Verity Burgmann's essay enters the debate taking place in the academic left over how to evaluate the trajectory of post-1960s radical politics and, more specifically, over the relative merits of “class politics” and “identity politics.” She makes a novel intervention, arguing that the labor movement might learn something from identity politics, namely, by claiming and promoting a politics of “class identity.” A set of politics that uses rhetoric, imagery, music, and performance to promote interests that are distinctively and explicitly identified with the working class, Burgmann suggests, might revitalize the labor movement. Indeed, she points to something that is plain enough but often overlooked—that the flabbiness of labor politics in the last third of the twentieth century derived at least in part from its “increasing reluctance to speak in classed rhetoric”(4). Burgmann's discussion of this trend focuses on the British Labour Party's educational reforms, which stressed “equality of opportunity” at the expense of working-class culture and identity. In the case of the United States, organized labor after the Second World War identified itself as part of the great American middle class. This was not, of course, a problem of mistaken identity but rather an erasure of class difference altogether.

I appreciate Burgmann's argument on behalf of the potential purchase that “identity” holds for labor politics. She points out that by the 1990s, “‘class’ and ‘identity’ had become concepts in opposition”(1). Read as an effort to find common grounds in contemporary progressive and left politics, Burgmann's essay is a constructive move. Yet, despite the effort to bridge the divide between “class” and “identity” politics, I fear she ends up reproducing it.

I am uncomfortable with the way that the juxtaposition of “class” versus “identity” sets the general framework for Burgmann's essay. The formulation is not a value-free descriptor of differences in contemporary radicalism. Rather, it is the product of a particular set of politics, which asserts the primacy of “class” over all other forms of oppression and resistance. This perspective appears throughout Burgmann's essay, for example, in the contention that “socioeconomic inequality” is a function of class (and by implication not of race or gender); that the labor movement's “primary role [is] as an agent of social change”(1); that identity politics is void of class content, having “impaired vision” when it comes to issues of “socioeconomic disadvantage”(2); that it “favors the socioeconomically more advantaged among the identity groups”(4); that it is easily co-opted by capitalism's culture of consumption (2–3); and that, in its worst form, it “leads to disunity as a matter of principle”(14).

When Burgmann refers to the social movements of ethno-racial minori-ties, women, and gays and lesbians, she characterizes their political content in terms of “identity” and “difference:” “black is beautiful,” “gay pride,” etc. (4). Nowhere does she mention any other dimension of these movements' concerns: economic inequalities, the allocation of social resources, political representation, civil rights, human rights, and individual freedom. Cultural affirmation and social legitimacy are, to be sure, important, but to reduce the totality of race and gender oppression to “culture” and their respective social movements to “identity politics” profoundly underestimates their nature and their importance. This brings us to the well-trod terrain of the larger debate: Are race and gender reducible to class? What is the transformative potential of struggles for democracy? What causes division and disunity in progressive movements—the replication of racist and sexist social relations within the movement, or those who resist their replication? That debate will not be rehearsed here. Instead, I want to briefly consider Burgmann's exemplary practitioners of class-based identity politics: the anarcho-syndicalists and communist parties of the early decades of the twentieth century and the antiglobalization movement of our present moment.

To be sure, these movements all employed distinctively radical class rhetorics such as “parasites,” “Mr. Fat,” “thou shalt wage class war,” and “capitalism destroys all life,” that articulated both political and moral opposition to the powers that be. Interestingly, Burgmann's fascination with the IWW's “peculiarly insulting vocabulary” as a form of class identity echoes the argument current in academic circles that rap music is subversive. But unlike much of cultural studies, Burgmann does not think that rhetoric alone makes resistance; her argument is not just for a language of class, her point is that, armed with such a language, the labor movement may realize its “primary role as an agent of social change.” Yet she is curiously silent (or perhaps ecumenical) on this score, offering no evaluation of the IWW, the working-class organizing of the Communist Parties, and the anti-WTO mobilization at Seattle, in terms of their roles in effecting social change. Anarcho-syndicalists like the Wobblies imagined that each strike for an improvement in wages was a dress rehearsal for the armageddon of class conflict. Did their rhetoric make it so? As for the interwar communists, Burgmann only discusses the British worker-intellectuals and their proletarian lexicon. More pertinent to the larger issue at hand, at least in the American context, is the Communist Party's often-troubled relationship to the so-called “national question:” the struggles of African Americans and other racialized minorities for full equality and democratic rights.

Finally, it seems to me that the transformative potential of the anti-WTO/globalization movement lies not primarily in the ostensibly “class conscious” politics of American radicals, as important as their protests have been. Rather, I would contend that its power resides in its global character and, in particular, in the cross-class oppositional movements in the developing world and in Europe—workers, farmers, environmentalists, students—who oppose not just corporate greed in general but American corporate domination of the global economy. It is at once a class politics (insofar as it is aimed at corporate greed) and a democratic politics that posits the nations of the world against the global hegemon. Burgmann would find more radical, more advanced, and more mass-based politics amongst the French and Korean farmers and the Hong Kong and Brazilian trade unions.

Burgmann's characterization of the United States antiglobalization movement as one grounded in “class consciousness,” however “inchoate” (9–10), is based on the movement's anticorporate rhetoric and the claim that activists from the “ecological or human rights or what have you” movements, who may not even make “specific reference to the working class or to the labor movement,” are nonetheless themselves “wage workers”(10,12). It all reads a bit like wishful thinking. It would seem, too, that by these criteria, the politics of the so-called identity-based movement are also “class-conscious,” for they certainly often target corporate power and they also comprise working people.

American workers have undoubtedly suffered from the export of American jobs to low wage regions of the world, but globalization has also benefited Americans (including workers) with cheap consumer goods. Wiping out the “peasantry” in the third world does not mean “more expensive food for consumers everywhere” (12, emphasis added); it actually means cheaper food for consumers in the United States. American antiglobalization politics necessarily involves both class self-interest and solidarities that reject the privileges that come with citizenship in the world superpower. Burgmann maintains that college-student radicalism is not “mere altruism on the part of the relatively affluent” because college students today face a grim economic future(13). This insistence that American students are part of the world's oppressed and are impelled by a sense of global common class interest seems wide of the mark. For example, environmentalists first opposed the corporate plundering of the seas because of its deleterious effects on ocean ecologies and on the dolphins caught in miles-long nets, but they soon learned about the disastrous effects on fishermen in smaller nations and joined forces with them. This is a new kind of politics, which is not best analyzed as a function of “class.”

Perhaps it is true that the unifying anticorporate politics of the antiglobalization movement might be characterized by the receptivity of “a woman dressed as an enormous beetle” to “revolutionary” politics(14). Concepts like “proletarian identity” and “class struggle” seem inadequate to analyze this phenomenon. Those interested in radical politics and social change today might do well to unshackle themselves from anachronistic political idiom. They might take another page from “identity politics”—that is, they might consider approaching “class” not as a material fact, but as a historically constructed and contingent concept.