Róisín McAleer and Eoghan Harris
Western imperialism has actively absorbed, redirected, and weaponised struggles against racial, sexual and gendered oppression. This is a process that has taken place in various waves since the 1960s but has become severely acute in the past ten years, where genuine grievances rooted in exploitation and social marginalisation have been transformed into parallel identity projects that fragment the working class rather than unite it. There is no denying the moral urgency of the oppression faced by women, racialised peoples, and sexual minorities. But in recent decades, particularly in the imperial core, these struggles have been institutionally detached from their material foundations.
Representation, visibility, and symbolic recognition are promoted in place of concrete improvements in wages, housing, healthcare, employment, and collective power. In many cases, this institutional promotion actively obstructs the struggle for material gains by substituting liberal inclusion for class struggle.
Critical gender theory, critical race theory, and postcolonial theory are not organically radical developments. They are the ideological legacy of a post Second World War period convergence of academia and state power in the imperial core in which Western intelligence agencies, media and academic institutions consciously sought to construct a compatible left.
Declassified CIA documents document their promotion of Critical theory and French theory in an efforts to “kill the communist left and shore up the non-communist left”…a left permitted to critique capitalism culturally and morally, but hostile to revolutionary socialism and to real emerging and existing socialist states. A long ideological war has been waged by western intelligence, one in which the CIA felt it was necessary to “speak their language, the language of Marxism”.
The so-called “cultural turn” marked a decisive retreat from historical materialism and political economy. Oppression was increasingly theorised as a matter of discourse, language, identity and representation, rather than as a product of capitalist social relations. We do not deny the value of some of the contributions made by critical theory, but we must place these in their overall social totality and put them in the context of the intellegence agendas of the imperial core powers.
By individualising power into a psychological prism they allowed themselves to be the conduits for the belief in the concept of “authoritarianism”, one detached from class struggle and the material conditions of history.
The imperial theory industry, and the systems of rewards and punishments it dispenses in academia promotes this personalistic concept of “authoritarianism”, which has been transformed into a way of viewing international relations, dutifully employed against the so called “regimes” hostile to western imperialism, as well as those who spoke up for the sovereignty of countries in the global south against imperial aggression, from Syria to Venezuela. These socio psychological concepts mixed with historical revisionism into a powerful cocktail of ideological control, where “democracy” was stripped of its substantive meaning and seen as the exclusive domain of the western bourgeois dictatorships.
Critical gender theory and critical race theory have continued in this endeavour by severing race, gender and sexuality from political economy. Imperial ideology thus diluted the revolutionary potential of these causes and rendered them compatible with capitalism. Sexual, racial, and gender oppression are treated as autonomous systems floating above class relations. A professionalised liberal-left layer of academics, NGOs, media figures, and activists police discourse with moral absolutism while offering no challenge to private property, imperialism or monopoly capital. This gatekeeping culture produces fear, censorship, and alienation particularly among working-class people who experience exploitation daily but are lectured, condescended, and chastised rather than organised.
The political consequences are visible everywhere. Does shouting “Nazi scum off our streets!” at newly politicised, economically dispossessed workers build collective power? Or does it drive them into the arms of the right? Does it materially advance the liberation of trans people when “allies” denounce everyone from bourgeois politicians like Mary Lou McDonald to anti-Zionist doctors like Rameh Adwan as “eugenicists” for adhering to medical guidelines on puberty blockers for minors? Or does it reduce complex material questions to moral spectacles that benefit no one but career activists?
For years, one could not even criticize the precepts of this new form of identity politics without being branded as an “authoritarian”, a “phobe” or worse, an “ist”. One could not have a reasonable debate about migration, health and other policies without fear of being labelled, isolated and persecuted. Somebody “Feeling uncomfortable” has been grounds to claim victimization of opression, and a culture of emotions-based instead of evidence-based persecutuon prevailed.
Zionists took advantage of this climate of reticence and fear as the same witchfinder techniques were deployed to persecute anti-zionists and those who opposed the genocide in Gaza and in the imperial core.
Now that Trump has won a second term in the US, and many anti-zionist activists persecuted on bogus anti-semitism charges, no small number of left-liberals have scrambled to regain credibility by lightly criticising behaviours which they themselves had been leading the charge of not so long ago. This speaks to a deeper problem of how dissent is managed through liberal gatekeepers who have exclusive access to media and academic institutions.
The intellectual cold war that the CIA set up in the 1950s now runs seamlessesly through the system of rewards and punishments of this liberal proceduralism. Marxists must reject this liberal proceduralism because it replaces solidarity with coercion. Tolerance cannot mean enforced ideological conformity. Oppression has to have a material basis. It arises from exploitation, dispossession, and class domination. Disagreement, however sharp, over identity claims, does not in itself constitute oppression. To pretend otherwise empties the concept of oppression of all meaning and transforms it into a tool of social control.
Freedom of expression is not a bourgeois luxury. It is a precondition for working-class politics. Rejecting liberal dogma does not make workers ignorant or reactionary. What is reactionary is the attempt to impose elite theories on the masses while dismissing their lived experience of exploitation.
Racism, sexism, and chauvinism are not the cause of capitalist exploitation; they are its ideological justifications. The Portugese did not start the slave stade because they hated black people. Capital did not plunder the Global South because workers in the imperial core were racist; racism was developed to rationalise plunder. To attack ideology without dismantling the material system that produces it is to fight shadows while leaving the structure intact.
As socialists, we must therefore reject identity politics as an imperial strategy of division. The task is not to deny oppression, but to root every struggle firmly in the class struggle, to unify the working class across all divisions, and to direct its power against capitalism and imperialism. We must have eternal vigilance that the cause for oppressed minorities do not turn our sites of struggle into places of opportunism and bourgeous individualism. Only through collective, class-based struggle can the material conditions of all oppressed people be transformed.