Identity, Class, and the Politics of Building a Real Movement
Moving Towards Solidarity
Growing up in New York City, I was taught about racism and sexism the same way kids are taught about bad weather: unfortunate, unfair, but ultimately random. Teachers framed these injustices as “bugs” in the American system, leftovers from the past that good people mainly had fixed. If discrimination still existed, it was because a few individuals were ignorant or hateful, not because something deeper was wrong.
But when I began learning about capitalism’s exploitation, the mass deaths produced by colonialism, and the ongoing violence of U.S. imperialism, the story stopped making sense. The more I studied, the harder it became to believe that oppression was simply the result of a few bad actors. The patterns were too consistent, too profitable, too embedded. They pointed not to individual prejudice but to systems designed to produce inequality and violence.
And then came the current U.S. presidential administration that ripped the mask off completely. Suddenly, the racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia weren’t glitches; they were openly embraced as a political strategy. Millions cheered them on. These weren’t anomalies. They were reminders of what America has always been willing to tolerate, and often celebrate.
The United States is built on genocide, slavery, land theft, and the domination of other nations. It has overthrown democracies, installed dictators, waged wars of empire, and experimented on marginalized communities at home. Its legal system, policing, foreign policy, and economic structure reflect those origins. The Nazis studied American racial laws for inspiration, not because the U.S. failed to hide its contradictions, but because it perfected them.
Understanding this history matters. It’s impossible to build a meaningful left politics without recognizing that oppression in the U.S. isn’t an accident; it’s foundational. Identity is crucial for people navigating these harms; it helps us name our experiences, defend ourselves, and understand how society positions us.
But identity alone can’t build a mass movement.
To confront capitalism, imperialism, and the systems that reproduce oppression, we need to build on what we share, our common exploitation, our common dispossession, our common interest in a world beyond profit and domination. If we only focus on what divides us, we stay stuck in personal narratives while the system remains untouched. If we ignore identity entirely, we risk recreating the very injustices we claim to fight.
The task is balance:
Honor identity for what it reveals, and organize across identity for what it makes possible.
Because liberation won’t come from choosing between who we are and what we have in common, it will come from weaving the two into a movement powerful enough to change the world.
In the United States, political discourse often collapses into a false binary: either you center identity, or you center class. Liberal politicians, nonprofits, and academic circles elevate identity politics as the primary terrain of struggle. Meanwhile, specific segments of the left respond by insisting that only class matters, dismissing race, gender, sexuality, and other lived experiences as distractions from the “real” fight.
Both approaches fail us.
Both approaches weaken mass politics.
Identity politics, as commonly practiced in the U.S., zooms in on individual experience while losing sight of the larger structures that shape it. It teaches people to analyze their oppression in a deeply personal way through representation, symbolism, and language instead of through the material conditions of capitalism, imperialism, and colonial power. This is why representation politics can give us a Black police chief, a woman drone pilot, or a queer CEO, while changing nothing about the violence and exploitation built into the system itself. A Black business person exploiting a Black worker is not representative of a better system; it merely perpetuates the exploitative dynamic of capitalism with a new face.
But rejecting identity entirely is just as dangerous. When class politics ignores how race, gender, disability, immigration status, and sexuality shape one’s position in the labor market and within the capitalist state, it risks replicating the very hierarchies it claims to oppose. If class analysis does not understand why Indigenous land is stolen, why Black workers are super-exploited, why migrant labor is hyper-precarious, and why disabled people are systematically excluded from economic life, then it becomes abstract, moralizing, and blind to the actual conditions of struggle.
Identity and class are not competing truths; they are layered realities. Identity politics without class becomes representation instead of liberation. Class politics without identity flattens, becomes mechanical, and is incapable of speaking to lived experience.
The challenge and the opportunity are to build a politics that honors both.
A mass movement must understand that capitalism does not oppress people in identical ways. Class exploitation is fundamental, but capitalism sorts bodies differently to intensify that exploitation. Race, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality become tools through which capital organizes who gets paid less, who gets policed more, who gets dispossessed, and who gets excluded entirely. These identities do not exist outside class struggle; they shape its terrain.
…it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression, not only of the Negro people in general, but of Negro women in particular. Nothing so exposes the drive to fascization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward Negro women.
- An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! by Claudia Jones
At the same time, identity cannot be the engine of political transformation. Individual experiences and recognition struggles cannot replace the collective force of workers organized across differences. You cannot reform capitalism by diversifying its ruling class. You cannot end imperialism by electing someone who “looks like you.” And you cannot build socialism by dissolving solidarity into competing narratives of personal oppression.
What we need is a synthesis:
Identity reveals how oppression is felt. Class reveals why oppression exists.
Identity helps us understand how people are hurt.
Class helps us understand how to fight back.
A movement that centers only on identity remains trapped in the politics of the self. A movement that centers only class risks reproducing systems of domination within its own ranks. But a movement that integrates both can finally see the whole picture: how capitalism exploits, how imperialism divides, and how solidarity must be built from the ground up, not assumed.
Respect identity.
Analyze class.
Organize materially.
Build collectively.
This is the ‘middle’ ground, not a compromise, but a strategy.
Because what we’re fighting for is not just representation, and not just redistribution.
We’re fighting for a world where no one’s identity determines their suffering and where our identities enrich our solidarity rather than limit it.
Understanding the history of U.S. oppression is one thing; knowing what to do with that knowledge is another. Once we see that racism, sexism, xenophobia, and every other form of oppression are not random “bugs” but core features of capitalism and empire, the next question becomes: How do we fight something this entrenched?
For many people, the answer has been to lean deeper into identity, to uplift individual stories, call out harmful behaviors, and demand greater representation. For others, the answer has been to reject identity altogether and return to “pure” class politics. But the truth is that neither approach is enough on its own. Identity without class cannot transform the system, and class without identity cannot mobilize the people most harmed by it.
The challenge of our moment is building a politics that sees both the material and the personal, the shared struggle and the different wounds we carry. This requires discipline, clarity, and a willingness to step outside the habits that U.S. political culture trains in us: individualism, moralizing, and fragmentation.
A movement that can actually win must feel like a home. It must give people the tools to understand their own experience and the structures that create it. It must show that fighting racism means fighting capitalism, and that fighting capitalism means fighting every mechanism it uses to divide and devalue human beings. It must make solidarity more appealing than shame, and collective action more meaningful than symbolic gestures.
Most importantly, a movement must give people something to do, not just something to feel.
Here are a few practical tips:
1. Start where people already are.
Political education works best when it’s tied to lived experience, such as rent hikes, medical debt, police harassment, and workplace exploitation. Meet people at the material points of pain. This is classic Marxist agitation, speaking towards people’s experiences and pain.
2. Build solidarity across differences by naming the system, not the individual.
Your fellow workers are not your enemies; the conditions shaping them are. Critique the logic of capital, more than the person who has been shaped by it.
3. Create spaces where identities are respected but not weaponized.
People need room to speak about how oppression affects them without reducing themselves to those identities.
4. Connect identity-based harm to class-based exploitation.
Show how capitalism depends on racialized labor, gendered labor, and disabled exclusion. Help people see the pattern, not just the symptom.
5. Move from conversation to organization.
Study groups become political organizations. Mutual aid becomes political education. Workplace frustration becomes a union drive. Outrage becomes structure.
Because the goal isn’t just to understand the world; it’s to change it. And change requires numbers. Not a chorus of individual stories, not a scattering of class-first purists, but a disciplined, rooted, collective force capable of fighting capitalism at home and imperialism abroad.
If identity tells us who we are and class tells us what we face, then organizing tells us what we can become, together.
I sent this article to my boyfriend who keeps repeating class purist talking points because I think he knows better and this will give him the tools to put it together
I would find it helpful if someone would clarify the distinction of "class" as used here versus "socioeconomic class identity". I sense that "class" as used here is referring to roles in oppressive structures distinct from socioeconomic class identity. But as I understand it, socioeconomic class identity arises from and supports the oppressive structure and, at the same time, inherently reflects oppressive positions, making it easy to conflate identity with "class". Please help.