Have you ever suspected that the endless proliferation of identities, each with its own flag, its own month, its own hierarchy of oppression, serves not to unite us, but to divide us?
And when flags and months are exhausted, the logic of fragmentation does not stop. It descends into absurdity. I recently encountered a single parent who informed me that she was not a “single parent” like me. She was a “SPBC”. I had to Google it. You might too.
The material reality of raising a child on one income, of fighting for childcare and maintenance, is hard, trust me. But the distinction being drawn here is not about material reality. It is about class status dressed in identity language. The Single Mother By Choice (SPBC)—often middle-class, with resources, support networks, and the luxury of planning, is distinguishing herself from the Single Mother By Circumstance. (I feel a new acronym coming on!). The one who was abandoned. The one who fled abuse. The one who cannot afford childcare, let alone the luxury of a label (or a flag).
Class contempt wrapped in therapeutic language is becoming the new norm. More and more in the West, we are seeing the petty bourgeoisie marking its distance and distinction from the working class. If every lived experience must be siloed into its own micronation, then the working class is not merely divided…it is being atomised into dust. And in that dust, capital finds its paradise.
Something has gone very wrong with what was once known as the left. Identity politics in its contemporary, authoritarian form is not a progressive force. It is a reactionary one. It is a tool of the bourgeoisie, deployed to divide the working class along artificial lines, to replace material analysis with moral posturing, and to substitute the difficult work of class solidarity with the easy comfort of virtue signalling.
The recent silencing of the Women’s Rights Network Northern Ireland by Féile an Phobail is a case in point. We do not know if WRNNI are working-class voices. We do not know if they are genuine grassroots organisers. That is not the point. The point is that Féile, a festival with historic roots in republican and working-class struggle, capitulated to an online mob, shut down debate and then refused to engage with the community it claims to serve.
Whether the dispute is about biological women or trans women is irrelevant to the principle at stake. Identity politics is eating itself. The content of the disagreement matters less than the fact that disagreement itself has been rendered unspeakable. Féile’s justification claimed it was “unaware” the event would “promote campaigns against rights for the Transgender community.” The reality is that they bowed to organised online pressure and initially stonewalled all attempts at dialogue until the threat of legal action became an issue.
But let us step back for a moment. Consider the trans debate itself. Where is this debate most intense? In the imperial core. In Britain, in America, in Western Europe. It is a preoccupation of the privileged. Go to Gaza, Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, to rural India, and ask them about pronouns. Ask them about safe spaces, HRT, changing rooms, and sporting competitions. Ask them about the hierarchy of oppressions. They will look at you with confusion, perhaps even with pity. They are fighting for food. For water. For shelter. For survival against bombs, drones, and the slow violence of austerity imposed by the IMF. They are fighting for life itself! They do not have the luxury of naval gazing because the boot of imperialism is on their necks every single day.
What does this reveal? It reveals that identity politics is a creature of the imperial core. It is the politics of those who have the material security to obsess over language. It is the politics of the petty bourgeoisie who have substituted revolutionary struggle for therapeutic self-examination. It is a form of narcissism dressed as radicalism.
The working class of the Global South does not have the time for this. They are too busy fighting for their lives against the very system that Western progressives refuse to name. And yet, these same progressives claim solidarity with them while at the same time demanding that we all adopt their language, their labels, their ever-shifting goalposts.
Free speech, disagreement and healthy debate are the lifeblood of any genuine working-class movement. However, they are being systematically eroded by an authoritarian identity politics that allows no dissent, and recognises no unity except the unity of the orthodox. The only way forward is to reject this division and to return to the materialist foundation of class struggle. There is no war but class war. And there can be no unity but the unity of the working class!
The economic base is what determines the superstructure. The mode of production shapes the forms of consciousness. Our struggle for survival is the primary struggle from which all others derive. Identity politics, however, turns this all on its head. It places the superstructure above the base. It treats consciousness as primary and material conditions as secondary. It asks “Who am I?” before it asks “What do I own?”
This inversion is no accident. It serves the interests of capital by fragmenting the working class, by channelling revolutionary energy into reformist channels, and by replacing the goal of systemic transformation with the goal of symbolic inclusion. Instead, we invite you the reader, the worker, the comrade to think about these questions:
- Who benefits when the working class is divided into competing identity groups?
- Who benefits when the discussion of women’s sex-based rights becomes unspeakable?
- Who benefits when the left spends more time arguing about pronouns than about wages, rents, and the cost of living?
- Who benefits when the demand for “safe spaces” becomes a demand to silence anyone who disagrees?
- Who benefits when Western progressives obsess over language while the people of Global South struggle for food and water.
The answer to all these questions is the same: the bourgeoisie. The capitalist class. The owners of the means of production. Those who profit from our division, our silence, and our submission. The Epstein cabal laughing at us fighting each other online and on BBC radio programmes.
The liberal bargain is indeed simple but very, very, effective. The bourgeoisie will give you flags til the cows come home. They will give you dates in the calendar, even months. They will give you logos on their products. And grants for your PR team. They will give you everything—except power.
Corporations fly the rainbow flag while funding a killing regime not just in Palestine, but across the Global South. Banks celebrate International Women’s Day while investing in Zionist bonds that fund the slaughter of innocent girls and women in West Asia. Tech companies champion diversity while destroying unions, to expand a Zionist surveillance empire.
And we see it in the progressive movement itself. The demand that we recognise every identity except the one that actually matters—the identity of the worker. The demand that we centre the preoccupations of the imperial core while making secondary the material struggles of the Global South.
This is the authoritarian face of identity politics which demands that certain views not only be disagreed with, but be rendered unspeakable. The reductive nature of “one group good, other group bad” thinking is killing us. And those who engage in such lazy, false dichotomy thinking shoot only themselves in the foot.
Where has free speech gone? Where has disagreement gone? Where has healthy debate gone? They have been sacrificed on the altar of identity. They have been traded for the promise of safety. Safety that never comes, alas, because the demand for safety is infinite, and the goalposts are always shifting.
The only way out of this impasse is to return to the materialist foundation, to reject the hierarchy of oppression and refuse the liberal bargain. We need to rebuild the unity of the working class.
And no, this does not mean ignoring the real oppressions faced by LGBTQ+ workers, by women, by people of colour, by the disabled. It means understanding that these oppressions cannot be overcome without overcoming the class system that produces and reproduces them. It means understanding that the trans debate, whatever one’s position, is a Western preoccupation that distracts from the material struggle of the global working class.
The old revolutionary in the Communist Manifesto put it this way:
“The only rights that cannot be lost are those secured by the abolition of the class system itself. The dictatorship of the proletariat. The seizure of the means of production. The end of wage slavery.”
This is the path forward. Not the multiplication of flags. Not the naval gazing of the imperial core, but the international solidarity of the exploited.
We end where we began: with questions.
Will we allow identity politics to divide us further?
Will we accept the liberal bargain—recognition in exchange for silence?
Will we abandon free speech, disagreement, and debate to the authoritarian mob who throw the “hate speech” label at those who don’t talk their way?
Will we allow ourselves to be divided until every individual has their own flag… until we are too busy defending our subjective labels to notice the boot on all our necks?
Or will we reclaim our movement, the movement of the working class, the movement that has won every genuine gain in human history, and rebuild it on the materialist foundation of class struggle?
The choice is ours. The future is ours.
Social Rights Ireland
For the working class. For free speech. For international solidarity against imperialism.
Follow us for more materialist analysis, working-class organising, and the defence of free speech against the authoritarian identity politics that seeks to silence us.