[[link removed]]

THE FALSE CHOICE BETWEEN IDENTITY POLITICS AND ECONOMIC POPULISM  
[[link removed]]


 

Michael A. McCarthy
August 14, 2025
Hammer & Hope
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ A left that ignores the differences within the working class will
never build power. _

, Brittney Leeanne Williams, Inner Storm 2: Spiraling, 2022. Courtesy
of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, NY.

 

In building a politics to fight the right, economic populism is
necessary but insufficient. Policies and rhetoric framed in the
interests of the working class as a whole are crucial. But organizers
have always known that in order to build a movement, you need to
address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of
your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone
you want to draw into your base. Because the U.S. working class is
already segmented, an emancipatory class politics that can beat the
right must do both.

But recent conventional wisdom says otherwise.

In the wake of Kamala Harris’s catastrophic loss to Donald Trump in
the 2024 presidential election, a narrative has taken hold: “Woke”
costs elections. Only by abandoning so-called identity politics or
issues specific to minorities will the left win working-class voters
back.

This war on identity has powerful proponents across the political
spectrum, including the tech billionaires Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk,
and Peter Thiel, who continue to pour millions of dollars into
initiatives aimed at destroying the causes they deem woke or
antiracist. Even prominent centrists like The New York Times editorial
board joined the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo’s side of the
culture war when it recently complained that the Democratic Party
“remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’
differences — by race, gender, sexuality and religion — rather
than our shared values.”

Instead, economic populism has emerged as a compelling alternative. On
the left, some argue
[[link removed]] that
economic populism is the only grounds for building a working-class
movement that can reverse class dealignment
[[link removed]].
In this view, the left should simply pursue a politics of class while
identity issues, such as immigration, gender, race, and sexuality,
should be downplayed in political organizing. Others go further
and treat
[[link removed]] conservative views
on those topics as working-class majority views that the left must
learn to embrace.

But this new common sense contradicts reality. Setting forms of
identity, such as race, against class as fundamentally opposed bases
of politics misrepresents how building working-class power works on
the ground, both today and throughout history. Dismissing the social
differences between working-class people as irrelevant ignores the key
building blocks of class politics. And a left that embraces the
right’s divide-and-conquer rhetoric on criminal justice, gender,
race, and immigration will only deepen political divisions within the
working class. Subscribing to either view would doom the working-class
solidarity needed to win.

When it comes to building a working-class politics against the right,
the stakes couldn’t be higher. Either we construct the solidarity
needed to dismantle the political oligarchy and achieve the massive
redistribution that the 99 percent needs, or our country will
continue to slide into an authoritarianism that scapegoats the most
precarious members of the working class.

Acloser look at the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s
extraordinary victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s
Democratic mayoral primary shows how economic populism works best when
combined with targeted appeals. Some have held up
[[link removed]] Mamdani’s
win as vindication of the view that economic populism alone gets the
goods, but he built a campaign on listening and meeting voters where
they are. After his success in the primary, he told New York
[[link removed]] magazine,
“We have tried to listen more and lecture less, and it’s in those
very conversations that I had with Democrats who voted for Donald
Trump many months ago that I heard what it would take to bring them
back to the Democratic Party — that it would be a relentless focus
on an economic agenda.” It’s true his campaign foregrounded
bread-and-butter issues, but not at the exclusion of other aspects of
working people’s lives that matter to them.

Though Mamdani leads with the cost of living and uses plain, sensible
language, his platform [[link removed]] also
includes positions on particular sectors of the working class and the
unique problems they face. He has been a principled voice of
opposition against the genocide in Gaza
[[link removed]],
has vowed to oppose ICE
[[link removed]], and
celebrates his status as an immigrant and a South Asian. On policing
and public safety, while he distanced himself from unpopular rhetoric
such as “defund the police” on the campaign trail, he offered
restorative justice proposals, including expanding non-police social
workers to intervene in crises, providing mental health services, and
ending Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to build a $225 million “cop
city” in Queens. He invited people into his coalition by
recognizing LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers
[[link removed]];
appealing to Haitian New Yorkers by calling Haiti its Creole name,
Ayiti [[link removed]]; and speaking to
the particular experiences of Bangladeshi aunties
[[link removed]], who turned out to be a
powerful organizing force
[[link removed]] for his
campaign. These complexities don’t fit easily into the economic
populist playbook, and upend the view that working people have
conservative cultural values that the left needs to defer to.

Mamdani’s campaign shows that working-class politics always relates
to the ways people’s particular experiences move them to fight. The
idea that workers simply have a one-dimensional set of interchangeable
class interests that motivate them and that politicians can activate
with the correct message deals in what Stuart Hall termed
[[link removed]] “low-flying
economism masquerading as ‘materialism.’” The reality is that
working-class political action always develops out of the intersecting
forces, interests, and identities of the working class itself and
cannot be activated or imposed from above. People don’t merely show
up to a protest against ICE because they are immigrants themselves.
They may be there because they have undocumented people in their
personal networks or simply want to express solidarity for a group
they feel is being treated unfairly. People voted for Mamdani not only
because he promises to lower the cost of living in New York but also
because particular aspects of his platform, targeted at subgroups such
as parents who cannot afford child care, either benefit them
personally or are things they believe in. Emancipatory working-class
politics is about both what is good for workers and also what is good
in general.

There are versions of the view that identity politics is a distraction
from the real class struggle on both the left
[[link removed]] and on the right
[[link removed]].
A closer look shows that perspective is based on simplistic and
distorting characterizations of working-class people and their
interests, an error my colleague Mathieu Desan and I call class
abstractionism
[[link removed]].

The core claims of this view of the working class are: Everyone
requires a basic set of material needs — housing, health care, and
food — to live. In capitalist society, most people work for an
employer to acquire these core goods. Capitalists depend on workers
but have an interest in minimizing the wages and benefits they give
their workers in order to increase profits. So far, so good, but here
is the twist: Class is therefore more important than non-class social
factors, including race, because it alone directly governs workers’
material well-being. Both capitalists and workers understand their
antagonistic interests, and that understanding shapes them as
political actors. Identity categories such as race occlude these core
relations because they form social bases to organize politically that
are distinct from class. The argument is that you can organize on the
basis of class or race — the two do not overlap.

That leads to an important strategic upshot. The working class is the
only group able to challenge the power of capitalists because its
members make up the majority of society and, because of their unique
role in production, can shut the system down by withholding labor.
They have both the numbers and the leverage. Again, so far, so good,
but class abstractionists further argue that that makes identity-based
movements within the working class distractions from working-class
politics at large because, as one commenter
[[link removed]] puts
it, they are not “the central and the key players in this society
that can bring the kind of changes we need.” Only a working-class
majority can win, and to the extent that minorities are part of that
majority, they need to subsume their own interests into those of the
whole.

But this claim is absurd when set against demographic and historical
facts. First, even within a working-class majority, it is always a
minority of workers who are involved in major labor actions and
strikes. The working class never acts as a whole; it isn’t a unitary
bloc. Second, subgroups within the working class organize along
non-class lines regularly and have dramatically changed history —
see the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

More broadly, many aspects of how working people’s lives are
structured beyond the worker-employer relation determine what they do
to survive and therefore how they see their own material interests.
This is obvious for Black politics. Consider, for instance,
the greater historic risk
[[link removed]] of
Black people dying of tuberculosis in the U.S. because of racial
segregation. Or the stress and physical pain of social alienation
[[link removed]] caused by
persistent racial dehumanization. Or the psychic burden of the double
consciousness described by W. E. B. Du Bois that results from
pervasive discrimination. Or the anxiety produced by the increased
surveillance and hostile interactions with law enforcement a poor
Black neighborhood endures. Or the difficulty in navigating labor or
housing markets because of racism or fewer personal and familial
networks to draw upon. The list goes on. The key point is that all of
these factors shape what people have to do to get by and therefore
their material interests. In New York, the Black teenager who
regularly gets stopped and frisked
[[link removed]] by
the police on the way to his underfunded public high school doesn’t
merely have interests as a worker.

The wealth of elites can afford them the ability to transcend any
hardships that might be particular to their demographic group,
allowing them to have a laser focus on amassing more money and
prestige. But working-class people aren’t defined only by the burden
of capitalists gaining more and more at their expense; a wide range of
things matter to them, too, and some are specific to their sectors of
the working class. The fruit picker in California’s Central Valley
is not only exploited by the Trump-voting farmer who withholds wages
but also is dominated by the ICE agents stalking him through the
fields.

What does this mean for working-class politics? First, workers come to
redistributive and egalitarian projects through both class and
non-class appeals. In the workplace, they do not form unions and
withdraw their labor in protest only as workers but also as Democrats
or Republicans, immigrants or citizens, free or incarcerated, straight
or queer, Christians or Muslims, women or men, white people or Black
people. The hard work of organizing involves creating shared goals
that can speak to different needs, as well as acts of solidarity in
which some segments of workers defend others, thereby creating the
social context for broader collective action. It means building a view
of what is good in general, not just what is good for an individual.
The Knights of Labor slogan, which the organization sometimes
struggled to live up to, captures it best: “An injury to one is the
concern of all.”

Second, working-class politics develops and forms in all the places
working-class people live, breathe, and form attachments, needs, and
grievances, including outside the workplace. Look at organizing among
Black prisoners led by working-class Black women connected to the
carceral state through their families. The existence of Mothers
Reclaiming Our Children
[[link removed]], Black
Mamas Bail Out Action
[[link removed]],
and similar organizations shows that the issues workers fight for
reflect their distinct positions in an overlapping set of material
relations. This is precisely why, as the criminologist Beth
Richie writes [[link removed]],
“in the realm of issues related to incarceration, women have assumed
key leadership positions, advocating for critical resistance to the
prison-industrial complex, sentencing reform, a moratorium on the
death penalty, and the development of alternative sanctions,” even
when these are not narrowly understood as women’s issues or
working-class issues.

The abstract class structure does not determine the form working-class
politics takes. Anyone interested in the future of working-class
politics needs to consider non-class social structures, such as race,
gender, citizenship, and place — what are dismissed as identity
issues in U.S. politics — not as distractions but as building
blocks. The working class as an organizational and political force has
always been assembled out of those segments.

As capitalism develops, it generates social differentiation within the
working class itself. Competition between firms and workers creates
uneven development both within and between places. Profit-driven
competition does not raise all boats; some places receive more
investment while others are starved. Similar to the way a city can
have both food deserts and extraordinary food waste, the working class
encompasses credentialed workers who have job protections and good
wages, people in rural and urban areas with concentrated poverty whose
work is poorly paid and precarious, and undocumented workers in the
shadows earning below the minimum wage because of their citizenship
status.

Class struggles that emerge from working-class communities where there
are already
[[link removed]] strong
communal bonds tend to be more effective. Capitalism doesn’t simply
dissolve such bonds, leaving unorganized workers atomized; it also
produces them or builds them anew. It segments the working class into
subgroups with their own subcultures
[[link removed]].
This differentiation makes non-class identities such as race
[[link removed]] central
to class politics. This is our basic reality. Working-class politics
always starts with an already differentiated working class that is
mobilized around different collective concerns.

It is also why building solidarity across social differences both at
the workplace and beyond, where people have competing material
grievances, is so hard. The challenge is exponentially harder at the
national level. And it is even more precarious as an international
project, as we see today, when some segments of the working
class embrace immigration restrictions
[[link removed]] while
others protest
[[link removed]] the
armed forces defending ICE raids. Segments of the working class are
often involved in opposing political projects that self-serving
politicians across the political spectrum claim to be in their class
interests.

It is no surprise that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and
the wave of foreclosures that disproportionately devastated Black and
Latino working-class neighborhoods the collective political struggles
springing up from working-class Black neighborhoods were articulated
as Black struggles. These poor people’s movements took the form of a
radical refusal not of work but of civil order. It was not a movement
of workers in the workplace via strikes but rather, because of
residential segregation and concentrated unemployment, a movement of
workers in the streets via protests. Black politics was the form this
class struggle took before political entrepreneurs, corporate boards,
and diversity officers claimed the movement as their own.

Politicians using economic populist or class rhetoric don’t create
working-class politics; at their best, they help assemble it. Class
politics always arises out of the identities and bonds people have
already formed, which is precisely why successful left politicians
need multidimensional platforms.

Nowhere is the dynamic view of class more explicit than in the work of
Du Bois. In his 1935 masterpiece, _Black Reconstruction in America
1860–1880_
[[link removed]],
he gives an account of the democratic revolution of enslaved Black
people and the counterrevolution of property as one of class struggle,
domination, and divisions, expressed in racial terms. Du Bois explains
the mass exodus of former slaves from Southern plantations during the
Civil War as a general strike, in which Black power was class power.
But the book is titled _Black Reconstruction_ rather
than _Working-Class Reconstruction_ because it tells the history of
poor and disenfranchised Black people liberating themselves and then
seeing their gains ripped away. The bourgeois counterrevolution of the
Southern planter class allied with Northern manufacturing, with the
Southern white worker as junior partner, to crush the nascent Southern
democracy by stripping away Black people’s newly won right to vote
and destroying their organizations with racial terror. Du Bois writes,
“The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun, then
moved back again toward slavery,” thanks to capital’s offensive
and white workers’ failure to pursue working-class solidarity.

Earlier, in 1933, Du Bois wrote
[[link removed]], “There is not at present the
slightest indication that a Marxian revolution based on a united
class-conscious proletariat is anywhere on the American far horizon.
Rather race antagonism and labor group rivalry is still undisturbed by
world catastrophe. In the hearts of black laborers alone, therefore,
lie those ideals of democracy in politics and industry which may in
time make the workers of the world effective dictators of
civilization.” Du Bois’s claim is that it is through the unique
political agency of the Black working class that America might move
toward genuine interracial solidarity.

Many other Black socialists also understood Black people’s struggle
for democratic rights as central to the working-class struggle. In
1948 the Trinidadian revolutionary C. L. R. James clearly
centered Black agency
[[link removed]],
pointing out that the Black struggle of the emergent civil rights
movement “has a vitality and a validity of its own” with “roots
in the past of America” that give it “an organic political
perspective” that “is in itself a constituent part of the struggle
for socialism.”

The dynamic perspectives of Du Bois and James emphasize the way that
working-class politics emerge out of particular historical moments by
particular subsections of the working class itself — and not always
under the banner of “workers.” They understood the working class
as segmented and their unity as potential rather than given. When
movements and organizers lose sight of the reality of working-class
differentiation, solidarity has no ground to stand on.

The socialist movement in the U.S. had to learn this lesson early in
the 20th century. At the Socialist Party’s founding convention in
Indianapolis in 1901, members adopted a “Negro Resolution” that
acknowledged the “peculiar position” of Black workers. Yet the
resolution offered nothing more than an invitation to Black workers to
join the party, asserting, “We declare to the negro worker the
identity of his interests and struggles with the interests and
struggles of the workers of all lands, without regard to race, or
color, or sectional lines.” Socialist Party members pushed to remove
a clause from the resolution recognizing Black people’s political
disenfranchisement and subjection to lynching terror, instead opting
to emphasize the homogeneity of the working class, declaring that
“the only line of division which exists in fact is that between the
producers and the owners of the world.”

There were real racists in the party, such as the founding party
member Victor Berger, the first socialist elected to Congress. But the
majority view within the Socialist Party was that Black people in
America needed no special place on the party’s founding platform
because Black working-class people were already part of that class and
therefore entirely equal. Eugene Debs raged against the “savory
bouquet of white superiority
[[link removed]]”
and cancelled a 1912 speaking tour of the South in protest of
segregation. Yet even Debs said “the class struggle is colorless
[[link removed]]” and
supported the repeal of Socialist Party resolutions on the “Negro
question” on the grounds that “we have nothing special to offer
the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.” In
1913, Du Bois argue
[[link removed]]d that “the Negro
Problem” is “the great test of the American Socialist.” What
history shows ever since is that the class struggle is colorful.

There are, of course, far darker moments in the U.S. labor movement.
Working-class politics and organizing can just as easily turn
reactionary. Consider the massacre of East St. Louis, Ill., where in
1917 as many as 200 Black workers and their family members were shot,
burned, or hanged by mobs of raging white workers. Investigating the
mass violence for The Crisis
[[link removed]],
Martha Gruening and Du Bois homed in on the cause: Strikes of the
relatively unskilled all-white manufacturing unions were being
weakened by Black strikebreakers, who had recently migrated in the
thousands from the South. Instead of organizing with them — an idea
that was beyond the pale for the union — white workers opted for a
murderous race riot. Of the union’s motto, “Labor conquers
everything,” Du Bois wrote, “In East St. Louis it has conquered
Liberty, Justice, Mercy, Law and the Democracy which is a nation’s
vaunt.”

But socialism and labor in the U.S. have seen more than just missteps
and massacres; an intertwining current of interracial solidarity also
runs through their histories. In 1921, at Vladimir Lenin’s urging,
the Communist Party USA explicitly recognized the special character of
Black oppression in America, acknowledging that “the history of the
Southern Negro is the history of a reign of terror — of persecution,
rape and murder.” The party program pledged
[[link removed]],
“The Workers Party will support the Negroes in their struggle for
Liberation, and will help them in their fight for economic, political
and social equality.” It continued, “Its task will be to destroy
altogether the barrier of race prejudice that has been used to keep
apart the Black and white workers, and bind them into a solid union of
revolutionary forces for the overthrow of our common enemy.” During
the Great Depression, Black workers in both the North
[[link removed]] and the South
[[link removed]] joined the
Communist Party in far greater numbers than they did the Socialist
Party.

When the communists soon began to organize explicitly around struggles
particular to Black people, such as the wrongful conviction of the
Scottsboro Boys, their Black working-class membership grew. Robin D.
G. Kelley’s _Hammer and Hoe_
[[link removed]] shows that
in the early 1930s, Black membership in the Alabama Communist Party
grew even more rapidly than white membership. The interracial
solidarity of Reds in the workplace in turn helped to fuel the
grassroots organizing that injected the CIO with militancy
[[link removed]],
leading to a major upsurge in labor organizing and an increase in
union density. Despite the New Deal’s racial shortfalls, as a whole
it established crucial labor provisions that were a direct result
[[link removed]] of this interracial
solidarity.

After the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 demanded labor leaders submit
affidavits disavowing communism and the Red Scare took hold,
communists — many of them Black — were purged from American
unions. The result was that many unions shifted into business
unionism, weakening their militancy and inroads into interracial
solidarity.

Class abstractionists view class politics and racial politics as
mutually exclusive and competing alternatives when it comes to
organizing. In reality, class struggles and antiracist struggles often
feed into each other. As the labor scholar Cedric De Leon argues
[[link removed]], Black
working-class organizations played the driving role in desegregating
the American labor movement. A. Philip Randolph helped create the
Negro American Labor Council to fight against segregation when the
AFL-CIO refused to desegregate its own unions. Work from the
sociologist Matthew Nichter shows
[[link removed]] that many of
the communists and socialists trained in the interracial labor
organizing of the 1930s and 1940s became leaders of the civil rights
movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In turn, the civil rights
movement revitalized
[[link removed]] American
labor militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. Continuing the pattern of one
feeding into the other, following a series of labor strikes demanding
hazard pay and coronavirus protections, the Black Lives Matter
protests of 2020 led to new workplace organizing
[[link removed]] over the past
five years. Working-class fights at work were triggered by Black
struggles in the streets, and vice versa.

Through the lens of Black socialists like Du Bois, we understand that
the working class is not an undifferentiated mass with a
one-dimensional set of interests located in the employer-worker
relation. Competition in the labor market, which pits workers against
one another and divides working people into segments, makes solidarity
across the workplace and beyond it the fundamental key to building a
working-class politics that can ratchet up to the level of a national
and international political project.

Working-class solidarity is cleareyed about these divisions and the
different conditions they produce for the separate segments of the
class. They cannot be papered over with empty theoretical
abstractions. This is a challenge for working-class politics that
nobody understands better than Steve Bannon and other economic
populists on the right who manipulate insider-outsider divisions among
the working class to build their own coalitions. When Trump described
immigrants
[[link removed]] as
“poisoning the blood of our country,” he was framing his populism
around the idea that there are good and bad workers. The right is
undeniably practicing identity politics. An economic populism of the
left that wishes such differences away will have only weak grounds for
building a coalition.

Karl Marx himself came to similar conclusions. In an 1870 letter
[[link removed]] to
America, he compared intra-class divisions between poor white workers
and Black workers there to the divisions between Irish workers and
English workers: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England
now possesses a working class divided into two _hostile_ camps,
English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English
worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard
of life.” He continued, “_This antagonism_ is the secret of
the _impotence of the English working class_, despite its
organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains
its power.” Working-class power in England had to be forged through
solidarity, he argued, and the work had to be done by the workers
themselves, because “the _national emancipation of Ireland_ is not
a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but
the _first condition of their own social emancipation_.”

What is the future of working-class politics in America? Either
organizers in the workplace and community and politicians on the
campaign trail and in Congress build a project that links the distinct
segments of the working-class together in solidarity through both
economic populism and targeted appeals, or the fascists will win.

MICHAEL A. MCCARTHY is the director of community studies and an
associate professor of sociology at the University of California,
Santa Cruz. His most recent book is _The Master’s Tools: How
Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It)_
[[link removed]].

HAMMER & HOPE is a new magazine of Black politics and culture. It is a
project rooted in the power of solidarity, the spirit of struggle, and
the generative power of debate, all of which are vital parts of our
movement toward freedom.

We are inspired by the courageous Black Communists in Alabama whose
lives and struggles to organize against capitalism and white
supremacist terror in the 1930s and 1940s are memorialized in Robin D.
G. Kelley's book Hammer and Hoe, from which we take our name.
[[link removed]]

We will envision collectively what a better future might look like and
the strategies that could get us there. Such an undertaking compels us
to deepen our knowledge of history, politics, culture, and our own
movements.

Our aim is to build a project whose politics and aesthetics reflect
the electric spirit of the protesters who flooded the streets in 2020,
a project that breathes life into the transformative ideas pointing us
toward the world we deserve.

Come join us. We have a world to win.

HAMMER & HOPE is free to read. Sign up
[[link removed]] for our mailing
list, follow us [[link removed]] on
Instagram. Donate to Hammer & Hope.
[[link removed]]

* Politics
[[link removed]]
* elections
[[link removed]]
* economic populism
[[link removed]]
* identity politics
[[link removed]]
* class
[[link removed]]
* capitalism
[[link removed]]
* class struggle
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]