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04/14/2023
New Book - Identity Trumps Socialism
A few years ago I asked a materialist feminist colleague if she was aware of any significant critiques of identity politics on the radical left. She didn’t reply. I’m happy to have edited the first reader on the subject, a collection of essays that address the politics of emancipatory universality.
Description:
With essays by today’s leading leftist social critics, Identity Trumps Socialism presents a rigorous and persuasive primer on the problems generated by postmodern and neoliberal challenges to the legacy of emancipatory universality. In addition to the ways in which capitalism has used racialized and gendered forms of oppression to divide the working class, today’s activism must also understand how neoliberal capitalism uses identity politics to undermine socialism. Identity Trumps Socialism advances an emancipatory left universality that addresses the limits of diversity and makes the case for the centrality of class in the struggle against global capitalist hegemony.
https://www.routledge.com/Identity-Trumps-Socialism-The-Class-and-Identity-Debate-after-Neoliberalism/Leger/p/book/9781032341804
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Politics of Emancipatory Universality by Marc James Léger
Eight Theses on the Universal by Alain Badiou
Politics, Identification and Subjectivization by Jacques Rancière
The Eternal Return of the Same Class Struggle by Slavoj Žižek
Universality and Its Discontents by Bruno Bosteels
Capitalism, Class and Universalism: Escaping the Cul-de-Sac of Postcolonial Theory by Vivek Chibber
Intersectionality: A Marxist Critique by Barbara Foley
From Progressive Neoliberalism to Trump – and Beyond by Nancy Fraser
What Materialist Black Political History Actually Looks Like by Adolph Reed, Jr.
Who’s Afraid of Left Populism? Anti-Policing Struggles and the Frontiers of the American Left by Cedric G. Johnson
Class Not Race by Walter Benn Michaels
Capitalism Is the Problem: Articulating Race and Gender with Class by David Harvey
A Comrade for the Anthropocene: Beyond Survivors and Allies by Jodi Dean
The Use and Abuse of Class Reductionism for the Left by Marc James Léger
Endorsements:
The denunciation of universalism comes all too easily to those who think of themselves as leftists. This keeps the left exactly as elites would have us: divided and enervated by internal conflicts. In a variety of registers, the essays in Identity Trumps Socialism critique the prevailing forms of identitarianism and lay out the key arguments for socialist universalism. – Roger Lancaster, author of Sex Panic and the Punitive State (2011)
A left mired in identitarian battles is no match for the inexorable march of destructive neoliberalism. It’s time the left evolved out of the politics of fragmentation and affirmed an emancipatory universalism capable of fighting both exploitation and oppression. This is the politics advanced in this volume by a host of leading scholars. A must read. – Nivedita Majumdar, author of The World in a Grain of Sand: Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism (2021)
Review Copy Requests: https://m.email.taylorandfrancis.com/review-copy-request-form
I have also written a forthcoming Guide to the Class and Identity Debate that is under review. This book offers Marxist criticism of the current variants of identity politics, including: identity politics as such, radical democracy, populism, privilege theory, critical race theory, intersectionality and decoloniality. The book also looks at how these trends are addressed across the political spectrum, including conservatism and fascism, liberalism and neoliberalism, postmodernism, anarchism, democratic socialism, socialism and communism.
previous:
Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (Red Quill, 2022) https://www.redquillbooks.com/portfolio-posts/too-black-to-fail-the-obama-portraits-and-the-politics-of-post-representation/
Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (Brill, 2022) https://brill.com/display/title/61660
A US$17.00 version is now available from Haymarket Books: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2030-bernie-bros-gone-woke