1st Edition
Identity Trumps Socialism The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism
With essays by today’s leading leftist social critics, Identity Trumps Socialism presents a rigorous and persuasive primer on the problems generated by postmodern and neoliberal challenges to the legacy of emancipatory universality. In addition to the ways in which capitalism has used racialized and gendered forms of oppression to divide the working class, today’s activism must also understand how neoliberal capitalism uses identity politics to undermine socialism. Identity Trumps Socialism advances an emancipatory left universality that addresses the limits of diversity and makes the case for the centrality of class in the struggle against global capitalist hegemony.
1 Introduction: The Politics of Emancipatory Universality Marc James Léger. 2 Eight Theses on the Universal Alain Badiou. 3 Politics, Identification and Subjectivization Jacques Rancière. 4 The Eternal Return of the Same Class Struggle Slavoj Žižek. 5 Universality and Its Discontents Bruno Bosteels. 6 Capitalism, Class and Universalism: Escaping the Cul-de-Sac of Postcolonial Theory Vivek Chibber. 7 Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique Barbara Foley. 8 From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond Nancy Fraser. 9 What Materialist Black Political History Actually Looks Like Adolph Reed, Jr. 10 Who’s Afraid of Left Populism? Anti-Policing Struggles and the Frontiers of the American Left Cedric G. Johnson. 11 Class Not Race Walter Benn Michaels. 12 Capitalism Is the Problem: Articulating Race and Gender with Class David Harvey. 13 A Comrade for the Anthropocene: Beyond Survivors and Allies Jodi Dean. 14 The Use and Abuse of Class Reductionism for the Left Marc James Léger. 15 Index
Biography
Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist living in Montreal. He is the author of several books, including Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022) and Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (2022).
