Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Fran Shor and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

During the last three decades of the twentieth century the labor movements of the western world were less successful in mobilizing their constituencies than were the new social movements propounding the politics of identity, whether of gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Ironically, this relatively poor performance of labor movements occurred during a period when class differences and socioeconomic inequalities actually widened considerably.¹

During the 1980s the intellectual and political climate became increasingly hostile toward the notion of class and contemptuous of the working class, with decline of class-consciousness persistently paraded as proof of the death of class itself. Prominent postmodernist theorists led the charge against class and the working class. For example, to Jean-Francois Lyotard, “class” was “little more than an effect” of Marxism, a grand narrative stripped of all credibility in contemporary culture.⁴

Postmodern theory appeared implicated in the death of class, skeptical as it is about grand narratives of emancipation or even explanation; but the ascendancy of postmodern paradigms was possibly as much an effect as a cause of the death of class. Whatever the precise relationship—and notwithstanding that some postmodern theorists were not dismissive of class—it is true that an antagonism towards the notion of class as a salient social division and class conflict as a likely avenue for change constituted what Terry Eagleton identifies as “the culture or milieu or even sensibility of postmodernism as a whole.” While the anticlass views attributed to postmodernism in general might well be qualified or even rejected in the work of a particular theorist, “they constitute even so a kind of received wisdom.”⁶

By the last decade of the twentieth century “class” and “identity” had become concepts in opposition and “identity” had become the central concern of new social movement theory and action. Indeed, new social movement politics was effectively rebadged as “identity politics.” Amory Starr observes:

The dominance of identity politics had serious implications for the labor movement and its constituencies. This politics of recognition, by and large, could not recognize class; with the horizon clouded by the death of class, its vision was impaired when it came to issues of socioeconomic disadvantage. There was thus a notable absence in identity politics: class was the one amongst the multiple forms of identity that most often, in fact usually, went missing.

Nancy Fraser has noted that struggles for the “recognition of difference,” which assumed the guise of “identity politics,” seemed charged with emancipatory promise. However, this promise was not realized in the 1990s because the emphasis on identity, or recognition, displaced the earlier emphasis on redistribution of resources that originally informed the agenda of new social movements, such as feminism. The relative decline in claims for egalitarian redistribution is disturbing, she argues, because this move from redistribution to recognition in the language of political claims-making is occurring at a time when an aggressively expanding capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality. “In this context, questions of recognition are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse, and displace them.” Insofar as the politics of recognition displaces the politics of redistribution, Fraser argues it may actually promote economic inequality.⁹

Arguably, the retreat from class analysis expresses the class interests of those advocating retreat: there are material reasons why identity politics appeals to radical intellectuals. Often positioned as leaders or spokespeople of the new social movements, radical intellectuals emphasize social categories other than class, in order to conceal the extent to which their own relatively privileged class position makes them unrepresentative of those they claim to represent. It is by deemphasizing the significance of class that the proponents of identity politics proclaim a community of interest between feminist bureaucrats and female welfare recipients, gay studies academics and working-class homosexuals, ethnic affairs advisers with unemployed immigrants, and so on.¹¹

In other ways, too, class forces have brought about the alleged death of class. Karl Marx stressed in the Grundrisse that capitalists must constantly encourage consumption by creating new and differentiated individual needs; thus it is capitalism that has created the polymorphous identities and hybrid phenomena of the current period, which are being hailed as signifying a radically new and final phase of world history.¹²

However, the limitations of identity politics should not prevent analysis of the reasons for its recent comparatively greater appeal. The labor movements of the western world have not been as successful in mobilizing their constituencies, in speaking to disadvantaged people, despite increasing socioeconomic hardship. Admittedly, during the 1990s there have been encouraging developments such as social-movement unionism in various parts of the world and, in general, sharpened degrees of class division have brought with them increased levels of class conflict.¹⁴

The power of identity versus equality of opportunity

Ronaldo Munck has suggested that any new and more successful labor movement in the twenty-first century “will be much influenced by the example of the ‘new' social movements that have come to the fore over the last twenty years.”¹⁸

Acknowledgement of shared identities is important in social movement formation. For movements about gender, racial, ethnic, or sexual identity, for example, collective grievances are inextricably linked with issues of identity.¹⁹

Language and systems of discourse invariably play active roles in the creation of aspects of social reality. Emphasis on the significance of language in the mobilization of subordinate groups does not entail commitment to poststructuralist theories that wrench political languages and concepts loose from their material and other influences,²¹

Social movements that successfully construct feelings of identity create new verbal frameworks and vocabularies, articulate inequalities as oppression thereby converting relations of subordination into relations of oppression. From the 1960s new social movements roused new constituencies of subordinate groups, such as women, homosexuals, racial and ethnic minorities, with their rhetorics of difference and their emphasis on identity. “Black Power.” “Gay Pride.” “The woman-identified-woman.” Numerous slogans come to mind, reminding us of the ways in which the movements propounding identity politics have utilized the power of words to mediate between being and consciousness, to persuade subordinate groups to recognize and act upon their oppression. Examination of the rhetoric of social movements therefore offers an important key to understanding how movements mobilize their constituencies. It also offers a shorthand means to assess the political meaning of a movement. For social movements, as Manuel Castells argues, “are what they say they are. Their practices (and foremost their discursive practices) are their self-definition.”²⁴

Many labor movement and left responses to the greater success of the new social movements have implied that the politics of identity is in itself problematic. On the contrary, the central problem is not identity politics per se but the comparative absence within contemporary political culture of a politics of class identity. By contrast, in the first half of the twentieth century, the labor movement was rich in cultural forms, institutional and linguistic, that nourished a politics of identity. Brass bands, workingmen's colleges, mechanics' institutes, workers' educational associations, cooperatives, a labor press, a socialist press, and labor movement agitators, propagandists, and even politicians spoke the language of class. The decline of class identity politics during the second half of the twentieth century not only directly weakened the labor movement but also encouraged the collapse of new social movement radicalism into class-free identity politics, with deleterious consequences for working-class people, including those from oppressed groups supposedly represented in the turn to identity politics.

Identity politics has undoubtedly demonstrated its capacity to mobilize subordinate groups, but without a corresponding politics of class identity articulated by the labor movement, identity politics favors the socioeconomically more advantaged amongst the identity groups commonly championed. Working-class people, whatever their other identities, are badly served by the displacement of the politics of redistribution by the politics of recognition, that is, by identity politics that does not also embrace class as a form of identity. The labor movement has therefore two reasons to reconsider its postwar trajectory that was characterized by an increasing reluctance to speak in classed rhetoric. This reluctance not only aided increasing inequalities within society generally but also reduced the appeal and therefore mobilizing capacity of the labor movement itself.

The politics of class identity that characterized the labor movement in the first half of the twentieth century revealed a greater capacity to mobilize working-class people for effective political purposes than the politics of equality of opportunity pursued by the labor movement in the second half of the twentieth century. Confined within a cage of liberal individualist assumptions, the demand for equality of opportunity is a politics incapable of success in actually unequal, class-divided societies. At the same time, it is a politics that actively militates against working-class identity, against notions of separate and distinctive working-class values and interests, the preservation of which would enable the labor movement to promote or defend more adequately the interests of working-class people. The decline of working-class identity politics in the second half of the twentieth century has ensured that, although the reality of class inequalities has in recent decades become more stark, perceptions of this reality have become less clearsighted.

At the same time, emphasis on equality of opportunity all too easily falls prey to neoliberal inflections, for what is demanded, in effect, is an equal opportunity to become unequal. “The desire for equality of opportunity,” wrote W.H. Mallock in 1918, “is a desire that everybody shall have an opportunity of achieving . . . some position or condition which is not equal, but which is, on the contrary, superior to any position or condition which is achievable by . . . all.”²⁵

Though “identity politics” was not one of his keywords, and he wrote well before its popular usage, Williams' writings persistently warned the British labor movement of the dangers of neglecting what we can recognize nowadays as identity politics. He notes that, in its formative period during the first half of the twentieth century, the British labor movement offered a new category within social bonding, and a positive one. “The exposed common condition of the landless and unpropertied, of the hired and fired but now newly aggregated and interdependent wage-laborers, was the basis for a new bond against new forms of bondage.” Williams wrote of the importance of this broad and meaningful working-class consciousness, as a sustaining and bonding principle.²⁷

Learning from the past: languages of class

Before the Second World War the labor movements of the Western world promoted the notion of separate and distinctive working-class values and interests. Indeed, the labor movement was identifiable as a social movement at this time because of this emphasis on working-class difference. For the basis of a social movement lies in the acknowledgment of a common interest between a specific group of people against another (and equally defined) group of people.³⁰

In marked contrast to the lingua franca of the contemporary labor movement, labor movement activists of the interwar period, whether syndicalist, communist or labo(u)rist, spoke a language that encouraged emancipatory or social-movement politics premised upon working-class identity. Especially distinctive are the notions of class identity propounded by the syndicalists, anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary industrial unionists of the first few decades of this century.

The class-consciousness of revolutionary industrial unionism was embodied in new linguistic traditions: new words, new songs and new ideas. Robert Tyler and many others have emphasized this distinctive culture of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the system of values that sustained it, values outrageously at odds with middle-class notions of hard work and Christian piety.³¹

The ability of syndicalist propaganda to encourage class distance was achieved also in continental Europe, especially in the Latin countries. Georges Sorel's 1908 Reflections on Violence outlines his views on the myth of the general strike to maintain proletarian morale and mobilization, an argument premised on the existence of a distinctive proletarian vitality and morality. For Sorel, the working class alone carried the seed of freedom, not simply because they had nothing to lose from the destruction of the present system, but because workers were the only authentic producers in society and productivity is good.³⁶

Sorel concludes his reflections with the observation that syndicalism aims to create a real proletarian ideology and the salvation of the world may come from it. Developing underground, this real proletarian ideology is shaping the birth of a virtue middle-class intellectuals are incapable of understanding, a virtue which will save civilization by eliminating the middle class.³⁸

By contrast with the syndicalists and their proletarian ideology, the Communist Parties in the interwar period propounded “a proletarian science,” as Stuart Macintyre has shown. In the case of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), this politics of working-class identity was formulated and enunciated predominantly by self-taught worker-intellectuals, who occupied leading positions in the 1920s Communist Party, just as they did also in the Labour Party. Marxist education, carried out primarily by the labor colleges and the Communist Party, was rooted in this wider autodidactic culture. Autodidactic habits of home study and the labor colleges supported “an intellectual culture quite distinct from that of the national intelligentsia.”³⁹

The flavor of this politics is indicated in Macintyre's description of the Proletarian Schools established for working-class children, predominantly in the central industrial belt of Scotland and South Wales. The organizer of these schools was a Glaswegian, Tom Anderson, who also published a series of pamphlets on working-class heroes, episodes of popular revolt, such as The Fat Bourgeois. At the Proletarian Schools the Ten Commandments were replaced by the Ten Proletarian Maxims, which included: “1. Thou shalt inscribe on your banner, ‘Workers of all lands unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.'” “6. Thou shalt demand on behalf of your class the complete surrender of the capitalist class.” “7. Thou shalt wage class war.”⁴¹

The left of the labor movement had no monopoly on the encouragement of class identity. Countless studies have documented the classed language of British Labourism in its first half-century. In general, labo(u)rism in the Anglophone democracies until the Second World War spoke the language of class, and loudly. This was true even in a political culture such as the Australian, where the Labor Party had always to contend with the hegemonic ideology of egalitarianism, which suggested that class distinctions were a peculiar affliction of British society and were more or less absent from the antipodes. More remarkable still was the way in which Australian Labor politicians used class-conscious rhetoric in government.

Although the Australian Labor Party was in office in the state of Queensland for most of the interwar period, its public statements nonetheless encouraged working-class identity in a way now unimaginable of labo(u)r parties in government. Distinct notions of class difference and, by implication, working-class moral superiority, were conveyed in its effective demonization of other class groups. Queensland Labor spokesmen publicly denounced the capitalists of interwar Queensland as “parasites” and “exploiting cliques.” They described the profits they extracted as “capitalistically-appropriated surplus.” The wealthy pastoralists were “land-grabbers” and the conservative and obstructionist Legislative Council members were “the minions of Mammon.”⁴³

Labor's retreat from identity politics: Britain as example

In Politics and Letters Raymond Williams explicitly identifies 1948–9 as the period of change in British Labour Party politics, the point at which the Party became less recognizable as part of a social movement.⁴⁵

Williams was also agitated by the decline of specifically working-class cultural forms and venues. He argues in Politics and Letters that the Attlee Government had a clear choice, in culture as in education, between two options: to pursue conventional capitalist priorities or sustain working-class culture. Attlee's “rapid option for conventional capitalist priorities” disappointed Williams. He criticized this Government's “failure to fund the working-class movement culturally when the channels of popular education and popular culture were there in the forties,” the cultural infrastructure of the wartime years that could have been built upon. If such an option had been pursued, Williams insists this would have enabled the labor movement to withstand the political campaigns in the bourgeois press that were already gathering momentum. The Attlee Government's decision to opt instead for “reconstruction of the cultural field in capitalist terms” became, according to Williams, “a key factor in the very quick disintegration of Labour's position in the fifties.”⁴⁸

Williams is adamant that neglect of the politics of working-class identity is the key to British Labour's weakened position in the mid to late 1950s. Williams' position runs directly counter to the conventional wisdoms that Labour suffered in this period from a muting of class differentials and the embourgeoisement of the working class. Williams The Long Revolution specifically rejected the argument that class distinction was on the decline, an assumption that sustained the latter twentieth-century labor movement's pursuit of the politics of equality of opportunity.⁴⁹

In The Long Revolution, Williams noted, “the complex and uneven growth of consciousness, most marked in the new communities but present almost everywhere in the society, is left with too few channels through which it can be politically expressed.”⁵¹

This depiction of the labor movement's decline from social movement to alternative power-group is not that different, in substance, to the analysis offered by Alain Touraine in The Voice and the Eye, one of the pioneering texts of new social movement theory, in 1981. Here, Touraine argued that the labor movement was no longer a social movement but a mere political force and one that was irremediably institutionalized and incapable of offering social opposition.⁵⁶

Seattle and S11: class as identity politics?

Where Williams deplores the decline of working-class consciousness for which he holds the Labour Party largely responsible, Frederic Jameson gladly anticipates its reemergence. Jameson's solution to the temporary absence of class consciousness from postmodern late capitalism was “‘cognitive mapping’ of a new and global type.” This was the attempt to learn how to represent “the truth of postmodernism—that is . . . the world space of multinational capital” and so “again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion.” Jameson explains that “cognitive mapping” is a code-word for class consciousness “of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind.”⁵⁷

Jameson published his thoughts in 1991. By the end of that decade the world was witnessing the first glimmerings in radical practice of such a politics of “cognitive mapping of a new and global type” and of class consciousness “of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind.” Chris Carlsson wrote on the internet of his experience in Seattle late in 1999 during the protests against the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO): “the people in the streets of Seattle articulated a sophisticated understanding of the new global political situation, and saw their issues as transcending borders, workplaces, industries, and populations.”⁵⁸

Most of the demonstrators, according to William Tabb, “had the sort of class analysis which working people intuitively, if inchoately, often have . . . The proposals for confronting transnational capital are in class terms and, for the most part, inclusive.”⁶⁰

The “Battle of Seattle,” though it was not the first of such events, has been described as the “coming out party for a new global movement.”⁶¹

Seattle has been followed by significant mobilizations across the world.⁶³

Amongst the mobilizations that form part of this global anticorporate movement was S11 in Australia, when protesters effected a mass blockade of the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum (WEF), meeting between September 11–13, 2000, at Melbourne's Crown Casino. Around 200 delegates were physically prevented from attending. Melbourne University student newspaper Farrago reported that: “Only one quarter of WEF delegates attended . . . while outside crowds swelled to more than twenty thousand people, as union members marched from Trades Hall to join the blockade.”⁶⁴

Amory Starr's analysis of the currents comprising the anticorporate movement reminds us that the concept of “identity” has typically precluded class. “None of these movements is organized as an identity movement.” Starr maintains “identity” may no longer be the most important organizing principle for social movements as they embrace multiple oppressions, confront corporations on many fronts at once and recognize allies who cannot be contained by an identity politics framework.⁶⁶

Yet examination of the rhetoric of the Seattle and S11 mobilizations suggests that the new movement against corporate globalization—marked as Starr notes by an absence of “identity politics”—could be interpreted as identity politics based upon class or at least upon socioeconomic disadvantage. To this extent, it is an identity politics to end identity politics, because it divorces identity from consumption and therefore from the capacity to flourish within capitalist forms of society. In Seattle, according to Jackie Smith, the “teach-ins” were “spaces where participants' commitment and identity with a growing movement and with other victims of ‘corporate-led globalization' were cultivated.”⁶⁷

Consider some typical placards at Seattle: “Capitalism destroys all life.” “Keep the sweatshop in the sauna.” “Stop exploiting workers.” “Think the WTO is bad? . . . Wait till you hear about capitalism!” Amongst the puppets was a ten foot square rolling “pyramid of corporate power.” The crowds sang, after Pink Floyd: “We don't need no corporations, We don't need no thought control.”⁶⁸

A teenager explained his presence in Seattle to Jeff St. Clair. “I like turtles and I hate that fucker Bill Gates.”⁷⁰

S11 literature explained that, like the WTO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) “is a means of promoting global policies aimed at weakening trade unions and environmental protection and intensifying the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.”⁷³

The principal slogans of the S11 protest were: “Human Need Not Corporate Greed” and “Our World Is Not For Sale!”⁷⁷

The organizers insisted that there was “a growing distaste for globalization and its running dogs of poverty, inequality, and exploitation.”⁷⁹

Vocabularies and verbal frameworks such as these encourage participants and observers to think about the structures of global economic power in ways that invite class analysis and class resentment—“cognitive mapping of a new and global type”—as Jameson would have it. Indeed, if the rhetoric of corporate globalization informs the identity politics of the world's rich, then increasingly anticorporate globalization rhetoric is the language sustaining an emergent identity politics of the world's disadvantaged. Robin Hahnel notes that the Seattle mobilization emphasized “the pernicious effects of corporate sponsored globalization, including the terrible effects on US workers and the US labor movement.”⁸⁰

Is class identity politics apposite from those who express the discontents of globalization at these summits? The movement's composition is clearly different from the new social movements of the 1960s when, by and large, labor unions were not involved. In Seattle the largest contingents were from that constituency. Despite the machinations of AFL-CIO bureaucrats to keep the union forces away from the battle zone by forcible detouring of the labor rally, many rank-and-file militants defied their lieutenants to join the troops downtown. John Charlton observed:

At S11, too, the union contribution to the amalgam of protesters was substantial; and, as at Seattle, a degree of ambivalence of the part of the union hierarchy was also evident. Although the 7000 strong union contingent that marched on September 12 to the Crown Casino did not formally join the blockade, significant numbers of unionists crossed the road to join the blockade at the conclusion of the union rally. S11 activist Jeff Sparrow asserts that, despite the equivocations and hesitations of Trades Hall, S11 forged a much closer relationship between left activists and the organized labor movement.⁸²

At Seattle, common socioeconomic interests against corporate globalization even saw a worker-peasant alliance forming, symbolized by the presence of Via Campesina, a network representing peasant movements in sixty-five countries.⁸⁴

Young adults are especially active in the anticorporate movement, partly because global labor markets have dealt much more harshly with employees younger than thirty-five than with older age groups.⁸⁷

White-collar employees are visible in the new movement, their militancy encouraged by the proletarianization of educated labor that has occurred in recent decades: not just older occupations such as teachers but newer ones, even those emblematic of the new global economy. For example, the role of “hactivists” and “net warriors” in the new movement has been the subject of much comment.⁹⁰

Prospects

The occupational and political diversity within the new movement has been the subject of much comment.⁹²

S11—a spectacular political collage—evoked a similar response. According to Damien Grenfell and Anita Lacey: “The spectre of plurality and difference became a pseudonym for inchoateness and ineffectiveness.”⁹⁵

Indeed, S11 organizer Jeff Sparrow noted that the kind of identity politics in which the celebration of difference leads to disunity almost as a matter of principle proved notable by its absence. Instead, a profound unity of purpose transcended all manner of political styles and positions. “I watched a friend sell a revolutionary magazine to a woman dressed as an enormous beetle without either of them feeling any incongruity about the transaction.”⁹⁷

The new activism against organizations that could reasonably be regarded as the executive committee of the international bourgeoisie for managing the common affairs of the whole international bourgeoisie points to the possibilities for a refreshingly inclusive working-class remobilization based on a strong politics of identity. The nature of the protests—the blockading of the citadels of corporate power—symbolizes the socioeconomic divide that is being contested. At Seattle, according to Chris Carlsson: “Working people came together to contest trade policies being negotiated behind closed doors.”⁹⁸

Whatever the class component in any particular protest, these mobilizations at least posit a form of identity politics that is recognizably based on socioeconomic status. There is a hard economic center to the rhetoric that sustains these confrontations and builds the necessary links between the participants, even between those whose radical leanings have been prompted by concern for the fate of the planet, the violence of men against women, or discrimination against their racial or ethnic grouping. The battle lines are drawn clearly in terms of the rich who rule the world versus the poor who do not.

Both the prewar labor movements and the more recent new social movements effectively enunciated a politics of identity that utilized the power of language to present the claims and articulate the needs of subordinate groups. By contrast, the mainstream labor movements of the second half of the twentieth century have been less successful, as the earlier emphasis on class identity became increasingly displaced by a politics centered on equality of opportunity. Now, the anticorporate social movement is creating new verbal frameworks and articulating inequalities—in this case socioeconomic ones—as oppression. This new movement's rediscovery of languages of class is partly in exasperated response to the retreat from such rhetoric on the part of labor and social democratic politicians across the Western world. Appearing at a time when socioeconomic differences have become harder and harsher, this consciousness of a hitherto undreamed of kind expresses an emergent identity politics of the world's exploited. From syndicalism to Seattle, we have witnessed the rise, retreat, and resurgence of class identity politics. The return of class as a form of identity suggests a potential for working-class remobilization—especially if labor movements overcome their ambivalence towards the anticorporate movement and adopt its classed rhetoric—because the politics of difference has a greater capacity than the politics of equality of opportunity to mobilize the disadvantaged. By such means might the forward march of labor be hastened rather than halted.