‘Black Lives Matter’ as Identity Politics and Class Struggle

“Daddy changed the world!” Gigi Floyd, daughter of George Floyd, smiled broadly as she shouted this out loud at a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis—a poetic expression of the connection between particular struggle and universal transformation. Gigi’s father, George Floyd, had been murdered by police just a week earlier, sparking mass outrage and a surge in anti-racist organizing.

In recent weeks, Black Lives Matter protests, precipitated by the racist police killing of George Floyd, have roiled the United States and filled streets and squares all across the globe. The protests have rapidly shifted public consciousness regarding racism and police brutality, and already brought about some concrete changes such as the call from Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, for $150 million in cuts from the LAPD budget, and the Minneapolis City Council’s resolution to disband their city’s police department altogether.

The slogan, “Black Lives Matter,” was coined in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted of all criminal charges in the killing of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teen whom Zimmerman had shot dead in 2012. It was not uncommon then for those who insisted that Black lives matter to be challenged as to whether it might not be better rhetorically to abandon the particular and embrace the universal—to say instead that “All Lives Matter.” Such criticisms are thankfully far less common now, but we are still left with questions regarding what it means for an anti-racist movement to blossom in the U.S. and around the world, and how to understand the relationships between movements for the liberation of particular oppressed groups, and a movement for a radically different kind of world. The question is especially pressing as demands to abolish the police, for example, make it increasingly clear that to adequately address the needs of particular oppressed groups will require broad, thoroughgoing, systemic, and radical change.

One of the ways these questions manifest is as a debate between “identity politics” on the one hand, and Marxism and other “class-based” theories on the other. Identity politics covers a broad array of theoretical and practical interventions that ground themselves in, and take as their point of departure, the lived experience and group interests of groups of people who share social identity categories. Examples of “identities” in this sense include but are not restricted to gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion. The class-based theories, on the other hand, argue for political activity based on interests shared by people of different genders, races, religions, etc., on the basis of their economic position within class society. (This is obviously a necessarily brief summation of the two orientations.)

The ideological conflict between “identity politics” and Marxist or “class-based” theories of oppression and exploitation appears across a number of domains, and is especially prevalent in academic and activist discussions regarding the liberation struggles of oppressed groups. We know that people are discriminated against in all sorts of contexts on the basis of features of their social identity. We see how social divisions seem to occur along these fault lines of identity, marking out what seem like zero-sum conflicts between opposing identity-based groups (“Black vs white,” “the battle of the sexes.”) And yet, “class-based” theories of oppression suggest that members of different identity-based groupings have more interests in common with one another on the basis of their role in economic production, than they do with members of their own identity-based group who might belong to a different economic class.

This is fine (and, I would argue, quite correct!) in theory. But the class-based approach can obviously seem to run directly counter to much of the everyday, lived experience of many people. In a racist work environment, white racist co-workers will hardly seem like the allies of Black people. To a woman harmed again and again in heterosexual relationships shaped by misogynist social messaging and habits, it will hardly seem obvious that she might find allies in the men of her class. Certainly, there are also countless examples of working-class solidarity shaping and constituting lived experience for us to draw upon. But there is no denying that when we attend to the lived experience and narratives of oppressed people, what clearly emerges is testimony to patterns of abuse that members of groups closer to the top of identity-based social hierarchies inflict, sometimes with great relish, upon people positioned at the bottom of those hierarchies. This must be made sense of.

Much of Anglophone academic philosophy is notoriously skeptical, or in any case, deeply ambivalent, about the practice of looking to subjective, lived experience as a source of knowledge. Appearances, as everyone knows, and as figures such as Socrates or Descartes have tried their best to show us, are often deceiving. But what follows from this? For some, what follows is a kind of flight from materiality, and into pure abstraction; away from the particular, and into the realm of the strictly universal, driving skepticism about the invocation of feminism, critical race theory, and queer theory as analytical frames, and casting doubt upon their claims to be part of philosophical inquiry, properly so-called. Those of us who obviously do have a vested interest in achieving social justice because we are regularly denied it on the basis of our identities, are often even eyed with suspicion as to whether we could truly be “serious” and objective scholars, on precisely this basis. 

For Marxists, there is a long tradition of thinkers such as philosopher Angela Davis (a key and founding figure in contemporary abolitionist discourse), W. E. B. Du Bois, and importantly, Karl Marx himself, thinking critically about the complex relationships between subjectively experienced social identities and objective economic class relations. Yet, ironically, a similar kind of flight from materiality and particularity manifests in certain varieties of “class-based” social analysis.

Marx writes that the proletariat “has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular wrong, but wrong generally, is perpetuated against it.” Part of what grounds both normative and descriptive claims made from the point of view of the working class, in Marxist theory, is that the working class is a “universal” class because it is possible to have a society in which it is the only economic class. In fact, this is Marx’s prescription for the abolition of class hierarchy, and so, of class society itself. The class consciousness of the working class thus constitutes, for Marx, a universal human perspective that can be shared by all.

Understood only superficially, this observation might tempt one to imagine that the right way to approach political theory and activism is to ignore particular wrongs committed against particular subsections of the working class on the basis of social identities that are not and perhaps could not be universalizable to the class as a whole. But this would be a grave error. A better way to think about the particular and the universal in this context might be to invoke the old labor slogan, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” The universal manifests precisely in the particular. We cannot skip past engagement with specific, particular, lived and concrete instances of oppression in order to get to it. Attending to multiple oppressions, and to the ways they appear in the subjective lived experience of the people who endure them, gives us insight into how we might one day do away with the domination of some human beings over others, in all its forms.

If, as we Marxists argue, an economic transformation is necessary in order to produce a world without racism, sexism, and other forms of identity-based oppression, how do we think through the connections between struggles against identity-based oppression and the need for a movement against class-based exploitation? The links are already there—they exist concretely. While the “Black Lives Matter” slogan has gained wide acceptance, we find today similar skepticism and hand-wringing about the movement’s calls to abolish or defund the police. Critics argue that such demands would obviously require a complete, fundamental overhaul and restructuring of our entire society, and that these demands cannot be achieved while leaving any part of existing society just as it is. But this is precisely the point. Marx wrote that revolutionary activity was necessary not only because it was the only way to put political power into the hands of the people, but also because it is the only way for us to leave behind the worst of what capitalism has made of us, and to forge ourselves anew—better, less egoistic, seeing that our individual flourishing is organically connected to the flourishing of all. When it comes to the oppressed, particular demands and struggles for liberation are ultimately only winnable when linked together into a common fight for universal social transformation.

It was early in 2019 that my friend, Kate Doyle Griffiths, a radical anthropologist based in New York at Brooklyn College, reached out to me to ask whether I would be interested in helping to launch a new, interdisciplinary, Marxist journal. Like any harried, junior faculty member on the tenure track, I found myself staring through my mind’s eye at the same mental abacus that pops up any time I consider assuming a new role and responsibility.

A curious feature of how I met my now co-editor, Griffiths, is that although we are both academics, we didn’t meet in an academic context, at all. Rather, we met in a space designed for women and nonbinary people to gather, commiserate, and share personal stories and advice. Conversations about sexual orientation and expression, racism, misogyny, personal boundaries, emotional labor, and queer theory blossomed daily. And so although it might seem at first unlikely, it was perhaps only natural that as conversations turned to thinking about the connections between our everyday experiences and the larger social and political dynamics that shape and give rise to them, political commonalities would emerge and alliances would form.

It felt a little reckless on my part, but in the end, I said “Yes” and gladly joined my comrades to create Spectre Journal. Spectre is a biannual, interdisciplinary journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis. Our editorial board is united in our commitment to revolutionary Marxist thought and activism, and in the view that Marxist analysis must directly take up questions of identity-based oppression, and is inadequate and incomplete without them. In fact, struggles against such oppressions are of central concern. Several of our editors—Tithi Bhattacharya, Cinzia Arruzza (a philosopher at The New School for Social Research), Kate Doyle Griffiths, Holly Lewis (a philosopher at Texas State University), and David McNally—are known in large part for their work on “social reproduction theory,” a branch of Marxist-feminism that interrogates the ways that social identities and identity-based oppression are shaped in and through capitalist processes, shaping them also, in turn. In my own work, I think extensively about the relationships among race and class (as do my co-editors Zachary Levenson and Charles Post), and increasingly in recent years, about race, gender, and class. My interest in these questions has many sources and my social location as a Black, working-class woman is importantly one of them.

Asked recently what philosophers contribute to the world, I had opportunity to reflect on how much philosophy can offer to theorizing that helps advance the cause of human emancipation. Discussions about the particular and the universal, the ideal and the material, the abstract and the concrete, the natural and the social, all fall squarely into our domain, and all, believe it or not, are absolutely necessary in order to understand the current moment, to help others to understand it, and to intervene as effectively as possible within it. Philosophical training gives us tools to interpret and change the world. The more deeply we engage intellectually with lived, concrete reality, the more effectively we can put those tools to work in both theory and practice.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.

Vanessa Wills

Assistant Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University

Vanessa Wills is a political philosopher, ethicist, educator, and activist working in Washington, DC. She is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The George Washington University, and in 2019/20, she held the DAAD Visiting Chair in Ethics and Practice at Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität’s Munich Center for Ethics.