On Class Politics, the New Right and the Failures of Identity Politics: A Critical Commentary

Abstract

 How to explain the relative success of the AfD in Germany, the presidential election of Donald Trump in the USA, the Brexit vote or the popularity of the Right in France and elsewhere in Europe? Moreover, why did the Left not see this authoritarian turn coming? One prominent suggestion has been that the Left abandoned the white working class, thereby becoming the inadvertent midwife of a right-wing resurgence. Significant blame for this is in turn apportioned to the emergence of ‘identity politics’. In this essay, the authors take issue with this line of argumentation and criticise some of the implicit assumptions they consider problematic in current debates on the Left regarding the relationship between gender, race, class and emancipatory politics. They argue that struggles against both neoliberalism and the New Right require intersectional analyses of contemporary global class relations that do not abandon the important achievements and insights of new and newest social movements. How to explain the relative success of the AfD in Germany, the presidential election of Donald Trump in the USA, the Brexit vote or the popularity of the Right in France and elsewhere in Europe? Moreover, why did the Left not see this authoritarian turn coming? One prominent suggestion has been that the Left abandoned the white working class, thereby becoming the inadvertent midwife of a right-wing resurgence. Significant blame for this is in turn apportioned to the emergence of ‘identity politics’. In this essay, the authors take issue with this line of argumentation and criticise some of the implicit assumptions they consider problematic in current debates on the Left regarding the relationship between gender, race, class and emancipatory politics. They argue that struggles against both neoliberalism and the New Right require intersectional analyses of contemporary global class relations that do not abandon the important achievements and insights of new and newest social movements