Do Identity Politics Betray Class Solidarity?
introducing Catherine Liu's left-on-left critique
Let’s rehearse some favorite conservative Talking Points we are bombarded with in the media sphere constantly for the last several years: identity politics is fake, Critical Race Theory is divisive propaganda, liberals are privileged snowflakes, university educations have become radicalized indoctrination grounds for coastal elites, progressive social issues are now beholden to widespread groupthink censorship and enforcement ala cancel culture.
Now imagine most of these criticisms (not all, to be clear) are being leveled from a leftist. And not a leftist who is happily ignorant/uneducated, nor some cartoonishly retrograde white guy. Nope. They’re being marshaled by a professor of color who is first and foremost a proud socialist agitating for working class struggle and old-school Solidarity with a capital S. What Catherine Liu tries to consciously agitate and provoke doesn’t stay there. For her, it’s about refocusing cultural debates into foregrounding labor, exploitation, materialism, class politics, and working class history.
One kernel of what those above New Right soundbites can’t usually say substantively or openly: there is great resentment in this country towards both major politic parties. Parties that either acknowledge your economic rage yet chooses to fuel/address it with hate fantasies (Republicans) or grant lip service to inequality (the 99%) while focusing solely on rhetorics of inclusivity and tolerance (Democrats). This distrust extends towards old/new forms of media: print/TV corporations and tech companies that thrive on extreme polarization, on making pure spectacle out of political disagreement. Eyeballs, attention spans, reactivity, etc. Aka, News-for-Profit.
Liu is ardently against a capitalist system that ties information, culture and the arts, healthcare, education to profits. She is also a self-declared non-radical, non-activist. She sees herself rather as a class traitor, part of the very system of PMCs she has placed in the crosshairs. What she wants is a socialist democracy with civic discourse, clear divisions between private and public experience, favoring Enlightenment values of universal reason not emotion nor identity to set the terms of debate.
Over the weekend I went down a rabbit hole listening to videos and podcast interviews with Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine whose most recent book is called Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Managerial Professional Class (Verso, 2021). There are many large and small points of analysis I disagree with Liu with strongly, foremost that class analysis is somehow more historically and materially “real” than a race-first or gender-first analysis, let alone an intersectional approach. “Intersectionality” is one of those concepts whose deployment Liu is happy to rake over the coals. Not because she doesn’t believe in racism and sexism, but rather because she is militantly against the way middle-class elites have defanged anti-racism training into yet another way to abandon and ignore working class majorities.
In another post, I plan to explain some of what I cherish most in Liu’s left-on-left critiques, and some of what I find myself most opposed to, or conflicted over. Like Adam Curtis and Slavoj Zizek, she is fond of yoking tremendously different events together in ways that feel counterintuitive and transgressive (can the Paul de Man scandal of the 1980s really put next to the rise of the Oprah Winfrey Show?).
Playlist for Catherine Liu
Spotify interview with
about the Art World and culture industries:
Campus lectures:
“The Problem with Trauma Culture” article (a preview of her forthcoming book, Traumatized):
Trauma culture takes suffering at the individual level as a privileged site of political struggle, inheriting its mandate from the 1960s cliche: The personal is the political. In doing so, however, it standardizes and mass markets individual suffering, through what sociologist Eva Illouz defined as a tightly scripted “trauma narrative” — an innocent protagonist, fractured and destroyed, then redeemed and remade whole as a survivor — that endows individual stories with immediately recognizable meanings.
The goal of psychotherapy should be to work through an unconscious fixation on traumatic material, and it can only happen on an individual level. Psychoanalysis, as I have understood and lived it, helps the suffering individual let go of her attachment to a traumatizing past. This therapy is not political, it is personal.
By confusing the personal with the political, trauma culture actively prevents us from seeing the material conditions of wage labor as the proper site of political struggle. Ever since the dawn of industrial capitalism, the working class finds itself pitted against the capitalist, who seeks to surveil, exploit and extract every bit of labor power from her workers. The greater the suffering of the working class, the greater the profits for the capitalist. By focusing on all forms of trauma except exploitation, trauma culture has helped to disguise the economic violence at the heart of neoliberal macroeconomic policies.
Trauma culture does play an important role in helping to orient dislocated subjects of late capitalism on an itinerary of social mobility — those torn from families where parents were no longer figures of moral authority, myself included, crave a different form of ethical grounding. But while a therapeutic language of suffering may have helped us find ways to articulate abuse, the demand for emotional authenticity has delivered us into the arms of the market. Trauma culture provides us with psychological tools to free us from the raw domination of feudal, patriarchal culture while it softens us up for the soft discipline of the commodity.
Verso book publication from 2021:
Finally, you can follow her own Substack at
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