Lucas Ballestín
December 2025
The first point is simple. There can be more than one version of a thing. And the two versions can be valued differently. I state this trivium because I want to suggest that while many of the criticisms that circulate about identity politics are valid, they do not encompass identity politics as such, but only a degraded version of identity politics. In fact, my claim is that identity politics in its liberal corporate representationist form is a corrupted version of identity politics, and that the optimal leftist attitude should be to reject the reduction of identity politics writ large to this degraded version of it. As I’ll soon mention, there is understandable hesitation on the left about accepting any form of politics that isn’t indefatigably radical, but identity politics can be radical, and we are better off re-radicalizing identity politics instead of dismissing it.
Identity politics arises in situations wherein a social group is oppressed and comes to understand itself as oppressed as a group for being that group. Doing politics as a group or in the name of the group in order to overcome that same group-based oppression. In this sense identity politics involves an element of recognition and an element of politicking. Of course, these are interrelated, with recognition of one’s own oppressed condition coming as the hard-won result of consciousness raising work. We may or may not want to call consciousness raising politicking. It may be understood as a precondition, or political education, that is necessary to the conduct of politics. It matters little here.
As I’ll elaborate in brief, the core of identity politics consists precisely in this: bringing a socially oppressed group - an institutional minority - into acknowledgement of its oppressed status and to mobilize this group towards liberation. To do this consciousness raising, identity politics must necessarily rely on the experiences of the members of the group who are oppressed and marginalized on the basis of their belonging to that group. This does not mean, and cannot mean, that identity politics is limited to lament. But the sigh of the oppressed creature, to paraphrase Marx, is a necessary step on the way to liberation. In this case, the sigh is the sigh of one group, or of one individual recognizing their struggles are due to their belonging to that group. Identity politics cannot stay there; it could not be a politics at all.
To be more concrete, when we are addressing, say, racial oppression, it is necessary for members of racial minorities to rely on their experiences of marginalization as the entry points to political consciousness, and therefore to engagement. The Black Panthers could not have found their way to Mao without first acknowledging their blackness and the effects that their blackness had on their lives. Awareness of how white supremacy is inextricably tied with the functioning of other systems of oppression can only come after one is first disposed to engage in systemic consciousness, and this begins with awareness of the oppression of one’s own group.
As Asad Haider already pointed out many years ago, and as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has further elucidated, this is not the notion of identity politics has been popularly received. The issue is not that the received popular notion of identity politics misunderstands what identity politics is. It’s rather that they’ve properly understood a purposely distorted mirror fun house image of it. Identity politics is fundamentally radical, both in its description of social reality as well as in its ultimate intentions. It aims to understand the roots of oppression and to dig deeply to extirpate them. It could not get much airtime.
What the public has had access to, though, is what we can call liberal identity politics (LIP). LIP only pays lip service to liberation and sloppily appeals to oppressed identities with little in the way of practical solutions. Again, this superficiality is not accidental, it is symptomatic of the interests of the ruling classes. There might be better ways to defang a dangerous political strategy, but using the same name for a wholly inferior facsimile of the original is a pretty good one.
And it has worked. By and large, “identity politics” has come to mean making superficial cosmetic tweaks to how things look without addressing the underlying structures. Unsurprisingly, anyone coming to be invested in LIP came to be disappointed by its inability to either produce genuine change or even make oppressed people conscious of how their oppression functioned and could be challenged. LIP was, however, the only echo of identity politics that was tolerable to the liberal establishment. It was not only compatible, it also had the benefit of siphoning emancipatory energies into familiar stream beds, where those energies promptly dissipated and desiccated.
Neoliberalism, the reigning form of ideological liberalism at the time, coopted identity politics. Perhaps that is not surprising. The reining ideology can only stay valid by swallowing up whatever new challenger emerges. What is surprising to this author is the way the left allowed one of its more potent tactical tools be so swiftly broken by its ideological opponent. In fact, it gladly helped to bury identity politics at times.
My claim, again following Haider and others, is that the left should vindicate identity politics by fighting to clear its name and return it to its true purpose and function, rather than collude with the dominant ideology to kill it. Instead, the left should make efforts, especially now, to save the baby from the fate of the defenestrated bathwater.
The objective is retention of linkages amongst groups around a common political goal of contesting the system, what bell hooks called “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Identity politics proper offers a fabulous tool for both systemic-consciousness-raising and for political action via coalitional politics. As the Argentine political theorist Ernesto Laclau argued – and I really am using him as a political theorist here, not an epistemologist – the point is to build “chains of equivalence” amongst different institutional minorities that bring into relief the ways differing struggles are the result of one system.
The instrumental goal, for Laclau, was to produce a “people” that could be the agent of revolutionary change. Many have found this notion problematic given the racist history of a politics invoking “the people” as the agents of change or objects of salvation. But Laclau used “the people” as a more expansive agent of change that could take the place of “the proletariat” in the wake of the New Left struggles and the shifts in the social terrain that resulted from the new social movements. Given the perceived untenability on insisting on the proletariat as the privileged agents of social transformation, “the people” comes to be that new agent, without invoking any positive notions of racial, ethnic, or national identity. Rather, “the people” are those who are oppressed by the system. Incidentally, an alternative translation for “the people” from Laclau’s native Spanish might be “the town,” which might evoke a more accurate image of the coalitional approach being proposed.
The “chains of equivalence” are ways to articulate what different struggles have in common through political discourse. Or, to put it another way, to show how struggles that appear to be separate can retain their distinctness while recognizing their shared roots in the contemporary political system. Indeed, for Laclau the equivalence between struggles is enriched by their difference. The broader the coalition, the greater the insistence on what makes each form of oppression unique, the better the relief into which the common enemy is brought. This linking of Laclau with identity politics is old hat, maybe, but its timelessness is especially timely today, and worth repeating.
There’s an elephant in the ointment, however, and that is the problem of cooptability. For some, the problem with identity politics is that it is easier for capitalism to coopt it in just the way described above. By contrast, old left movements focused on opposing capitalism through the vehicle of the proletariat is simply impossible for capitalism to coopt. There is no way for capitalism to sell genuine anti capitalism. And because capitalism has a vested interest in defending itself, and remarkable talent for being creatively durable in this task, it will always coopt resistance movements. Given this, the answer might be to put our eggs in the uncooptability basket. To find a pure, incorruptible vehicle.
What’s more, it’s not like (again – for some) an anti-capitalist proletarian struggle wouldn’t also liberate all other oppressed groups. If coalitional theory and identity politics is right in claiming there is one shared system, the overturning of that system will free all. The “on the other hand” here is that a narrow focus on the struggle of the proletariat fails to activate many to struggle. Surely it could be that that style of struggle’s uncooptability have made it a target of both discursive derision and political decimation. But it is also the case that many have felt excluded by a preponderant focus on class struggle as the privileged site of political action and social transformation. And I would argue that the full nature of capitalism would not be fully theoretically intelligible without the contributions of black lesbian thinkers (such as the B. Smith sisters) and others, to give just one example. Some might counter that while these thinkers added more nuance to our understanding, old left style emancipation would have liberated all identities in any case, but I think this view is untenable.
This is all further complicated by the fact that the hegemonic cultural struggle that Laclau derived from Gramsci and championed as a complement to his political strategy has been so effectively adopted by the right. Both in terms of diagnosing political obstacles and in terms of political strategy, the contemporary right wing has effectively adapted the Gramscian playbook. With the added benefit of deep institutional pockets to back it, of course.
So maybe we are stuck between a narrowly focused but broadly applicable class struggle and a diffuse yet unwieldy and (may-be) more corruptible coalitional model. So, what do?
One humble suggestion might be to stop letting the right hamper our discursive and political-theoretical tools with such little fight. Both in terms of allowing them to co-opt terms and tactics that undermining them and in terms of colluding with them to dilute and neutralize the original, threatening versions of those tactics.
Rather than acquiescing and surrendering the radical potential of identity politics to build coalitions and contour the systemic core, elevating institutional and systemic consciousness, the left should have insisted from the jump on the difference between the genuine identity politics of the Combahee River Collective and others, and the empty LIP version so amplified by mainstream loudspeakers. What is needed amongst other things, is redemptive revolutionary recapture of those tools. One might think here of struggles like Sophie Lewis’ to wrestle feminism’s revolutionary meaning away from the conciliatory clawless choice feminism versions propagated today.
It may be true that unlike other tactics, old school organizing along explicitly class and labor lines is the pure and uncorruptible way. However, it also has its obvious drawbacks. And in succumbing to this cooptation the left made a grievous concession for which it continues to pay. Yet the time is not too late. In fact, given the manner that the right has built its own popular front between elite economic interests and patriarchal white supremacy in the last few years…the time for our own broad tent radical-popular front is now. So, to my comrades: you’ve had your good “anti-woke” fun. And what’s better your critiques have been validated and pardoned. It’s time to get serious again.