Identity politics can be a great force for change. Many strong and collective movements were born from shared identity – the Black Power movement, women’s liberation, and the gay rights movement among them.
Early identity politics, championed by figures such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Simone de Beauvoir, used identity as a means of unity. These were materialist movements fighting for housing, employment, bodily autonomy, legal rights, union protections, and institutional change. Grounded in grassroots organising and collective struggle, identity was not a brand but a lived condition around which ordinary people mobilised to demand liberation.
Today, however, identity-based politics often manifest in the form of corporate Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) policies and performative activism – phenomena that frequently fail to centre the very people they claim to protect. One need not dwell on the irony that companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé, which flaunt glossy diversity campaigns, are simultaneously implicated in human rights abuses ranging from child labour to union suppression by military force. Far from furthering equality, this corporate version of identity politics primarily serves to sanitise brand image while deflecting attention from exploitative practices.
But identity politics has not only become an enemy of progress in its corporate form; it increasingly burdens left-wing political movements as well. Ash Sarkar argues in Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War, “today’s identity politics isn’t so interested in the material injustices of food, jobs, bombs and money.” Instead, by centring their political struggle on identity, left-wing movements become ineffective and divided.
However, some movements still echo the identity politics of the past. The trans rights movement, for instance, is consistently present in radical spaces. The Transgender Law Center’s Trans Agenda for Liberation features demands such as readily available health care, resources for disabled people and indigenous land sovereignty. Trans people contribute hugely to protests across the spectrum – from immigration and Palestine, to the climate and austerity. The trans identity is powerful and integral to the movement, but it is not the limit of its political struggle.
On the other hand, when we allow identity to be made the main purpose of social justice, we inadvertently shift the goal posts. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, anti-racist literature and EDI training were marketed as self-help for white people, with books like White Fragility seeing huge sales. The focus shifted from addressing institutional violence against black people to instructing white people and corporations on how to curate an anti-racist identity. Similarly, when Vogue tells women that it is embarrassing to have a boyfriend, it draws upon the feminist notion of de-centring men, but reduces it to a matter of curating personal image to avoid embarrassment. The wider concept of de-centring men in economic policy, education, social safety structures, and the workplace remains conveniently untouched.
These are examples of how identity is manipulated to create a culture of performative activism, discreetly redirecting political energy towards ideological branding and away from the fight for material needs and institutional change. For people still facing real and tangible oppression, this is abstract and alienating.
And this is where the erosion of working-class support becomes most apparent. For many working-class people of all backgrounds, movements can appear more invested in performance and linguistic battles than in tackling low pay, rent hikes, food insecurity, state violence, or worker exploitation. Thus, the language of liberation feels disconnected or detached from their lived experience.
Importantly, focusing on economic liberation is not a “colour-blind” dismissal of identity. In fact, the foundation of old-school identity politics was the commitment to elevating marginalised groups by raising the baseline of economic security and political power. Material improvements, fair wages, strong unions, accessible housing, bodily autonomy, and anti-discrimination protections benefit marginalised identities because oppression is lived economically as much as it is culturally.
Yet the current online discourse often frames class politics and identity politics as mutually exclusive, creating an ultimatum that defeats the purpose of intersectionality. Intersectionality originally emphasised the interlocking nature of class, race, gender, and other structures of oppression – not their competition for priority. Recognising identity remains important, but moralistic online distortions of identity politics have become unproductive, reducing complex systems of inequality to symbol-driven culture wars.
This drift away from material politics is precisely what enables neoliberal co-optation; neoliberal corporations are more than happy to amplify such superficial identity discourse. Their virtue-signalling diversity campaigns offer the illusion of progress while obscuring the economic exploitation at the root of global inequality. The more identity is performed at the level of branding, the less pressure is placed on companies to enact real institutional change, and the more movements risk becoming subsumed into the very system they once sought to challenge.
If identity politics is to regain its radical potential, it must return to its original grounding in material struggle: not as a competition of identities, but as a coalition of people whose liberation is bound together. Only then can identity cease to be an obstacle, and once again become a force for genuine progress.
