Class First, Then Everything Else

The phrase identity politics was coined in 1977 by a group of Black socialist feminists who wanted to destroy capitalism. What it became is something else entirely.

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"There is no law of history which can predict what must inevitably be the outcome of a political struggle. Politics depends on the relations of forces at any particular moment. History is not waiting in the wings to catch up your mistakes into another inevitable success. You lose because you lose because you lose."

Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Right Show, January 1979.

The largest unit of strength the left has ever assembled was a class one. Not a coalition of identities. Not a coordination of movements. A class. The labour movement at its peak commanded mass organisation, structural leverage at the point of production, ideological coherence across regions and trades, and political representation through parties that, however imperfect, could form governments and rewrite the basic compromises of capitalist society. The welfare state, the eight-hour day, the public sector, the post-war settlement, all of these were class achievements. They were won by people who understood themselves as workers first and acted accordingly.

Nothing built since has matched this scale. Civil rights movements integrated public space and won formal legal equality. Feminist movements changed laws on reproductive rights, divorce and employment. Gay liberation won marriage and ended the worst of the police harassment. Disability rights movements won legal protections against discrimination and, in Britain, the independent living movement built structures that allowed disabled people to live outside institutional care. Each of these was a real victory and none of them transformed the underlying distribution of wealth and power. The buses got integrated. The boardrooms remained the boardrooms. The marriages got recognised. The right to independent living was legislated, then the funding for it was cut. The houses remained unaffordable. This is not because the movements were insufficiently radical or because their participants lacked seriousness. It is because the unit they organised was smaller than the problem.

Class is the largest unit because it is the universal that contains the others without being contained by them. Every Black worker is a worker. Every woman who has to sell her labour is a worker. Every queer person who pays rent is a worker. Every disabled person who has to navigate the labour market or depend on the state for survival is inside the class relation. The reverse does not hold. A politics that begins from class can include race, sex, sexuality, disability and migration as conditions that shape working-class life. A politics that begins from any of those particulars cannot get back to class without doing additional theoretical work that, in practice, mostly does not happen.

This is the argument I want to make.

The right’s denunciation of identity politics operates in bad faith because the right is itself the most aggressive identity-political formation now in European public life. Restore Britain is identity politics in the strict sense, organised around the defence of an ethnically and culturally specific subject position. Camus, Sellner and the Hungarian circle that runs through to Harrison Pitt have read their Gramsci and concluded that the cultural-identitarian terrain is where contemporary politics is decided. Their project is metapolitical, identitarian and increasingly successful. The political theorist Jodi Dean, whose book Comrade (Verso, 2019) makes the case for solidarity as an antidote to identitarian fragmentation, is direct about this: the most potent form of identity politics is white nationalism on the right. When Lowe denounces identity politics, he means liberal recognition politics for groups he opposes. The denunciation is itself a move in identity politics. None of this should be conceded.

The Combahee complication is harder, because it is honest. The Combahee River Collective Statement of April 1977, which coined the phrase, opens with a position no class-first argument can refuse without dishonesty:

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.”

That is the opening proposition. The Collective were socialists. They wanted the destruction of capitalism. Their statement is explicit:

“We realise that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organised for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses.”

This is not the version of identity politics now in mainstream circulation. The Combahee tradition is closer to what I am calling for than to what gets called identity politics in 2026. The Collective were not refusing class. They were refusing the actual existing class-first politics they encountered in the white male left of the 1970s, which had treated their oppression as adjunct and told them to wait. They were correct about that historical experience. Class-first in the form they encountered it had asked them to subordinate their liberation to a movement that did not see them. They refused, and they were right to refuse.

The honest version of the class-primary argument has to begin by acknowledging this. The complaint that produced identity politics was a real complaint. The labour movement of the 1960s and 1970s, in Britain as in the United States, did sideline race and sex. The trade unions were often hostile to women workers and routinely hostile to migrant ones. The Labour Party was complicit in immigration controls that targeted Commonwealth citizens whose labour British capital had recruited. The white left’s idea of the working class was pale, male and resentful of anyone whose oppression complicated the picture. Combahee, and the broader tradition of Black socialist feminism it helped consolidate, was a corrective to a real failure. Treating it as an unwelcome distraction from class is to repeat exactly the mistake that produced it.

Stuart Hall, writing on the British left at the same moment Combahee was writing in Boston, saw the structural problem more precisely than almost anyone. His 1979 essay The Great Moving Right Show, published in Marxism Today the month before Thatcher’s election, explained why the left kept losing ground it should have held. The commonest response on the left, Hall wrote, was to interpret the swing to the right "as a simple expression of the economic crisis" — Thatcherism as the political bedfellow of recession, nothing more. This missed everything specific to the conjuncture. It treated history as a series of repeats, suppressed what made the present moment different, and so prevented the left from working on "those related but distinct contradictions, moving according to very different tempos, whose condensation, in any particular historical moment, is what defines a conjuncture." The left, in other words, was reading its own defeat through a template that made the defeat invisible.

What Hall saw that most of the left did not was that Thatcherism was not a reflection of economic crisis. It was a response to it, constructed through active ideological and political work. The right had dismantled elements of existing ideology, reconstituted them into a new logic, and “articulated the space in a new way, polarising it to the Right.” Crucially, this worked because it operated on real contradictions. The state under monopoly capital, in its actual operations on the popular classes, was “less and less present as a welfare institution and more and more present as the state of state monopoly capital.” Anti-statist sentiment was not false consciousness. It had, Hall wrote, “a rational and material core.” The right won the popular-democratic terrain not because it fooled people but because it spoke to something real in their experience of the state, while the left could not occupy the same terrain. Social democracy administered the very conditions producing the grievance. The revolutionary left lacked the social weight to offer an alternative.

Hall also identified the structural contradiction inside social democracy that has reproduced itself through every Labour government since. To win electoral power, he wrote, social democracy must maximise its claims as the political representative of the working class. Once in government, it is committed to finding solutions to the crisis “which are capable of winning support from key sections of capital.” The link between class and party then becomes the mechanism by which the class is disciplined rather than advanced, the “indissoluble link” turned against the people it claimed to represent. This is the Starmer government, written in advance. The proscriptions, the witch hunt, the refusal of any break with Treasury orthodoxy. The form Hall identified in 1979, now operating after forty years of accumulated defeats, each of which has narrowed the space for the next attempt.

By 1987, in Gramsci and Us, Hall had drawn a further conclusion from these conditions. “Socialist Man, with one mind, one set of interests, one project, is dead. And good riddance.” The unitary class subject was gone. The proliferation of antagonisms — racial, sexual, ecological, regional — had expanded the field of politics beyond class struggle in its familiar form. Hall still insisted on the “decisive nucleus of the economic” as the anchor of hegemony. But his prescription was moving towards articulation across multiple sites of antagonism as the strategy for a left counter-hegemonic bloc, rather than reconstruction of class organisation as the base. Interests, he argued, “are not given but have to be politically and ideologically constructed.” The left had to learn to do what the right had been doing: construct political subjects through ideological work, speak to people’s actual subjectivities, build hegemony across difference.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe had made this argument at book length two years earlier in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). Their argument pushed further than Hall was willing to go. There is no privileged subject of history. No necessary link between economic position and political identity. Socialism has to be reconstructed as a project of articulating democratic demands across multiple antagonisms, none of which is reducible to class. This was the theoretical permission slip for what followed. Whatever Laclau and Mouffe intended, the practical effect of their framework, as it moved through the academy and into the political culture of the 1990s, was to license the displacement of class by a proliferation of particular claims.

By 1988, in New Times, Hall had widened the analysis further:

“Culture has ceased to be, if ever it was, a decorative addendum to the hard world of production and things, the icing on the cake of the material world. The word is now as material as the world.”

The economic-political-cultural distinction had dissolved. Identity was multiple, performed, in process. The new times required, Hall wrote:

“a ‘socialism’ committed to, rather than scared of, diversity and difference.”

The hope was that the dispersal of antagonisms could be reassembled into a counter-hegemonic bloc through the cultural and political work of articulation. Asked directly whether this was possible, Hall admitted the absence of the map:

“What we lack is any overall map of how these power relations connect and of their resistances. Perhaps there isn’t, in that sense, one power game at all, more a network of strategies and powers and their articulations — and thus a politics which is always positional.”

This is where Hall's framework runs out. He was right that no overall map existed in 1988. Robinson's transnational capitalist class framework, developed in the decades since, is the map the conjuncture required. Robinson treats race, gender, migration and disability not as cultural overlays to be articulated alongside class but as conditions of accumulation — how class is organised under contemporary capitalism. The militarised border, the racialised division of labour, the gendered care economy, the platform-mediated extraction of unpaid reproductive and affective work, all of these are class facts. The TCC has organised itself across national and cultural and racial lines with considerable sophistication. It has a unit large enough to do its work. The dispersal of left politics into particular identity claims has served it well.

The substitution of recognition for redistribution that followed Hall’s cultural turn was named most precisely by Nancy Fraser. Her Justice Interruptus (1997) distinguished two dimensions of justice — redistribution of material resources and recognition of cultural identities — and argued that both are required. Her later concept of progressive neoliberalism named the trade that actually happened: Wall Street accepted the symbolic politics of diversity in exchange for the left abandoning any serious challenge to the financialisation of the economy. Boardroom diversity targets cost capital nothing. Trade union rights cost capital considerably. The Blair-Clinton settlement chose the first and abandoned the second. It presented this as progress and much of the left accepted the description.

Adolph Reed Jr has been the most sustained critic of what this produced. Identity politics in its contemporary form, Reed argues, is a class politics for the professional-managerial fraction of subordinate identity groups. Representation in executive ranks. Diversity targets in elite institutions. Legal recognition for middle-class formations of queer life. Each presented as a victory for the group named. Each leaving the underlying distribution of wealth untouched. The Combahee Collective wanted the destruction of capitalism. What they got, forty years on, was a McKinsey report on boardroom gender ratios. These are not the same project.

Asad Haider in Mistaken Identity (2018) pushes this argument back to its source. The Combahee statement was not, in its origin, the politics Reed and Fraser are criticising. It was a method for analysing structural oppression from the standpoint of those at the intersection of multiple oppressions, oriented towards coalition and material transformation. Its capture by liberal recognition politics was not inevitable. It required the specific historical conditions of the 1990s — the collapse of the organised left, the consolidation of neoliberalism, the absorption of progressive vocabulary by the political centre — to transform a socialist feminist document into the ideological infrastructure of corporate diversity programmes. Haider’s recovery of the Combahee meaning against its capture is the move the class-primary argument requires. Not a refusal of what Combahee correctly identified. A refusal of what was done to it.

Dean, writing from a communist position, makes the solidarity argument in its sharpest form. The left's focus on identity, she argues, is itself a response to the failure to galvanise a politics around the fundamental antagonism of class. Her concept of comradeship — solidarity between those on the same side of a political struggle, which "disrupts capitalist society's hierarchical identifications of sex, race, and class" and "renders that equalizing sameness productive of new modes of work and belonging" — is an attempt to name a form of political belonging that does not begin from identity and does not end there. Whether the term can be recovered from its historical associations is debatable. The argument behind it is not. Class solidarity is the form of belonging adequate to the scale of the problem. Identity solidarity, however genuinely felt, is not.

The class-primary politics adequate to the present is not class-first in the old sense that told Combahee to wait. It is class politics for the working class as it actually exists: multi-racial, multi-national, gendered across the full range, including the queer and disabled and migrant and care-working fractions the older labour movement either ignored or actively excluded. The point is not that race, sex, sexuality and disability are class issues in disguise. They are not. They have their own histories, their own forms of oppression, their own irreducible weight. The point is that the working class is constituted across all of these differences, and a class politics that cannot address them as it actually finds them is a politics for an imagined class rather than the real one. The pale male manufacturing worker of 1955 is not coming back. The class that needs organising is the one that cleans hospitals, drives delivery vans, codes apps, cares for children and elderly people for poverty wages, navigates the benefits system on assessments designed to fail, and is increasingly migrant in its composition and precarious in its conditions.

Hall understood this in 1987 when he buried Socialist Man. He drew the wrong conclusion from the correct observation. The death of the unitary class subject required not the dispersal of class politics into identity articulations but the reconstruction of class politics adequate to the actual composition of the class. The dispersal has had forty years to prove itself. It has not assembled the force the situation requires.

There is a question this argument cannot answer. Whether the conditions for assembling a class-primary politics now exist is different from whether such a politics is theoretically correct. Mass employment in concentrated industrial workplaces is gone. Stable employment relationships that allowed long-term organisation have been systematically dismantled. Platform-mediated work has fragmented the conditions under which solidarity is built. National economies that political parties could meaningfully act on have been restructured under the sovereignty of financial markets. A class-primary politics adequate to these conditions has to find forms of organisation adequate to them, and nobody on the left I am familiar with has worked this out at the scale required. The question is open. The conditions are not encouraging.

What the argument forecloses is the idea that the answer lies somewhere other than class. Hall in 1979 saw that the right had won the popular-democratic terrain by articulating real contradictions in working-class experience into a reactionary direction. Restore Britain is doing the same work now, but the reactionary direction is more explicit than anything Hall was analysing. This is not a politics of cultural preference or identitarian positioning. It is a racialised project organised around the exclusion and removal of people who are not white British. The housing crisis is real. The collapsed public services are real. The state encountered as imposition and indignity is real. Restore Britain articulates all of it through the grammar of ethnic replacement — the houses are not yours because they were taken by people who do not belong here. The grievance is material. The explanation is racial. And the solution, running through remigration doctrine and citizenship-stripping proposals, is directed not at capital but at the people capital brought here to work for less. This is identity politics as an instrument of structural oppression, not a response to it. The distance between that and Combahee is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of which side of power you are on. The class-primary argument is not that the underlying grievance is false. It is that the unit capable of articulating it in a transformative direction is class, and class organisation is what the left dispersed in exchange for a politics of recognition that capital absorbed without cost.

The Combahee Collective wrote in 1977 that the synthesis of oppressions creates the conditions of their lives. They were right. The conditions of all our lives are now being shaped by a transnational capitalist class that has organised itself across the differences the left has spent forty years treating as separate terrains. They have a unit large enough to do their work. The work that remains is to build one large enough to do ours. That unit is class. Not class as it was imagined in 1955. Class as it exists now, in all its differentiation and precarity and migration and care. The Combahee statement is a usable document in that work. What was done to it in the forty years since is not.

"What constitutes them as a danger is that they change the nature of the terrain itself on which struggles of different kinds are taking place. Currently, they are gaining ground in defining the conjunctural. That is exactly the terrain on which the forces of opposition must organise, if we are to transform it."

Stuart Hall, The Great Moving Right Show, January 1979.

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Thanks for reading Anti-Capitalist Musings. It is a small operation, and I hope it offers something worth your time. There will be no premium subscriber content here: everything published will remain free to read. If you value these pieces and want to support the writing, buying me a coffee helps fund media subscriptions and the books that keep the analysis grounded. Every contribution, however modest, is genuinely appreciated.