[FE] 3.2 From Class to Identity: A New Center of Gravity
How a Moral Framework Shifted the Axis of the Left
This is the condensed, free edition of Chapter 3.2 from the book project The Return of the Duopoly by The Duopolist, which traces how Oppressionism is transforming liberal democracy and driving today’s “woke” politics and culture wars. The complete version is available here. Free readers see the core argument, while paid subscribers unlock the full text with references, notes, and extended analysis.
From Class Solidarity to a New Ideological Horizon
The shift from class to identity did not happen by chance. As the Marxist left confronted the collapse of its revolutionary project, it needed a way to preserve its moral story about oppression and liberation. Identity became the substitute arena where that story could continue.
A central claim of this book is that this was not just a change of emphasis. It was the rise of a new ideology. It was neither a simple extension of liberalism nor a leftover of classical Marxism. It kept the moral grammar of oppression that gave Marxism its power, but it replaced the economic base with identity hierarchies.
It could blend into liberalism because it used liberal language. It spoke of rights, equality, inclusion, and dignity. It worked through existing institutions, not against them, and seemed to help those institutions meet their stated aims. In practice, it quietly rewrote what those aims meant.
Many Marxists also missed what was happening. Some took it as liberalism pushed to its limits. The surface looked familiar because the economy remained capitalist. But the inner logic was different. Liberalism rests on universal rules for everyone. This new framework rests on particular standing for groups, ranked by their place in a history of harm. That difference marks a break.
The Old Paradigm: Class as the Axis of Justice
For much of the twentieth century, the left’s moral compass pointed to class. Economic inequality was the main injustice. The argument centered on wages, housing, pensions, public services, and labor protections. Politics aimed to close the gap between those who owned the means of production and those who sold their labor.
This framework had a clear organizing logic. The working class was not only a social group but also the moral subject of history. Unions, parties, and movements treated workers as a coherent bloc with shared interests and shared leverage.
In communist states, class struggle became a doctrine of political control. One party claimed to act for the working class. It ran industry, planned the economy, and suppressed rivals in the name of ending exploitation. In the West, social democrats chose a different route. They built welfare states and labor rights inside market economies. They could shape policy and deliver gains, but markets remained the foundation of economic life.
Across culture, the story matched the politics. Novels, plays, and films portrayed miners, dockworkers, and factory workers with sympathy and urgency. Strikes and picket lines were depicted as moral front lines. The worker stood for the human condition under capitalism.
Why Class Gave Way to Identity
So why did identity take the central place when the class paradigm faltered? Part of the answer lies in continuity. The class frame already worked through an oppression lens. Broadening the category of “the oppressed” to include race, gender, sexuality, and culture felt like a natural extension.
Another part is structural. As economies shifted toward services, technology, and knowledge work, heavy industry declined and union membership fell. Workplaces became more fragmented. National strikes like those of the 1980s were harder to organize. Class identity lost some of its day-to-day coherence, even though the working class did not disappear.
Politics also changed. Neoliberal reforms weakened organized labor and gave more power to capital. Center-left parties accepted more market logic and paired it with arguments about diversity and inclusion. As scholars like Nancy Fraser have noted, identity causes advanced while redistributive class politics receded.
Culture pushed in the same direction. Postwar immigration, decolonization, global trade, mass media, and the internet widened the field of concern. Social media let marginalized groups speak directly to large audiences. For people who once pictured “the oppressed” as the industrial worker next door, the image widened to include racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people, Indigenous peoples, and refugees. Identity became the new moral axis.
Transition Period
This was a long process. It unfolded in the decades after the decline of traditional Marxism. Where Marxists had seen the core injustice in the economy, the new framework saw it in social hierarchies expressed through norms, language, representation, and institutional routines.
To many on the left, this did not feel like a break. Thinkers such as Stuart Hall treated anti-racism and feminism as fronts that could be articulated with class. Others, like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, argued that politics was always a web of overlapping struggles that could not be reduced to economics alone.
There were critics. Writers like Adolph Reed Jr. and Ellen Meiksins Wood warned that symbolic wins would replace material change. At the same time, post-structuralist thinkers shifted attention to how power works through culture and knowledge. Michel Foucault mapped how institutions regulate bodies through norms. Edward Said showed how stories about the world can uphold domination.
Within this shift, oppression was redefined. It was no longer only the exploitation of labor. It was also the maintenance of dominant norms and narratives across everyday life. Power was embedded in habits, language, and symbols. That redefinition laid the ground for a politics in which identity categories became the key markers of injustice.
From Framework to Hegemony
At first there was an uneasy coexistence. Class analysis still held prestige among older activists and parts of organized labor. The new lens was often presented as an add-on, not a replacement. But the institutional base of class politics was shrinking.
Unions lost members and leverage. At the same time, identity-centered fields in universities moved from the margins to the mainstream. Women’s studies, ethnic studies, queer theory, and postcolonial studies built departments, journals, and career paths. New activists who entered through these doors found clearer routes to recognition and influence than the older Marxist tracks provided.
Strategy followed structure. Political energy moved from parties and unions to culture and communication. The aim was not only to pass laws but to win the battle over words, images, and norms. Hashtags, campus protests, and public campaigns became tools to shift the terms of debate. Institutions adapted. Universities, nonprofits, and corporations adopted the language of identity and built procedures around it.
As these practices spread, the center of gravity moved. Equity statements, diversity benchmarks, and bias audits became standard. Workplace disputes once handled through collective bargaining were reframed as questions of culture and representation. Class-first arguments were pushed to the margins.
The Left Remade
By the early twenty-first century, the old class-centered left had been sidelined. The infrastructure that once sustained it had withered or been redirected. Identity-based frameworks held the advantage across the places that produce ideas and set agendas.
The change was visible in academia where identity-centered disciplines offered stable careers and strong networks. It showed up in activism, where cultural campaigns and symbolic politics proved better at gaining attention and shifting narratives than traditional electoral or workplace organizing. It was entrenched in nonprofits and foundations, where identity language shaped hiring, training, and policy.
What emerged was not a fringe tendency but a new orthodoxy in the institutions that shape political language and decide what counts as a legitimate cause. It was also a new ideology. It presented itself as an enhancement of liberal ideals, yet in practice it displaced class as the organizing center and rewrote the left’s common sense.
The next chapter looks at how this ideology works and why it proved so persuasive. We will trace the rules it sets, the incentives it creates, and the reasons it spread so quickly once it entered the mainstream.
This is the condensed, free edition of Chapter 3.2 from the book project The Return of the Duopoly by The Duopolist, which traces how Oppressionism is transforming liberal democracy and driving today’s “woke” politics and culture wars. The complete version is available here. Free readers see the core argument, while paid subscribers unlock the full text with references, notes, and extended analysis.