Oppression of racialized and ethnic minorities and women needs to be adequately understood and effectively fought against. Identity politics (IP) appears to take oppression seriously. As an intellectual and political struggle for justice, IP has two inter-related components: recognition/respect and economic distribution for identity-groups, with the first being the predominant component. IP has highlighted the importance of oppression and is right to emphasize recognition as an aspect of social justice. Yet, IP cannot be a good tool for the fight for sustained social justice because of its theoretical and political deficiency. IP’s biggest theoretical problem is its inherent neglect of the causal primacy of objective class relations. As a result, it over-emphasizes special oppression as a cause of humanity’s major problems. It lacks a rigorous conception of oppression itself as a condition that is common to many different oppressed groups, nor does it have an objective explanation of oppression. IP’s theoretical deficiency leads to its political deficiency. The latter is manifested in its neglect of class politics, its overemphasis on linguistic resistance, and its fight for representational politics whereby small groups of people defined on the basis of identity receive some limited material benefits. Based on an empiricist, idealist, individualist, and reformist approach, IP has no strategy to unite all the different oppressed groups based on their objective interests. Just as trade union politics is a bourgeois politics of workers, IP is a bourgeois politics of oppressed groups. A class theory of society recognizing oppression, and a class-based political strategy aiming to eliminate exploitation and oppression constitute the only alternative to IP.
