Contemporary bipartisan politics undermines socialist solidarity by ignoring class issues and pitting advocates of social justice against ethno-national chauvinists. This guide to the recent wave of "woke" culture wars provides a radical class analysis and critique of the most popular academic trends around diversity and inclusion: radical democracy, intersectionality, privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. The book further explains the complexity of today’s cultural conflicts by examining how these issues are viewed across the political spectrum, including populist and postmodern perspectives. Exploring historical, cultural, political and economic developments since the postwar era, this follow-up to Identity Trumps Socialism provides the reader with everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the campus wars that have gone mainstream.
Introduction: The Identity of Politics
Part I: Contemporary Variants of Identity Politics
1. Identity Politics
2. Radical Democracy
3. Populism
4. Privilege Theory and Critical Race Theory
5. Intersectionality and Decoloniality
Part II: Diversity Across the Political Spectrum
1. Conservatism and Fascism
2. Liberalism and Neoliberalism
3. Postmodernism
4. Anarchism
5. Social Democracy and Democratic Socialism
6. Socialism and Communism
Part III: Three Caveats Against the Notion of a Postmodern Left
1. The Problem of Anti-Universalism
2. The Difference Between Socialist Politics and Identity Politics
3. Cynicism and Eclectic Materialism
Class, Class, Class
Conclusion: Theses on Class Struggle and Identity Politics
Biography
Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist living in Montreal. He is the author of Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022), as well as Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (2022), and editor of Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism (Routledge, 2023).
"Class Struggle and Identity Politics provides a comprehensive overview of the debate between socialist and identity politics, convincingly showing why the former, rather the latter, must serve as the groundwork for any truly emancipatory politics. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand how the neoliberal obsession with identity has reduced ostensibly leftist politics from materialism to moralism, from macropolitics to micropolitics, and from solidarity to difference – and what is to be done about it!"
Russell Sbriglia, Associate Professor of Literature Studies at Seton Hall University, and co-editor with Slavoj Žižek of Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism
"Marc James Léger’s unwavering intervention recentres the primacy of class struggle in any project with emancipatory aspirations. Against the pitfalls of culture wars and the traps of both wokeism and anti-wokeism, this book makes resolutely clear that a Marxism worthy of the name must shed its self-defeating attachment to identity politics and affirm in an uncompromised fashion a universal politics."
Zahi Zalloua, Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Whitman College, and author of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality
