In 2025, rhetoric of a class war has become the new “eat the rich” of 2020. It’s a cathartic release in response to the increasing boldness that economic elites are moving with as they single-handledly preclude the collective well-being of the majority of people who are living on this planet and that of future generations. More so, this class war is presented as an inevitable outcome that the ideological center of both the Democratic and Republican parties desperately attempted to avoid by distracting everyone with questions of identity politics. A natural reaction to decades of complacence and complicity from multiple generations of political leaders, younger people — including me — are doing everything in their power to overthrow patterns of self-destructive greed before the system of capitalist exploitation reaches its logical conclusion of a planetary catastrophe. At the same time, we need to be cautious about imagining a class war where other systemic, albeit less materialist, systems of race, sex, and gender-based discrimination are thrown to the periphery of our movement for radical restructuring.
Among the far-left, there is an increasing disdain for “identity politics” — a term that very loosely encapsulates any political questions pertaining to the ethnic, racial, sexual, or gender identities of an individual or community. Much of this disdain can be explained by looking at how leading political figures like former Vice President Kamala Harris have harped on these topics, even as far more urgent issues like rising economic inequality and climate change were sorely underaddressed.
At the same time, we need to be wary about switching to an alternative position which holds that identity politics have nothing tangible to do with the state of our society. Identity politics are, in fact, inextricably linked with kitchen-table issues. I spent my summer interning in Boston as summer researcher and organizer for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union. I mention this because, as a result of being so close to a hub of labor politics in the Northeast, I got exposure to not only how people produce cognitive dissonance from splitting kitchen-table issues from identity politics, but also the severity of the political and economic consequences that come from such dissonance.
The memory that stands out the most is when my supervisor explained to me that they would never vote for a Democratic candidate again after seeing how Harris and Walz were too focused on distractions that nobody cared about. This statement was broad, yet clearly critical of the very real complacency that the Democratic establishment currently has, not least regarding the brazenly abhorrent economic conditions that millions of people in America are suffering under. At the same time, however, their reasoning also encompassed social issues like abortion access and preserving DEI as an institutional pillar, ensuring that employers and schools at least somewhat take steps to further social equity.
It was disheartening to hear the leader of an organization so engrained in working people’s lives be so quick to disregard an area of issues that are close to the very same people they work for. When thinking about the history of systemic mistreatment and exploitation that workers of color, specifically female workers of color, have faced over history, for my supervisor to be so callous toward some of the most important issues for the very workers our union represented felt like a glaringly warped understanding of how social issues intersect with and are inseparable from material questions about how to economically and politically uplift working people.
The inability of the UFCW’s leadership to critically approach Harris’ complicated platform — which contained deep flaws that were, in fact, antithetical to what is necessary to advance an anti-capitalist agenda for collective empowerment — reflects a larger problem, where people want to dismantle political and economic systems of inequity and inequality, but cannot recognize that the tendrils of this inequity are distributed unevenly. What I heard from my peers at the UFCW was not new. Since my first semester in fall 2023, these same points have circulated on our campus, only becoming more frequently expressed as time moves forward. The idea of a class war is a natural reaction to economic and political elites continuing to demonstrate their unbridled greed in an increasingly brazen fashion. The stark division between the top one percent and the rest of the world is indeed becoming irreconcilable. But if we go on asserting that it is all about class, we are bound to run into a brick wall in our attempts to unite and mobilize for justice and equity.
Thinking back to my experiences with the UFCW, it is clear that in the 21st century, their chances for seizing power from corporations and employers dwindle as their membership stagnates and their political relevance shrinks. In large part, this is a continuation of the long-standing shadow cast by the slew of union-breaking activities that Ronald Reagan undertook nearly 40 years ago in the 1980s. Still, we cannot place all of the blame on neoliberalism. The history of vitriolic racism, sexism, and xenophobia that the labor movement has been a harbinger of since the beginning of its existence still influences its dynamics today, as I have seen firsthand.
White majoritarian identity politics heavily underpin the labor movement and are behind some of the most dismal recent political miscalculations of the largest labor organizations. During my internship, it was clear that the union’s representatives were excruciatingly unwilling to do or say anything to their thousands of members who were active Donald Trump supporters, and even scolded the union for making gestures towards supporting undocumented workers — I remember when one member expressed their confusion as to why the union would do anything to help such “criminals.” Though at the surface it may seem practical for unions to eschew identity politics and prioritize kitchen-table issues about equitable working conditions, this tactic becomes fraught and downright counterproductive when labor organizers willingly cover their eyes while some of the most viciously targeted workers are at the mercy of both political opponents and segments of their own membership (a paradigm that continues to be the norm).
Places like Oberlin and other hubs of socialist progressive thought and activity are not much different from these labor organizations in their reticence to openly acknowledge and act upon identity politics. Student organizations for political action need to do more to mobilize coalitions with Black and Brown students, or they have no hope of achieving a truly equitable and just future. As tensions rise and many of us dedicate ourselves to taking political action for a better future, we should take care in being sensitive to identity politics as an essential element in our social, political, and economic fabric. The sooner we do, the better chance we have at transcending the inequalities of the present.
