Who Needs The CIA When We Have Each Other?

Wokeness, class consciousness, and true solidarity

A viral tweet has been making the rounds lately that is predicated on the claim that black Americans visited Gaza to deliver aid and had racial slurs thrown at them the whole time. This tweet is unsourced, aside from a TikTok video posted after pushback that says nothing to that effect, but it has served its purpose nonetheless. People are now fighting back and forth about whether Palestinians are racist and antiblack, this while they are undergoing a genocide, have lived under apartheid and occupation for over 75 years, and are routinely kidnapped and held in torture dungeons based solely on their nationality. While the last decade of identity-politics-centered leftism seems to be waning, it still has a toehold in movements and works to derail solidarity to amazing effect. Precisely what it was always intended to do.

While impossible to pinpoint with exact accuracy, the era of liberal identity politics and social justice began some time in the early 2010s. From forums, to Tumblr, to Twitter, the mainstreaming of the concepts of intersectionality, microaggressions, safe spaces, and the “social justice warrior” were everywhere. Much of the scholarship around these subjects was devised in the 70s and 80s in the halls of academia in order to understand the dynamics of multiple oppressions and how they interact in our society, but took on a life of their own through mass movements and the rise of internet microblogging. Through mass adoption and the democratization of the internet these vaunted concepts also saw mass distortion and strayed far from their intended audience and goals.

I’m not here to give you an entire history of wokeness - many have done that before and better than I ever could - but I think it’s worth examining how divorcing identity-based dynamics from class dynamics, individualizing blame and accountability, created an opening for the right to capture an audience, roll back vital protections, and capitalize on backlash to nefarious ends. On the liberal side, this era also gave politicians the ability to pantomime progress while keeping a deeply unjust system in place and perpetuating many of the same harms that disproportionately impact marginalized groups. On the left, it has led to countless internecine conflicts that have split movements apart, preventing us from uniting to create real change.

The Individual, The System

The liberalization of social justice has broken countless brains on both the left and the right and made a mockery of a vitally important idea: that liberation from all oppressions is the highest goal. Because liberalism itself revolves around the individual — individual rights, individual freedoms, etc. — the individual and his or her “lived experience” becomes the focal point of this analysis, with systems either existing in the background or being left out entirely. Class oppression does not factor in because an examination of class oppression is an examination of the system it exists within. If class is mentioned, it is placed as an oppression that is equal to or lesser than identity-based oppressions. The liberal notion of identity politics represents a surrender, a giving up on the idea that we are capable of changing the system itself and therefore we have to settle for the moderate reforms we can get under this one. This is something Adolph Reed called “the atrophy of political imagination”¹.

As Marxists we understand that class oppression is the primary contradiction in society from which all others flow, and that while special attention must be given to special oppressions, the analysis will always be incomplete without an analysis of class. The liberal attempt to understand oppression needs to account for where this oppression comes from while ignoring the structures producing it. By doing so it must individualize the systemic causes, which always results in a reductive “good vs evil” understanding of what perpetuates harm of marginalized people. There are “good” people who are “doing the work”, who must atone for their inherent sinfulness and there are bad people who are irredeemably bigoted and will never self-examine and fix their souls.

By attempting to sidestep the class question, failing to address the structures and systems that perpetuate marginalization, we continually end up with half-measures that fail to substantially confront the root causes of oppression. We end up with what DEI actually is (not the boogeyman that the right has made it out to be), which is mostly a bunch of boring corporate seminars and annual quizzes that companies need to have their employees fill out to check a diversity box, instead of any measures that would substantially improve the lives and welfare of marginalized people. We end up with a diversification of the identity of our oppressors instead of the dismantling of the class that rules us. We end up with some idea that if the ruling class includes more Black women, it will be a win for Black women everywhere. We end up with ridiculous appeals to identity like the one in the viral CIA ad below:

Democrats have played this hand incredibly well and avoided any of the sticky issues of having their hands in the corporate money pot by leaning heavily on this version of “representation” that curiously never includes representation of the ideological kind. Its absurdity is self-evident; Pelosi kneeling in a Kente cloth while sending unlimited money to police, lifelong racist segregationist Joe Biden choosing Kamala Harris as his Vice President, the choice to deploy Linda Thomas Greenfield to shoot down Gaza ceasefire resolutions at the United Nations. None of these things get us closer to justice or emancipation, yet all of them were touted as the highest forms of progress available under capitalism.

Making Black Americans complicit in the crimes of the empire is no true liberation. True liberation is only possible through class struggle. Fred Hampton of the Black Panthers addressed this decades ago, saying,

“We've got to face some facts, that the masses are poor. The masses belong to what you call the lower class. When I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses. I'm talking about the black masses. I'm talking about the brown masses, and the yellow masses too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire. But we say you put out fires best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're going to fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism. You fight capitalism with socialism.”

Hampton knew that racism can only be overcome if capitalism is overcome. He knew that engaging whites in class struggle would help them overcome their own internal biases, focusing them on the creators of their conditions instead of a war against members of their own class. Liberalized identity politics does the opposite. It causes interclass conflict, putting people on a seek and destroy mission against other workers, trying to root out the sinners and the heretics. This isn’t to say that you should welcome racism into your movement or that you should not hold people accountable ever, quite the opposite. The problem lies in the idea that you can “call out” enough people within the working class to meaningfully resolve racial or other oppressions. That you can get enough people to repent and “do the work” on an individual level to resolve a thing that is a byproduct of the base of society and that the ruling class substantially benefits from in both direct and indirect ways.

Misdirection

There was a famous moment in the 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary where Hillary Clinton, darling of Wall Street and the epitome of the ruling class, said of Bernie’s attacks on her cozy connections to the big banks, “Not everything is about an economic theory, right? If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the LGBT community? Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?” This line of attack would become commonplace for corporate Democrats who wanted to put a line in the sand between social progress and economic equality. Liberal pundits hysterically claimed that if you didn’t support the white segregationist Joe Biden in 2020 you were racist towards Black voters in the south, and are doing the same song and dance today to attack the anti-oligarchy rallies of Bernie and AOC — as if black and brown voters just love corruption and plutocracy. Identity, to this cohort, is merely a weapon used to run cover for the worst excesses of capitalism.

Liberals on MSNBC employed a similar line of attack towards the growing MAGA movement on the right from 2016 on; mocking the idea that any of their grievance came from “economic insecurity”. They insisted that the entire movement was borne solely out of voters’ commitment to racism. There’s of course an element of truth to this, as there is with all good propaganda, but the critique - I would argue intentionally - misses the forest for the trees.

The rise of MAGA undeniably centers on nationalism, xenophobia, othering. Trump’s attacks on immigrants have always been a core part of his campaign. It’s easy to take all of this at face value, but if you look even a little deeper you can see that the only reason any of this has any purchase is because of the decades-long project of hollowing out the middle class that started under Carter and Reagan, was accelerated with the offshoring of good paying jobs under Clinton’s NAFTA, and went into hyperdrive during the financial crisis. People have been losing the hope of achieving the so-called American dream steadily for decades upon decades, and have become increasingly angry and insecure as a result. This is the necessary pre-condition for reactionary backlash. Now a guy like Trump comes along and says “the reason you are poor is because those immigrants are stealing your good paying jobs” and without any opposing force (as the Democrats are not offering any sort of promise of economic equality) it is easy to convince the masses that this is true. They think “at least someone is speaking to my pain, someone is acknowledging that things aren’t great for me, maybe they are right about the cause”.

Instead of reclaiming this territory by offering a redistributive economic agenda, Democrats as the upholders of the capitalist status quo rely heavily on identity based attacks the perpetuate the system they hold dear. Bernie Sanders supporters were labeled “class reductionists” for daring to assert that economics might play some sort of role in the problems in society, for saying we need an agenda that actually helps the working class (which of course will help the most marginalized members of that class disproportionately). We don’t need a land acknowledgment before you conduct a mass layoff, we need a jobs guarantee.

In an effort to combat this, liberals have painted their interlocutors as people who don’t care about progress for marginalized people. They insist that you must trade one for the other, ignoring completely the ways in which poverty is a predictor of all sorts of harms, most impacting the most marginalized. They act as if there is an inherent racism in economic populism. This, of course, is not a sincerely held belief — it is a cynical strategy to get people to shut up about empire.

This absurd use of identity as a shield to uphold the status quo has seen its logical conclusion in the last year and a half of liberal zionism, which claims that it is antisemitic to object to the wholesale slaughter of a people under occupation. The constant centering of western Zionists and their feelings takes precedence over due process, free speech, and over human life itself.

Deference and Diversion

While the anticapitalist left is supposed to have a much better analysis than that of their liberal counterparts, this liberalization of liberation has seeped into their analysis in often insidious ways and resulted in unnecessary and avoidable fractures within our movement. The self-policing of the left seems oftentimes far more focused on ideological purity than with casting a wide enough net to create a true class-struggle-centered movement. Much of the organizational left in the US is from an upper middle class college-educated background and as such seems to let academic liberalism inform and infect their understanding of movement building. Instead of uniting around a common goal of dismantling capitalism, transforming workers through class struggle, it seems many are content to whittle down the movement to just the handful of people who already agree with them.

Instead of realizing that it is incumbent upon them to persuade the backwards masses, they decry the masses for being irredeemable. With this attitude it’s no wonder there is so much infighting amongst the left. It takes so little to cause a rift, such as saying people using the phrase “rest in power” for those who sacrificed their life in protest of genocide are engaging in racism. While we are prone to such distractions and diversions, the right is making historic gains among working class and marginalized communities.

Instead of the actually leftwing identity politics of the Combahee River Collective who coined the phrase in the 70s to describe tying your movement to others with shared struggles like those in the Third World, the modern left seems to only play in the sandbox drawn by the ruling class. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls this “deference politics”², where you defer to the most marginalized person in the room, as if oppression necessarily makes you an expert in political strategy. An expectation that people involved in a movement sit down and shut up, a strategy that splits your movement into smaller and smaller parts, is never going to be one that is broad enough to make change.

It’s not uncommon to see the cooptation of radical language to represent an utterly liberal analysis of power that can only serve to derail and divide. Take this piece called “An Open Letter To White ‘Allies’ From a White Friend” by Caitlin Deen Fair³:

“I was told by a fellow member of a group that I belonged to that the first step in the liberation of Black folks was to kill all the White women because they were tools of re-colonization… I knew I couldn’t engage him on that; primarily because I don’t know what his lived experience has been. He may very well have had legitimate experiences that tell him that this is the most reasonable and effective solution to the problems that we face… That being said, it is safe to say that it would be imprudent to challenge or engage in a “discussion” (read: argument) about it, particularly in movement spaces.”

This type of politics is poison to building solidarity and the type of struggle that is capable of challenging capital. Individual experience, standpoint epistemology, deference politics, call outs and cancelations, none of these will ever be an acceptable stand-in for class struggle. We must unite the broadest strata of the working class and in order to do that we must abandon this individualist frame. We must fight for Black liberation with an understanding that while dismantling capitalism won’t dismantle racism, dismantling racism is impossible without dismantling capitalism. We must fight for women’s liberation with the understanding that misogyny won’t disappear if there is communism tomorrow, but that the mode of production we live under makes dismantling misogyny unachievable.

When we struggle with others of our same class we see the ways in which our rulers use identity to divide us. We learn that bigotry is a tool that only benefits those who have power over us. When the veil falls away, we can finally see our true enemies clearly. Much of the awakening that has happened in this society around race and gender happened first in union halls, where workers put their petty squabbles aside and learned to see each other as equals. We need to emulate that now. Not by abandoning the struggles for the liberation of the oppressed, but by incorporating those struggles into the class struggle. By recognizing that it is, in fact, our job to educate people. By believing people are capable of redemption. Instead of recreating the exact methods used by the state to destroy us, let us stop falling for the trap.

There is no alternative. Either we find a way to unite the working class and struggle to liberate us all, or we perish under the weight of the system that is trending more and more towards dystopia every day. Either we find our commonality in revolution or we die. There is no third way.

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1. Adolph L. Reed Jr., “Nothing Left: The Long, Slow Surrender of American Liberals,” Harper’s Magazine, March 2014, https://harpers.org/archive/2014/03/nothing-left-2/.

2. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Elite Capture,” Lux Magazine, 2020, https://lux-magazine.com/article/elite-capture-olufemi-taiwo/.

3. Kimmel and Ferber, Privilege: A Reader.