marc James Léger’s latest book, Class Struggle and Identity Politics, reminds us that there has always been another way. Léger’s book is a guide, a way to untangle the various strands of identity politics that are associated with the left, but that do not, in his assessment, support a socialist agenda. With refreshing concision, Léger details how intersectional politics have prioritized identity over class, severing socialist politics from its emancipatory potential.
Class Struggle and Identity Politics is organized into three parts, which track identity politics through contemporary academic scholarship, the political spectrum, and the evolution of the post-modern left. By demonstrating how identity politics have weakened socialist soli- darity, Léger calls for a return to universalist principles and class- based emancipation.
As evidenced by his last book, Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022), Léger is interested in how social justice move- ments and the working-class agenda have been coopted by bipartisan politics and the neoliberal counterculture. When class issues were decentered, a vaguely progressive neo-bohemian radicalism moved to the fore. Léger charts a series of cultural, economic, and political developments since the postwar era that gave rise to, among other things, wokeism, culture wars, and the professional managerial class’s moralistic form of social justice. Neoliberal progressives bullied the left, and the academy, into participating in these initiatives, using cancel culture threats to define the parameters of acceptable dis- course. Like many of his contemporaries, Léger believes that these cur- rents have weakened the socialist movement and challenged its cohesion. He directly indicts strains of left-ish scholarship for their complicity in choosing moralism over materialism, and for abandoning the socialist agenda. Looking to anti-Enlightenment trends during the emergence of postmodernism, he describes how an influx of French theory became the “lingua franca of a seemingly progressive yet thoroughly neoliberal academia” (3). Scholars working in this tradition fail to account for how their work is situated in the capitalist context. They have forsaken class for identity. Léger’s clarity on this matter is one of his most powerful contributions.
Class Struggle and Identity Politics attends to how identity politics is a problematic of the left (and leftist academics) because it represents a struggle against all forms of oppression. Léger also shows how identity politics pose a distinct problem for the left, working against the advancement of socialist politics (6). As he claims throughout the book, a reinstatement of Marxist materialism and universalism are the only way out of this predicament. First, he turns to contemporary theories of identity, radical democracy, populism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and decoloniality; then, he analyzes their interplay across the political spectrum. In Léger’s view, postmodern identity politics has utilized these seven variants (intentionally or inadver- tently) to displace the universalist class politics established by Marxism and the struggle for socialism. Although identity politics may circle around issues of social justice and oppression that concern the left, a return to Marxist materialism would address the problems of labor exploitation as well as gender and racial oppression. Where capitalism reigns as the dominant form of socio-political and economic relations, class “retains a distinct explanatory value” which is as true for “considerations of identity and oppression as it is for the vagaries of social status or occupational dynamics” (16).
Identity politics is anti-universalist by nature; therefore, it poses a direct threat to socialist solidarity. This anti-universalist attitude threads through scholarship on intersectionality, critical race theory and feminist theory. For Léger, these kinds of theories wrongly eschew universality for the sake of individual emancipation. Intersec- tionality – what Walter Benn Michaels defines as the “opiate of the PMC” – acknowledges an abstract universality of particulars instead of the concrete capitalist universality that forms those particulars(60). This, Léger asserts, displaces an Enlightenment theory of univers- alism that called for political equality (based on this universality) regardless of a person’s status or attributes.
While Léger’s perspective on Enlightenment universality might be problematic for some readers, his general contention is well founded. Segments of identity politics, critical race theory, and feminist theory do not constitute a new kind of politics as much as a new type of mor- ality. They use difference and distinction as the basis for emancipation, “replacing equality with personal feeling and moral imperatives” (47). Class critiques may not directly address group or individual experiences of oppression, but they indicate a universal dimension that is far more radically inclusive than identity-based interests. While many of the aforementioned theories reject issues of class, Marxism accounts for these forms of oppression in its analysis.
Léger defends universality against a postmodern agenda that “allowed identity politics to renew its radical credentials through the rejection of Enlightenment and Marxist principles” (30). This agenda, which promotes social and cultural relativism and a classless rhetoric of power, informs Léger’s critique of radical democracy and populism and their political variations. He is particularly troubled by Foucaul- dian discourses that define socialism as a discursive landscape rather than an empirical fact. By failing to identify the cause of oppression, discourse theories allow corporate powers to falsely align themselves with social movements and public interest groups. Mouffe and Laclau reimagine the place of power or universality as empty, which they believe creates a democratic space where interest groups can co-exist. Additionally, Mouffe suggests that for concepts like the “new hegemonic block” to come to fruition, the left must move beyond a “class essentialist” political understanding. This provokes one of Léger’s most fervent rebuttals; Mouffe’s theory and others like it are predicated on an acceptance of capitalism. These scholars can only con- ceive of the universal space as empty because they do not renounce capitalist democracy. Leger argues that they justify their alignment with capitalism by prioritizing a politics based on relations of power over a politics based on relations of production (38). To that end, he examines how contemporary populism utilizes aspects of radical democracy and post-modern theory to function as its own strand of identity politics.
In a depoliticized capitalist democratic landscape, the citizenry is left with “nothing more to champion than the free market system”(109). Léger compares the academic variants with standard political ideologies and contrasts them with socialist emancipatory politics. He distinguishes between fascists, who “are dissatisfied with the status quo because it limits their deranged desires,” conservatives who are primarily worried about their own self-interest, and liberals, who “are generally satisfied with the status quo even if they are dis- trustful of institutions” (102). Léger cuts through terminological abstractions - such as in the transmutations from liberalism to neoliberalism - and saves socialism from incorrect associations with other political alignments. This clarification is needed, as neoliberal democrats have absorbed progressive, liberal, and even socialist move- ments to make identity politics seem like a radical alternative. Identity politics do not constitute the future of the left or a counter action to neo- liberal domination–they are an institutionalized feature of the hegemon itself.
Léger is explicit – issues of identity cannot be conceptualized outside a critique of capitalist universality. Any theory or political ideology that suggests otherwise – offering ways to negotiate between class and identity is not socialist. Identity theorists may try to mediate the culture wars to bring about some kind of peaceful res- olution or harmonious coexistence. Bipartisan political ideologies, to varying degrees, promise something similar. But there is no resolution for class struggle within the capitalist system. As Zizek declares, “Class struggle does not function in this way: It aims at mutual recognition and respect of classes only in its Fascist or corporatist versions”(101). Léger summarizes this kind of false reconciliation neatly, cata- loging the problems that postmodern leftists face when they are forced to choose between class critiques and strands of oppression. Even if the means of actualization are not always clear, Léger makes his point elegantly – socialists cannot contend with identity without also addressing the realities of class exploitation.
Léger’s book distinguishes itself with its directness and concision. It is a timely and resonant read, reminding readers that, in the fragmented terrain of identity politics, where gender, sexual and racial conflicts are used by the ruling elite to divide and control the populace, we must never lose sight of the real enemy, the concrete universal – capitalism.
© 2025 Mariah Wakefield
George Mason University,
Washington, DC, USA
Mwakefie@masonlive.gmu.edu
https://doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2024.2435793
