Red Star: Who are the workers?

To understand politics, particularly the failure of liberal identity politics, we need to understand the working class.

Those who work for a wage and many who work for a salary are the working class, including industrial, service and agricultural workers.

The working class is the base of society. There are two other classes in America; the professional class, which makes more money as the foremen of capital, and the owning class, which controls the bulk of the property, political power and mass culture.

America’s exploitation of black, Latinx and Asian labor and its extermination of indigenous people produced a uniquely racialized working class. The working class is nearly half female, less white and younger than the rest of America. It is for this reason that class and identity politics cannot be separated.

Liberals view oppression as something individual people or institutions do or as something we can't fight. Oppression can only end after the overthrow of American social relations, the abolition of class conflict and systematic redress for historical wrongs. Tufts is racist, not because the trustees are individual racists, but because it exists in a racist society built on racist relationships.

Abolition of the police and prisons, along with the struggles for trans rights, abortion access, family medical leave, easy immigration and an end to the criminalization of minority communities is part of the class struggle in the United States.

Under capital, differences of identity serve to fragment the working class, or they are produced in the mirror image of property and labor relations and are reinforced by social custom and law.

As Lesley Feinberg argued in "Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman," “wherever the ruling classes became stronger, the laws grew increasingly more fierce.” The same is true of race. Black and white didn’t exist as antagonistic categories until chattel slavery in the colonial world created a racialized class system. Poor Europeans had their liberty, but no property. Enslaved Africans and indigenous people were the property of rich Europeans. In time, the Europeans came to call themselves white and define of their existence against the slaves, who ceased to be Africans in chains, and became black slaves.

Without a radical working-class movement, social movements are doomed to become useless aesthetic choice. Marxism offers a way to understand and fight against the material basis of all kinds of oppression.

We will never be free from racial, gender or religious oppression unless we destroy class society. Any movement for liberation must build solidarity across these barriers and, in doing so, overturn them.

There’s no real division between identity and class politics. But there is a difference between liberal and socialist identity politics. Liberals who dismiss class politics and “radicals” who dismiss identity politics only serve to deepen oppression by creating codes of behavior that claim to be egalitarian but really reinforce and recreate capitalist oppression. Liberalism ends with cops in pride parades, while the radicals who won LGBTQ rights are pushed out of public life or reduced to images of resistance to be consumed and appropriated.