Lots of people now think about class in terms of identity. But this is a peculiarly modern idea. We find it in terms like ‘Nascar Dads’. And we find it in weird, quasi-ideological attachments to Carhartt products. We might call the politics of class-as-identity ‘class-identitarianism.’ It’s an ugly term, but let’s not shy away from ugly. At least not yet.

I’m working on answering two questions in this post. First, is class an identity? And, if it is, does class-identitarianism offer an explanatory framework that helps us make sense of the world and/or formulate a better political path?

Is Class an Identity?

The short answer is “no.” At least, the answer is “no” if we’re using ‘identity’ to mean something analogous to gender, race, et al. Class isn’t an identity, and I’ve written before on what class really is.

At a broad level, there are two kinds of accounts of class. On one account, class is an outcome. It’s one’s socioeconomic status (SES), measured in terms like income, wealth, and/or educational status. On a second account, the account I prefer, class is a process and set of relationships. It’s a group of people who share a common position (e.g., worker, boss) with respect to the ownership and control of economic resources.

But what those accounts share in common is that they’re not visions of class as an identity.

History of Identity Politics

It’s worth reiterating how new this class-as-identity idea is. The earliest identity politics movements, at least in the US, thought about identity separately from class and class politics. They definitely didn’t think class was an identity. I’d recommend Asad Haider’s book Mistaken Identity for a historical overview of these issues. And I wrote about that book in an earlier post.

We can find identity politics in both right-wing and left-wing forms. But the right-wing forms have a much deeper history in American politics. The point of right-wing identity politics was to divert and distract working-class people from the class politics of the left. It divided people by race, gender, et al. And, in particular, it fanned the flames of white male anger and resentment.

Historically, at least, these right-wingers did a lot to pretend that class was an identity. But even they knew they were pretending. And that class isn’t really an identity. However, it sure was a useful idea for them. They used it to move the Overton window well to the right.

The Transition to Class-Identitarianism on the Right…

The idea that class is an identity comes from newer forms of politics that I called ‘identitarianism’ much earlier. While that’s an older word, I gave it a new definition. I defined it as a kind of reduction of politics to issues of identity. This can be a reduction to one identity (e.g., race- or gender-identitarianism) or to all identities (i.e., intersectional-identitarianism).

On the political right, the goal is to whip up populist sentiment and anger among rural, wealthier white people. Especially white men (though sometimes white women). These are people who make up a large segment of Trump’s base. Right-wingers do this by driving these rural, wealthier white people to pretend they’re working-class. And they pretend they’re working-class by adopting allegedly working-class products and styles. Big, expensive trucks. Affected ‘country’ accents. And so on.

This is quite different from how right-wing identity politics worked during the civil rights era. Back then, it was mostly an attempt to divert real working-class people from class politics. But now, it’s an effort to appropriate the term ‘working-class’ on behalf of non-working-class people. And the goal is to totally erase class politics. You might think of it as the next step in a logical progression.

…And on the ‘Left’

The identity politics of the left, in their original form, opposed the workerism and narrow forms of class reductionism practiced by much of the American left before the 1970s. Much of the American left followed the sometimes regressive, often myopic, views of the mainstream labor movement. This was largely to the detriment of women and black and Latinx people. But not only those groups. It also hit unemployed people and all groups hardest hit by accumulation by dispossession.

Now we see something different. It’s what amounts to a clean break with leftist political projects. Take, for example, documents like We Are The Left. They explicitly assert that ‘all politics are identity politics.’ These liberals, being socially liberal and often relatively wealthy, fail to see class politics or anything that goes beyond issues of identity. It’s their entire political universe. They long ago abandoned any grounding in the anti-capitalist views of, say, the Combahee River Collective.

This, too, is an erasure of class politics.

Nascar Dads and Redneck Women

Some of what’s new is that pundits and even political scientists started adopting these same forms in the mid-2000s. They started doing so around the time of John Kerry’s loss to George W. Bush in 2004. Many focused on made-up groups like ‘Nascar Dads’ or, say, ‘Redneck Women’. These were supposed to be big swing groups or people hidden by the data. Pundits love conflating phony groups like this with (more or less equally phony) groups like the ‘white working-class.’

We see, then, an emerging consensus from many directions.

But Don’t People Use Class as an Identity?

I recently read Sarah Smarsh’s book Heartland. I’ll probably have more to say about this book later. But for now, the point here is that Smarsh was born in 1980. She grew up in rural Kansas, and she talked about recent changes to rural America.

This idea of wearing Carhartt gear, driving around in huge $50,000 trucks, talking with an affected rural accent, and generally strutting around like a douchebag is pretty new. I grew up in rural America, and people didn’t do shit like this in the 1980s. Smarsh and I grew up in the working-class world Trumpists pretend to represent. And we both know most of these Trumpists aren’t working-class people.

So, it’s all pretty new. And the people doing it are the sorts of people I described above: rural (though sometimes suburban), relatively wealthy white people who didn’t go to college. The relationship between class and identity is complex and multi-faceted. But the popular American view of ‘white working-class identity’ is mostly outlandish nonsense.

What is Class-Identitarianism?

Let’s think a bit about what class-identitarianism might amount to. If identitarianism is a reduction of politics to issues of identity, then class-identitarianism is a reduction of politics to identities grounded in confused and inaccurate notions of ‘class’. In particular, it’s a reduction of politics to things like ‘white working-class identity’.

Class-identitiarianism is what we might call a ‘second-order confusion.’ It begins with a confused conception of class. From there, it moves to a confused reductionism about identity. And so, it’s a confusion that takes as its object another confusion.

One of the problems with gender- and race-identitarianism is that they must reify race or gender for these categories to work for their purposes. But, in reality, they’re just features of people assigned for reasons that have to do with location within a class system. Class-identitarianism is tricky because it uses the actual language of ‘class,’ even though it’s really just an identity term in disguise. It, too, must reify the identity category it’s based around (in this case, working-classness). And it must attribute some kind of inherently praiseworthy feature to it (in this case, traits like cooperation).

Intersectionality and Class

So, what would a class-identitarian turn look like, politically?

One form it’s currently taking is the inclusion of class in visions of intersectionality. Many people who talk about intersectionality now list something called ‘classism’ alongside racism, sexism, et al. in the general list of forms of oppression.

When they say ‘classism’, what they usually mean is something like the everyday harms, prejudices, and microaggressions faced by people of lower SES. A better term for all of this would probably be ‘SESism’, or ‘socioeconomic status-ism’. It’s not directly related to class, though it does hit class indirectly.

But the deeper problem with what intersectionality theorists are doing when they talk about ‘classism’ is that they’ve created a false analogy. ‘Class’ is not analogous to ‘race’ and ‘gender.’ And class politics are not identity politics in the ways that race and gender politics are.

The Key Disanalogy

Here’s one way to think about the difference. One goal of most (though not all) anti-racist and anti-sexist politics is to preserve racial and gender difference while rendering those differences inert. Most intersectionality advocates want a world where we can be black, white, et al., and men, women, non-binary, et al. freely, or where these differences don’t impact our SES outcomes.

But that’s not the goal of class politics. We don’t want a world where the bourgeoisie treats the proletariat nicely. Nor do we want a world where the children of the proletariat and the children of the bourgeoisie have an equal chance to become wealthy. We want a world where there’s no thing such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The goal of class politics is the total obliteration of the class system.

Most intersectionality theorists seem unaware of this deep disanalogy between their politics and class politics.

Is the Working-Class Virtuous?

Another form class-identitarianism takes is the weird and fetishistic lauding of working-class values as some kind of inherent feature of working-class people. This has a long tradition in weird left-wing movements, and it’s especially common in varieties of Maoism.

But it’s working its way into more mainstream movements as well. Let’s take a look at a recent study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. What the study shows is that working-class people are more likely to use what the researchers call ‘wise reasoning.’ This includes things like intellectual humility, accepting diverse perspectives, and openness to change.

You might call this pro-social behavior. But a better way to describe these things is ‘intellectual virtues.’ Working-class people are more likely than wealthier people to have these virtues.

And, If So, Why?

Media coverage of this study was actually pretty good. The science journalist who wrote that article pointed out why working-class people are more likely to have these virtues. They’re more likely to have grown up in a situation that’s both more precarious and more social. When you have to rely to some extent on your neighbors to get by, you’re more likely to have the virtues.

Not a shocker. But I found that some of the people sharing the study seemed to think these virtues are somehow a natural part of working-class people. That’s a class-identitarianism sort of answer. And it’s nonsense. Nor does it make any more sense applied to other identity categories.

Trumpist Class-Identitarianism

I’ve picked on the liberals enough, and so this is the point where Trumpism naturally enters the picture. But I’m not going to say too much here. Trumpism is a major theme of this blog. I’ve written at some length elsewhere about how it preys on the myth that class is an identity.

What I will say here by way of a summary is that Trumpism, as a movement grounded in class-identitarianism, is the next logical step in white identity politics. Trumpism attempts to erase class politics. And it does so by adopting ideas with a vaguely left-wing history (e.g., opposition to corporate free trade, concern for the American worker) and discrediting those ideas via the most inept and foolish means of implementation imaginable.

The logical end point of Trumpism is not fascism, but nihilism. It’s headed toward a reduction of politics to cultural affectation and affront. If Trump has a second term, don’t expect a parade of legislation.

Perversions of Standpoint Theory

Intellectually, class-identitarianism is arguably a perversion of standpoint theory. Standpoint theory was originally Marxist in its orientation. Its basic idea was that some groups of people, due to their position in society, are better able to arrive at certain forms of knowledge. Theorists developed this in a variety of ways and fleshed it out, but that’s the key insight.

I hit this issue a bit in an earlier post on the liberal bubble. But people who grow up outside the bubble are more easily able to recognize it for what it is. They have to engage it, but they weren’t raised in it. This social positioning makes it easier for them to understand it.

Standpoint theorists never claimed that such knowledge is an inherent feature of any group. They didn’t claim that members of any group get ‘free knowledge’ or ‘free skills’ in virtue of group membership. Nor did they claim that anyone could learn anything without hard work. All those claims are the work of sloppy theorists and Internet dilettantes. Beyond class-identitarianism, other forms of identitarianism often involve the same sorts of errors.

“But Didn’t Marx Think Class was Ultimately an Identity?”

There’s one remaining issue. Marx had a lot to say about class consciousness. See, for example, the Communist Manifesto. Marx’s basic view is that as people become more aware of their class situation and begin organizing along class lines, they become a ‘class for itself.’ The proletariat, as a class for itself, overthrows the bourgeoisie and leads us into the bright communist future, etc.

That looks like a vision of identity politics, right? The proletariat is supposed to think of itself in identity terms. And perhaps this is a sticky wicket?

Maybe. One way to respond is that if this is a vision of identity politics, it’s an unusual and very specific one. It’s very non-identitarian. If anything, it’s kind of a reversal of class-identitarianism, in the sense that it reduces identity relations to class relations rather than vice-versa.

A Class for Itself?

But I think there’s a bigger problem that I’ll say a bit about. This is going to be short, so I’d be happy to develop this further or entertain discussion on it. I’d also recommend David Harvey’s book The Limits to Capital regarding these specific issues.

The bigger problem is that I think Marx’s vision of the proletariat as a ‘class for itself’ is tied too closely to 19th and early 20th century industrial relations. He thought about this in terms of the proletariat, which he defined relatively narrowly as certain sorts of wage workers. He thought the proletariat, specifically, would develop into a class for itself. Thus, it’s not just that he reduced the identity relation to class, he reduced it to a narrow one. And one that’s much narrower now, in a somewhat post-industrial America, than it was 100-150 years ago.

In our current world, I think class struggle has to be a lot broader than this. It’s not just the proletariat, qua proletariat, that’s central to it. In addition, there are much wider populations hit by the forces of accumulation by dispossession. This includes women oppressed qua women, black people and other non-whites oppressed qua black or non-white, tenants, disabled people, et al. Class struggle has to include all of these groups, and this probably supercedes the idea that the proletariat must be a ‘class for itself.’

Not All Politics are Identity Politics

I want to return ever so briefly to We Are The Left. I’ve picked on this document a few times in my blog, though it’s worth thinking about what’s wrong with it. I see two key problems. One is logical, and the other is more theoretical.

The logical problem is this. They assert that ‘all politics are identity politics’. But their supporting statements only show that identity politics are legitimate forms of politics. But showing that all A (identity politics) are B (politics) doesn’t show that all B (politics) are A (identity politics). It’s an error in formal logic.

The theoretical problem is more interesting. It’s not that class politics are identity politics. They aren’t, and that’s what’s wrong with class-identitarianism. Rather, identity politics are one tool of good class politics. We need to address issues of identity in our class politics because identity is centrally important to the system of accumulation by dispossession. It’s also important to various ideological features of modern capitalism.

To say, on the other hand, that all politics are identity politics is like saying that building a house is hammering. The hammer is a tool for building a house, but it’s one tool among many. Hammering is important, but so is the rest of it. And to say that ‘We Are The Left’ is, in fact, the left, is to say that anyone who skillfully swings a hammer is a carpenter.

I’m afraid there’s more to it than that.

N. B.

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