Verity Burgmann addresses a critical issue for the contemporary left by analyzing the decline of class-based social movements in the last three decades, and by searching for new iterations. In doing so she raises fundamental questions about the role of identity in politics. Burgmann rightly concludes that identity and culture are critical for social movements, and that attendance to these questions is crucial for the advancement of class politics today. However, I think her understanding of identity prevents her from fully grasping what happened in to class politics in the 1960s, leads her to miscast the struggles that go under the sign of “identity politics” today, and ultimately makes her miss the radical potential of the current resistance to global capital that she describes.

Burgmann acknowledges that language plays a role in framing social identity, but wants to resist theories that “wrench political languages from their material and other influences.” Her assumption that material influences are somehow prior to language prevents her from appreciating that these influences can be experienced, interpreted, and expressed myriad ways, linked to heterogeneous political commitments. As a way of demonstrating how individuals and groups take up different political identifications, I will begin by revisiting Burgmann's own story about the decline in class identification over the last three decades, focusing on the context I know best, the United States.

Bergmann's account tellingly begins with a crucial absence. She describes the emergence of new social movements in the 1970s, whose theorists “seized upon the evidence of declining levels of class identification and increasing levels of incorporation of labor movement institutions.” From there, she moves on to the role of postmodern theorists in the denunciation of the working class in the 1980s, and then to the last decade of the twentieth century, where the now-dominant identity politics “could not recognize class.” Citing Nancy Fraser, she goes on to suggest that the “politics of recognition” was itself implicated in the demise of class politics. And yet she does not tell us why there was a deterioration of class politics on the left to begin with. Addressing this absence gives a different perspective on the history Burgmann relates, allows for a richer understanding of the relationship between politics and identity, and offers the potential to imagine a new, vital politics on the left that does not collapse other identity categories back into class.

Working-class identity did not die in the 1960s, at least not in the United States. Instead, it was mobilized by a populist Right that linked class resentment among whites to racism and antistatism. Wealthy elites, conservatives argued, were not the natural enemies of working people. Rather, they said, liberal political elites were. White workers were appealed to on the basis of race and class, and told that everything they held dear—their homes, their communities, their schools, their job sites, and their unions—would be forced open by arrogant federal bureaucrats. Civil rights thus was not just an abstract moral question, conservatives claimed, but one that would substantially alter the lives of these working people and everything they had toiled for. This rhetoric proved quite compelling when employed by the likes of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and—most deftly—by Ronald Reagan, but it was effective not simply because its purveyors were gifted persuaders. Rather, this rhetoric played on longstanding contradictions in the Democratic Party and the New-Deal state that had kept people of color out of labor accommodations to begin with.¹

When Wallace spoke of “this bus driver, this beautician, this man in the street” he was attempting to shift the political identifications of white workers who were anxious about the pace of civil rights reforms and uneasy with state elites implementing them. When Nixon invited the leader of the construction trades union to the Oval Office after union members beat antiwar protesters in New York's financial district, he was signaling his commitment to a specific articulation of working-class politics. But it wasn't just national elites who made this successful. Political activists and politicians in white working-class communities in such places as Baltimore, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Gary, Detroit, and Milwaukee shaped new political identities—and electoral coalitions—on the ground.²

Mobilization of right-wing populism was the centerpiece of conservative strategy from the mid 1960s onward. As Nixon strategist Kevin Phillips wrote after his boss's 1968 presidential victory, “The emerging Republican majority [spoke] clearly . . . for a shift away from the sociological jurisprudence, moral permissiveness, experimental residential, welfare and educational programming, and massive federal spending by which the Liberal establishment sought to propagate liberal institutions and ideology. Democrats among these groups [were] principally alienated from their party by its increasing identification with the Northeastern Establishment and ghetto alike.”³

While mobilized under new conditions in the 1960s, this producerist rhetoric linking elites above to perceived dependents below in an alliance against working people has deep roots in working-class formation.

The brief history outlined above is meant to demonstrate that conservative reaction did not signify the disappearance of working-class culture and identity. Rather what emerged was a new defining cleavage, linking white class resentment to economic conservatism, authoritarianism, social traditionalism, and race on the one side against statist liberalism, civil rights, feminism, gay rights, ecology, and other political elements on the other. This part of the story is critical in examining how class became separated from other identity positions, such as race, for it locates the origins of the split in the institutional contradictions of the twentieth-century liberal state, in conservative mobilization, and in a broader historical context of white supremacy.

More important, however, is what the enlistment of class politics for right-wing populism tells us about political identity itself. The linking together of disparate political elements into what Ernesto Laclau has called “chains of equivalence” is the basis of decisive political cleavages and the creation of new hegemonies.⁴

Key to the process is making the connection between these elements seem natural and fixed. Activists on the right were able to make racism, economic conservatism, “law and order,” and conservative Christianity all of a piece politically, even though separately, there are no inherent links—and plenty of contradictions—between them.

Because Bergmann sees struggles against racism, gender domination, heterosexual normativity, etc. in opposition to class politics—“competitors” she calls them—she is unable to see their historical connection to capitalism, through for instance, colonialism and patriarchy. In doing so she reproduces the very split engineered by conservatives. Thus, she is also unable to imagine a way that these struggles could be linked in the future, except to collapse them all back into class.

Class on its own is not enough to build a hegemonic movement, nor should it be. Like Burgmann, I think that the current movement against capitalist globalization provides an inspiring example of how to revive a class politics on the left. But her very depiction of the movement misses what is truly radical about it. In Seattle (and in counterglobalization demonstrations since then), labor organizations worked with farm organizations, human rights groups, environmentalists, immigrants' rights groups, indigenous rights groups, and others that she would call “identity” or “recognition” politics. Yet she claims to want “an identity politics to end all identity politics” based on class. Her hope for such an identity is that it “divorces identity from consumption and therefore from the capacity to flourish within capitalist forms of society”—as if labor politics in advanced industrial societies in the twentieth century have either been opposed to consumption, or immune from cooptation by the bourgeois state on that very basis.

What is hopeful about the counterglobalization movement is not its class identity, but the search for a common language and common identity that can link the diverse array of groups. Most broadly, this has been achieved through a shared commitment, however vague, to democracy in opposition to global decisionmaking by multilateral trade and lending organizations like the WTO and IMF. Class is a key element to this struggle, but the thrust should be outward and embracing of excluded identities, toward forging a common articulation. Perhaps one way this might be done is to continue to develop counterhegemonic politics that link together in a negative signifier corporations, first-world power, neocolonialism, antidemocratic decisionmaking, and antiecological practices that movements can unite against. The solidification of the counterglobalization movement should not reduce everything to class, but rather link different elements into a new politics. To narrowly promote economics can only impoverish the identity and culture of the movement, and reproduce the splits that cause “identity” groups to look elsewhere for political allies.