Reviving the Universal: Class, Identity, and the Struggle for Emancipation
The Left cannot retreat into nostalgia or dissolve into identities. If socialism is to mean anything, it must revive the radical universalism once at its core.
We have to find ways to articulate class politics as the core of our anticapitalism and ecosocialism. An articulation that is inclusive, that integrates the particulars of our lives with the universal struggle for human emancipation. That is the real question of the Left today. Not whether class matters more than race, or gender, or disability, but how we can weave them together into a movement that does not collapse into fragmentation or resentment. Nostalgia, even.
The drift of the past forty years has been in the opposite direction. The universalist tradition of the Left. The belief that human liberation could be imagined in common, across racial, sexual, and national boundaries, has been eroded, not by accident but through a sequence of defeats. In its place has emerged a politics of recognition, a politics of cultural pride and cultural grievance, sometimes radical in tone but rarely in structure. At the same time, class itself has been allowed to ossify into caricature: miners and steelworkers, flat caps and pints, the authentic white working class invoked like a folk memory, shorn of the complexity and diversity of real lives.
The Universalist Loss
Kenan Malik is one of the few public intellectuals to insist on what was lost. In a recent interview, he pointed to the erosion of “the old universal ethos of the Left.” Black, once a political label, became an ethnic one. The solidarities that tied Asian youth movements to the labour struggles of Willesden or Southall were re-written into narrow cultural categories. The Indian Workers’ Association, born in the 1930s to represent exploited migrants, was recoded as an ethnic society.
“We’ve lost something deeper: the radical universalist tradition.”
Malik’s warning matters because he lived the history. He was there in the street campaigns of the 1980s, when police brutality and racist attacks were daily facts of life. Racism brought him into politics, but politics made him see beyond racism. It gave him Marx and Luxemburg, Baldwin and Fanon. It gave him the recognition that to fight only for one’s own is to remain trapped.
Universalism here does not mean an abstract sameness. It means recognising that liberation cannot be sectional. That the migrant cleaner, the disabled tenant, the precarious graduate, and the striking bus driver share not only oppression but a common enemy in capital. That we fight not for better terms within class society but for its abolition.
Against Trade-Union Consciousness
This is where Malik departs most sharply from Eddie Dempsey and his brand of union-rooted socialism. Dempsey’s account is familiar: neoliberalism gutted the industries, destroyed the unions, stripped the fabric of working-class life. His answer is to rebuild. Sectoral bargaining, legislative reform, solidarity strikes, a return to the federations of the past.
There is truth here. No class politics worth the name can do without organised labour. Dempsey treats organisation as if it were the destination, when it’s only the means. What was lost was not only union density, but a vision of the human future beyond the wage.
The early Marx understood this clearly. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing. Its struggle is not for a bigger slice of the pie but for the end of the bakery itself: the abolition of wage labour, the overthrow of class society. That horizon matters because without it unionism collapses into corporatism. It becomes defensive, sectional, white-male, pits and pints. Or its even darker itteration in red/brown politics.
As Marx wrote in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, the aim was always a society in which “labour no longer exists as wage labour.” In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he described alienated labour as “external to the worker” and as compulsion to be abolished. Later Marxists such as Angela Davis (Women, Race and Class), Lise Vogel (Marxism and the Oppression of Women), and CLR James (The Black Jacobins) showed how racism, and sexism are not incidental oppressions but constitutive of capitalism’s reproduction.
We fight for wages, but also for a world without wages.
We fight for dignity at work, but also for the abolition of work as compulsion.
We fight against racism and sexism not as add-ons, but as constitutive of the fight against capital itself.
This is precisely what the nostalgia of “white working-class socialism” cannot grasp. It cannot grasp that exploitation is not the preserve of one culture, one community, one region, but the common lot of all who live by selling their labour.
Grunwick and Beyond
Take the Grunwick strike of 1976–78. Here, Asian women walked out of a photo-processing plant in north-west London, facing down appalling conditions and racist intimidation. They demanded union recognition. At first, the official unions hesitated. There was racism within the movement, suspicion of migrant militancy. But solidarity won out: miners, bus drivers, electricians, builders, thousands on the picket line. The strike was lost in the immediate sense, but it revealed what was possible: a moment of cross-racial solidarity that turned the politics of “black” into a political identity.
Contrast this with today. Malik notes that naked racism in the unions has receded, but something else has replaced it: fragmentation. The unions are less hostile, but the broader Left has abandoned universalism for a celebration of difference. Black and Asian communities are treated as cultural blocs, not as workers. Class is implicitly coded white. The result is that solidarity has become harder, not easier.
Starmer’s Narrow Vision
Here is where the present British conjuncture comes in. Keir Starmer insists that “growth is the antidote to division.” Rachel Reeves lectures young people on “dignity” while threatening to cut off benefits if they turn down jobs. Both cling to fiscal rules and digital ID schemes, while crime, housing, and services collapse around them. What is this if not the denial of universalism? Growth, as Starmer means it, is not redistribution or emancipation. It is accumulation dressed up as cohesion. Reeves’s “youth guarantee” is not a vision of dignity, but of compulsion: workfare in a new guise, dignity reduced to obedience.
Meanwhile, Reform UK thrives by presenting itself as the voice of those left behind. Farage’s Reform conferences grow bigger each year. Robinson marches through London with 100,000 in tow. Their answer to the collapse of universalism is racial exclusion: the migrant hotel as symbol, the asylum seeker as scapegoat.
The government feeds the fire. Migrants are warehoused in decaying hotels, contracts handed to private firms, councils suing for injunctions. The politics of fragmentation becomes material.
A universalist Left response would refuse the trap. It would insist that the migrants in the hotel and the locals in the food bank are not enemies but fellow workers, equally at the mercy of landlords and outsourcing giants. It would recognise that racism is not a side issue, but a class weapon: deportation as labour discipline.
To defend them is not charity but solidarity.
Identity and Its Limits
This is not to deny the realities of racism, sexism, homophobia, disablism. These oppressions are not side issues. They are integral to class society. Malik does not deny this either. What he denies is the usefulness of reifying them into identities, divorced from class.
The New Orleans sanitation strike of 2020 makes the point. Black workers walked out, demanding safety equipment and fair wages. Their employer? A black-owned company, subcontracted by a city proud of its anti-racist credentials. Black Lives Matter was on every lip. But the workers lost, the bosses won.
Identity in this sense obscures more than it reveals. It is the perfect ideology for a minority middle class that wants recognition without redistribution. For the working majority of minorities, it is worse than useless: it hides their exploitation behind a racial or cultural unity that serves only the elite.
Disability and the Universal
The same applies to disability. Under capitalism, disablement is not just a matter of exclusion but of active exploitation. Disabled people are often placed in unsuitable housing, forced through punitive benefit regimes, made to justify their existence in bureaucratic rituals of assessment. And yet disability politics too has been captured by a discourse of recognition: visibility, representation, inspirational stories.
To insist on the class dimension is not to deny the specificity of disablement, but to connect it to the universal. Disabled people are denied access to the means of life, forced into dependency, their bodies commodified and disciplined. That is not an isolated oppression but the logic of capital itself.
A universalist politics would not only fight for accessible transport or fairer assessments, but for a society where human need, not profitability, organises production. Where the measure of value is not wage labour but human flourishing.
The Early Marx
The early humanist Marx understood this. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he wrote of alienation: how under capitalism humans are estranged from their own labour, from each other, from themselves. The aim was not simply better wages, but the restoration of humanity itself.
“The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and qualities have become human, subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, created by man for man.”
That is the tradition we need: not the economism of wages alone, nor the fragmentation of identities, but a universal humanism rooted in class struggle.
When Universalism Worked: Rock Against Racism
It would be wrong to imagine the universalist tradition as simply utopian or naïve. It has existed, concretely, and it has won battles.
In the late 1970s, the far right was on the march. The National Front staged rallies of tens of thousands. Racist attacks were rising. Yet the Left did not respond with appeals to sectional interests alone. It built coalitions: the Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism, carnival after carnival where punks and reggae bands played on the same stage.
At Victoria Park in 1978, 80,000 people marched and danced under banners that said “Love Music, Hate Racism.” It was not a denial of difference, but the forging of unity through culture and class. The miners who had supported Grunwick were there, shoulder to shoulder with black youth from Hackney. It was messy, contradictory, imperfect. But it worked: the NF was pushed back, the streets reclaimed.
What mattered was the insistence that racism was not a cultural grievance but a class weapon, to be fought not with tolerance classes but with collective struggle. Rock Against Racism did not ask for recognition. It built solidarity.
Where Struggles Meet
Compare that with today’s politics of identity. Instead of festivals of unity, we have panel discussions of representation. Instead of collective marches, we have funding competitions for “community leaders.” The universalist impulse has been hollowed out, co-opted by the state, professionalised into irrelevance.
There are lessons all around us if we bother to look. Take the gig economy: riders and drivers, most of them migrants, paid by the job, tracked and disciplined by an algorithm that no one sees. Their struggle is always both racialised and classed, though it is often described as one or the other. To pretend it can be separated is to miss the reality of their lives. Or think about care work: still coded as women’s work, still treated as though it were natural rather than labour, still among the most badly paid and undervalued forms of employment. Here class and gender do not just overlap, they lock together, making solidarity a necessity rather than an afterthought. And climate: it is the poorest who breathe the dirtiest air, who live in the flood zones, who are pushed first from their homes. Yet the politics we are offered is middle-class moralism about plastic bags and consumption habits, when the only universalist position is system change—ecological survival tied directly to the abolition of capital.
To take Malik seriously is to accept that racism cannot be fought as a demand for recognition alone, as if it were simply about who gets noticed or who sits at the table. It has to be understood as a weapon of class society and fought as such, not as an accessory to the struggle but as one of its conditions. The same is true of sexism: representation is not liberation, nor is the promotion of a few women into positions of authority. The family itself, as an economic institution that reproduces labour and enforces dependence, has to be challenged if women’s oppression is to end. And disablism too: it is not enough to argue for accessibility or fairer assessments, though both are urgent. What is required is a society where need dictates provision, where life is not measured against productivity, and where disabled people are not consigned to the margins because they are judged unprofitable.
This is the point where Malik and Dempsey part ways. Dempsey wants to rebuild unions, and that is necessary. But he mistakes organisation for destination. The unions matter, but they must be remade; the Left matters, but only if it refuses both nostalgia and fragmentation.
The horizon is universal liberation, human emancipation. And class struggle is not one identity among others—it is the key that unlocks them all.