capitalism
Dear friends,
The acceleration of populist movements globally presents an interesting contradiction for analysis. Populism, a peculiar (if increasingly popular) political “logic” positions people against one another for the benefit of a person, or small group of people, vying for political power. Building on manufactured “us vs them” narratives, populist leaders will typically suggest the people need to rally behind their cause to take on the elites. The elites, importantly in this context, are not capitalists – but rather minorities that have been or can be depicted as evil, menacing, and controlling society. There is an aura of sophistication to the way populists speak, engage, and share their messaging, but above all else it is regularly xenophobic, racist, and comes with a chaser of hatred. All this in the name of clawing over some political power while allowing the continued exploitation of workers, and so on. Over time, populism has come to serves as a sophisticated tool for capital by leveraging new technologies to fragment class consciousness while continuing to reinforce the power structures it claims to oppose. This deserves our attention, particularly as we suffer from the transformation of social relations through algorithmic mediation and the cultivation of what can only be described as digital fascism.
Populism, which, positions an imagined “pure people” against a supposedly corrupt elite offers a relatively straightforward power grabbing tool for political figures – and so its proliferation globally over the last hundred odd years has an almost self-evident feeling. Because populism doesn’t demand truth, nor offer anything genuinely transformative, it does not upset capitalist status quo. Indeed, it can simply serve extant capitalist agendas, while keeping the working class fighting amongst ourselves. Populist campaigns across history have shown this, from Long’s “Share Our Wealth” movement in 1930s America to contemporary figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi, populist movements have emerged as responses to capitalist crisis. They swoop in, purporting to connect with working class issues, and offer seductive but false solutions to systemic contradictions. While these movements often appropriate left-wing critiques of inequality, they invariably redirect legitimate working class grievances toward reactionary ends, substituting scapegoating for structural analysis.
The historical record reveals some distinct variants: right-wing populism, which typically combines nationalist mythology with racial grievance (c.f., George Wallace); left-wing populism, which attempts to build multi-racial working class coalitions but often remains trapped within capitalist logic (c.f., Peron in Argentina); and what we might call techno-populism, exemplified by figures like Elon Musk who marry Silicon Valley utopianism with reactionary politics. Each variety, despite their surface differences, shares a fundamental characteristic: they offer individualist solutions to collective problems while reinforcing rather than challenging capital’s grip on social relations. Frequently, populist movements have relied on technologies to advance their messaging, initially a reliance on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today demagogues harness algorithms and data analytics to micro-target their messaging – or just buy an entire social media platform and run it into the ground with fascist spam. This technological “evolution” requires theoretical framing to understanding how capital reproduces its hegemony through increasingly sophisticated means. Let me digress slightly to reactionary politics, first, though.
Marx offers a critique of reactionary politics, particularly his analysis of Louis Bonaparte’s rise to power, which provides a crucial substrate for insights into contemporary populism’s function within capitalism. Importantly, Marx observed how reactionary movements emerge during periods of class struggle, presenting themselves as defenders of “traditional” social relations while actually serving capital’s need to forestall revolutionary consciousness. His famous line about history repeating “first as tragedy, then as farce” continues to hold resonance as we witness capital’s recycling of reactionary tropes through digital means.
What Marx identified as “Bonapartism”, where a supposedly charismatic leader claims to transcend class conflict while actually intensifying capitalist exploitation, perfectly describes the function of contemporary populist figures. Nailed it. Analysis over… But not quite. The key difference lies not in the fundamental mechanism, but in its technological amplification. Where Bonaparte relied on army and bureaucracy to maintain power while appearing to stand above class interests, today’s populists leverage technological manipulations, algorithmic timelines, and digital surveillance to achieve the same end with unprecedented precision. Marx’s insight that reactionary politics serves to “represent” the masses while actually defending ruling class interests remains, devastatingly, relevant as the specific technologies of control metamorphose.
Historically, populist movements have emerged during periods of capitalist crisis, offering simplistic solutions to complex systemic problems while redirecting working class anger away from its true source. As we’ve touched on, the fundamental playbook hasn’t changed. Scapegoating marginalised groups, promoting nationalist mythology, and promising restoration of an imagined golden age. Rinse and repeat. But the mechanisms of delivery have evolved dramatically – and while this doesn’t change fundamentally the role of populism, it does alter the scale and damage. Where demagogues once relied on radio broadcasts and mass rallies, today’s fascist authoritarians deputise traditional intellectuals to leverage data analytics, manipulate social media feeds, and micro-target their messages of hate and division. As with all right-wing ideas, the goal is to continue capitalist accumulation, exploiting and fucking over the 99% – fracturing working class solidarity while maintaining capitalist hegemony.
From the printing press enabling nationalist propaganda, through radio and television creating the first “celebrity” politicians, to today’s social media platforms optimising for engagement through extremism, each new communication technology has been seized by capital to enhance its ideological control. The key here is that capital does not care who on the spectrum is chosen to “lead” – it cares only that growth continues. In this humanity-destroying way, capitalism is tantamount to cancer. The only difference offered by new technologies is the unprecedented precision of manipulation. Social media algorithms don’t just broadcast populist messaging. Rather, they actively cultivate ideological bubbles, pushing users toward increasingly extreme content while creating the illusion of mass movement. Your feed becomes a carefully curated echo chamber, with each interaction driving you further from genuine class consciousness and deeper into manufactured tribal identity. Regardless of the “specific messaging” you’re seeing, this is true for you if you use any of Meta’s platforms. The resulting right-wing scream-fest of hatred and misguided anger coupled with the extremely inequitable capitalist model we continue to allow creates such angst and suffering and, remains, largely unidentifiable by the 99% due to hegemonic enforcement and cultural institutions.
The cruel genius is that populism, through its “almost truth” about exploitation, extraction, harm and division, transforms legitimate working class grievances into individualised rage, redirecting systemic critique into personal vendettas. Better yet, for the capitalists, cottage industries of hatred and “content creation” intersect to fuel accumulation and production of whole categories of misanthropic, cynical, and despotic media, merchandise, and more. Rather than recognising shared class interests, atomised “users” are encouraged to view their fellow workers as enemies, with algorithms helpfully suggesting which out-group to blame for their precarity. This technologically enhanced division serves capital perfectly – keeping the 99% fighting each other while the 1% continues accumulating wealth at our collective expense. The new found dictators rising to prominence through these platforms aren’t threatening the capitalist order; they’re its perfect products/pundits, offering the illusion of rebellion while reinforcing its fundamental logic. Or better yet, they are capitalists, beneficiaries of the worst of the system, seeing how it operates and perpetuating crueller and intersectionally more disadvantageous systems to solidify their own wealth and power.
This brings us to the wicked problem of electoral strategy in an age of algorithmic radicalisation. While the liberal fantasy of individual consumer choice in the “marketplace of ideas” has proven catastrophically inadequate, we must also reject the false populist promise of strongman solutions. The path forward requires rebuilding class solidarity and collective political consciousness – what we (or specifically Piper) might term utilitarian voting for the many, not the few. This means understanding elections as tactical terrain in an ongoing struggle, not as ends in themselves. When we vote, we must do so with clear eyes about the systemic limitations of electoral politics while recognising the material differences that policy choices make in working class lives – particularly at the margins and intersections of gender, race, disability and class. The myths perpetuated to forestall this kind of collective consciousness are as numerous, from the bootstrap fallacy of the “self-made millionaire” to the fiction of meritocratic mobility, capital relies on an elaborate mythology to naturalise its violence. These just-so stories about deserved wealth and poverty serve to individualise systemic problems, making structural critique appear impossible or naive. The ultimate success of these myths lies in how they’ve infected our ontological understanding. They make the artificial constructs of capitalism appear as natural as gravity – and even economists will tell you it’s not. We must remember that every “self-made” fortune rests on generations of stolen labour, every “individual success” story obscures a network of social relations and structural advantages.
What makes our current moment particularly dangerous is how new technologies amplify and accelerate these mythologies while simultaneously fragmenting our capacity for collective response. Ughh, I’m tired, are you tired? The same platforms that connect us also isolate us, channelling legitimate rage into algorithmic dead ends killing the development of genuine class consciousness. Filter bubbles abound, and rage lies at the end of every rainbow. Every click, every share, every angry reaction feeds the machine learning models determining what content spreads – letalone the deeply manipulated content priorities on platforms such as Twitter and “Truth Social”. All this, naturally, supports capitalist accumulation – more clicks, more ads, more engagement, more MAUs, more investors, more money! And engagement metrics inevitably favour extremist content that drives division over nuanced systemic critique – because who wants to listen to a Marxist when you’ve got Andrew Tate on the scene (present company excluded).
The “self-made” mythology really deserves scrutiny as a masterwork of hegemonic control. This narrative performs a dual function in service of capital, offering a phantasmic promise of class mobility while legitimising the structures that make mobility impossible. Like a cruel parody of Tantalus, the “American Dream”, hello white picket fence, or “Australian Dream”, just “a house”, I guess – the colonial-capitalist branding matters not, dangles forever out of reach, close enough to maintain hope while far enough to ensure continued submission to wage labour exploitation. This mythology operates simply: a very small handful of privileged workers do manage to ascend to petit bourgeois status through some combination of “foundational capital”, chance, and brutal self-exploitation. Their stories are then weaponised by capital’s (occult) cultural apparatus, transformed into morality tales about “hard work” and “determination” – better yet “GRIT” my absolute favourite psychology bullshit-ism – carefully excising any mention of structural advantage or stolen labour value. That’s right, these “self ascending” dickheads stole from you to get where they are. These exceptional cases serve as both carrot and stick – promising rewards for compliance while implicitly blaming the vast majority of workers for their own exploitation. “If they made it, why haven’t you?” (words that I’ve heard way too many times). The unspoken accusation, transforming systemic critique into personal failing – a joy.
The ideological sleight-of-hand ever effective because it leverages real examples while completely mystifying the underlying relations of production. Yes, some workers do become small business owners or climb the corporate ladder. But their individual success stories obscure how this limited mobility actually reinforces rather than challenges capitalist hegemony. The petit bourgeois small business owner often becomes an even more passionate vanguard of capitalist relations than the capitalist class itself, having internalised the logic of exploitation through their own desperate struggle to avoid falling back into the proletariat. They become the perfect deputies of capital, enforcing its logic at the micro level while championing the very system that keeps them in constant precarity. Not to mention the narcissistic, psychotic, torturous class of professional “managers” that capital deputises to “bootstrap enforcement” jobs.
Naturally the ingenious, come utterly evil, system transforms the potential energy of class consciousness into the energy of individual striving (or cutthroatism). Rather than organising collectively to challenge exploitation, workers are encouraged to view their peers as competition in a grand meritocratic game. What. An. Absolute. Load. Those “above” are more interested in pulling the metaphorical ladder up behind them than doing any work, and constantly in the process of creating new platitudes, torture technologies, and endless bureaucratic bullshit to keep workers busy. This process of selective co-optation serves capital perfectly – fracturing class solidarity while creating a layer of ideological enforcement within the working class itself. The. Worst.
We need both tactical savvy and strategic clarity. We need to deeply understand these technologies without being used by them, to use alternatives like Mastodon, Lemmy, and other decentralised systems rather than gargling corporate fascist propaganda on Bluesky, Instagram or Reddit. We need to find ways to build genuine solidarity that can withstand algorithmic manipulation. This means developing new forms of digital literacy and collective resistance – my assertion is that digital literacy remains one of the most foundational pieces of knowledge required to date, and Australia’s political leaders have spent a majority of the last term in office ensuring that kids have absolutely 0 exposure to any kind of analytical thinking or technology capabilities. Only by understanding how these systems work while refusing to let them work on us can we see “through” the shit – the constant normalisation of harm. The alternative is continued fracturing of the working class, with populist demagogues serving as the perfect instruments of distraction while we literally COOK OURSELVES ALIVE. The jet stream is gone, folks, we’ve already passed the point of no return on climate. If anyone’s willing to learn a lesson here, its the 8 billion of us who will be left here suffering when Musk’s on his way to Mars.
Deep time is such an important concept for our futures – and its something we absolutely have not come to understand. Caring for the future – generation, ecology, collectivism – these are things we notionally cared about as a society – now it’s militant individualism and capitalist propaganda all the way down. What the hell.
In solidarity,
Aidan
Dear friends,
I’ve been “experiencing” liberal American post-election analysis on every form of media I visit. I’m sure you’re in the same boat as politically engaged people – but things have really reached frustration point today. So, without naming names, msnbc, I want to explore how “liberal politics”, or really what should be labeled soft-right after this Trump-slide, maintains hegemonic control through a variety of interlinked mechanisms that ultimately serve capital while preventing genuine social transformation. You know – the usual. Specifically today I’m interested in “sanewashing” and virtue signaling, because that’s the thrust of post-electoral fervor in the US – and I can feel it in my bones coming to Australia next (after all we’re just little USA, right? More on that soon).
It’s worth beginning with how liberals internally justify their political positioning. Their inaction, justification of government and corporate decisions, and general malaise unless something is a personal threat to them (even then, a stretch for action to occur). The bourgeois “left” engages in endless self-congratulatory rhetoric about being “reasonable” and “moderate”. Through this they position themselves as the “adult in the room” (in all things, really – yuck) while actively enabling fascism through constant concessions to capital. This manifesto of mediocrity serves to police the boundaries of acceptable discourse while portraying any genuine challenge to capitalism as dangerously extreme. Thanks, liberals (and to be clear to the Australians in the room I mean ALP supporters, not “Liberal Party” supporters who are Trumpian). The grip of the liberal mindset becomes a self-reinforcing loop: “we must be reasonable because we are moderate, and we are moderate because we are reasonable”. This circular logic conveniently ignores how their “reasonable” politic continues to enable exploitation and expropriation. Nice gymnastics.
Illustration required! The phenomenon of “sanewashing” exemplifies this mental HIIT workout perfectly. Liberals dismiss Trump supporters and other right-wing voters as simply “crazy” or “weird” rather than engaging with the material conditions and deliberate manipulation that drives working people toward reactionary politics. This is particularly important – the start and end of issues in US and Australian politics alike is that there are no parties supporting fair working conditions, socialised care, or ecological preservation – no parties beside the Australian Greens anyway. And even that is a concession to the change desperately needed in both countries to save our planet from climate destruction. “Those people are just nuts”, the liberals declare, while continuing to support the very economic system that creates the desperation and alienation fuelling fascism’s rise. This narrative conveniently absolves liberals of any responsibility to build genuine solidarity or challenge fundamental injustices, they can rest easy on their privileged boomeresque retirement fund. It also reinforces the false binary between two flavours of capitalism – one openly fascist, one with a pride flag – a dichotomy of the ages as the “political spectrum” tells you you can have your opinion, as long as it is ontologically capitalist.
From a sociological perspective, this othering process serves multiple hegemonic functions. It allows liberals to maintain their self-image as the “reasonable” ones while actively participating in systems of exploitation – hot. It fragments working class solidarity by creating artificial divisions between the “normal” and “crazy” segments of society. Most perniciously, it prevents meaningful analysis of how capitalism itself produces the social conditions that drive people toward extreme positions. The people who should be conducting the analysis, hell, they should be rallying on the streets, instead its “woe is me, some crazy people won the power” and “Kamala only lost because she was marginalised by the media” – not an ounce of introspection in the whole liberal core. The obsession with individual “sanity” versus “insanity” literally masks the systemic nature of our crisis – if you reduce all our problems to one faulty leader (Dutton, Badenoch, Luxon, Trump) then “capitalism is ok, it’s just the leaders who are wrong” while their more palatable leader (Albo, Starmer, Hipkins, Biden) institutes the same policy with a rainbow flag draped over it – do you feel sufficiently “washed” yet?
The normalising of “sanity” as defined by acquiescence to capitalist relations represents another victory for ruling class ideology. And with liberals it is always ruling class ideology – not anything born of organic intellectualism – because they seek only to become the next oppressor (landlord, CEO, investor), not defeat systems of oppression. Those who accept endless war, environmental destruction, and grinding poverty as “normal” get to claim the mantle of “reason”, while those who suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t sacrifice human flourishing on the altar of profit, planetary destruction, and genocide are dismissed as extremists. Again, cool work liberals. The deep irrationality of a system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet gets naturalised as “just the way things are” and this pervasive hegemony informs all of what is “allowed” on the political spectrum – policing the possibility of change.
Particularly galling is how this discourse completely ignores the role of education. (Here we go Aidan’s back on the high horse). Not in the liberal sense of “if only they understood facts and logic” but in the Gramscian sense of developing critical consciousness – consciousness born of their class origin that enables a shared understanding of the failings, expolitation, and fundamentally cancerous nature of capital – rather than vanguarding and justifying it endlessly for “sanity” against both the socialist left and the alt-right. Instead of building systems of popular education that help people understand their material conditions and collective interests, liberals fixate on sneering at the “uneducated masses” while offering no alternative vision. They posture about how the “poors and illiterates” can’t truly understand their big brain political system, and yet when they do vote they somehow choose “insanity” rather than their candidate. Their conception of education remains trapped within capitalist logic, naturally – training “better workers” (read: complicity in capitalism’s exploitation) rather than developing revolutionary consciousness.
The political spectrum, here, serves as yet another tool in this same hegemonic arsenal. By positioning “moderate” pro-capital positions as the reasonable centre, with socialism relegated to the “extreme” fringe alongside fascism (no, not in horseshoe theory’s twisted worldview – if those liberal kids could read they’d be very upset), this framework naturalises exploitation while pathologising resistance. It is no accident that the “centre” always seems to align perfectly with the interests of capital – and over time creeps ever further rightward as capital’s crises and metastaticisation destroy our ecology, demand more socially gruelling positions, and continues painting anything that challenges these interests as dangerous extremism – anything. This false equivalence between left and right “extremes” serves to maintain capitalist hegemony by preventing genuine alternatives from gaining traction. Again, harming progressive causes and trapping the broadest discourse within a narrative controlled by binary and “sanity”.
The manufactured spectrum, with perhaps its most damaging feature, enables the alt-right to position itself as merely the “opposite” of some imagined radical left, thereby normalising its fascistic tendencies through false equivalence. “Well, if there are communists on the far left, we must be the reasonable counterbalance on the right”, goes their twisted logic. But this framing fundamentally misunderstands (deliberately, of course) the dimensional nature of political thought. The spectrum isn’t a simple line from left to right, it’s not even a two-dimensional political compass. The reality is that while fascists and liberals argue about various flavors of capitalism, genuine socialist and communist thought operates on a different axis (because their values are concerned with freedom from oppression, not “how would you like your oppression today?”). Fundamentally, it is an axis that questions the very premises of capital that both “ends” of the mainstream spectrum take for granted. It’s like watching two people argue about the best way to arrange deck chairs on the Titanic while refusing to acknowledge the iceberg – or better yet, refusing to acknowledge that boats could be steered differently altogether. The right’s success in positioning itself as just another “pole” on a reasonable spectrum serves to further entrench capital’s hegemony by making any genuine alternative appear literally unthinkable. Through this sleight of hand, they can paint socialists as “just as extreme” as fascists, while the real extremism – the endless extraction, exploitation, and expropriation required by capitalism itself – gets completely naturalised as the water we all swim in. The bourgeois media’s obsession with “both sides” reporting only reinforces this dynamic, creating an artificial equivalence between those who want to accelerate capitalism’s death drive and those who dare to imagine we might organise society differently.
Meanwhile liberals engage in endless virtue signalling about inclusion and diversity while actively participating in systems of exploitation and expropriation. They need to “look” reasonable, after all, as the moderate centre in all this. They’ll put “Black Lives Matter” in their social media bios while opposing any policy that might actually challenge racial capitalism. Similarly with decolonial efforts – full support for Indigenous movements unless they challenge capitalism – but knock-off art piece looks nice on their wall right? They’ll celebrate pride while supporting politicians who maintain the carceral state. I could go on but I’m feeling physically ill at the thought of liberal performativity, capture, and misappropriation of genuine causes into identity based squabbles [1]. The performance of progressive values without material commitment to transformation only serves to recuperate radical movements into channels safe for capital – and serves to both disempower the genuine movement and fuel capitalist “washing” – i.e., greenwashing, queerwashing, and so on.
And readers out there from the philosophical tradition may be troubled by my espousals today, but let’s be clear – contemporary liberal politics has devolved far from the aspirational heights of philosophical liberalism. While classical liberal philosophy, emerging from enlightenment thinking, at least attempted to grapple with fundamental questions of human freedom, rights, and the relationship between individual and society, today’s liberal politics has abandoned even these intellectual ambitions – verging on libertarianism. Philosophers like Locke, Mill, and even Rawls – raced, gendered and classed as their conclusions largely were – engaged seriously with questions of justice, liberty, and the social contract. Their theoretical frameworks, which integrated into the bourgeois interests of their time, maintained some commitment to universal principles and rational inquiry. By contrast, contemporary liberal politics circle jerks itself to pure pragmatism in servitude to capital. The profound questions about human nature, freedom, and justice that animated classical liberal thought have been replaced by shallow technocratic discussions of “what works” where “works” is defined entirely in terms of maintaining capitalist social relations (slavery of the 99%). This degeneration of liberalism from a philosophical project (however flawed) to pure ideology maintenance exemplifies the broader crisis of bourgeois thought under late capitalism.
All of these varied techniques the “washing”, othering, normalisation of capitalist “reason”, and the shallow performance of progress – are the modern day tools of hegemonic enforcement – these are the ways that capitalism is protected, steered, and remains in a state of growth and subsumption forever – liberal engines perpetually powering and justifying capitalist heat death. These techniques, and the broad approach of liberals to contemporary politics fragments solidarity, mystifies power relations, and channels dissent into dead ends. Most dangerously, it prevents us from building the kind of intersectional movement for justice that could actually challenge capital’s death grip on our future [2]. The liberal framework offers no tools for addressing the deep interconnections between various forms of oppression because it cannot question the capitalist system that produces and requires those oppressions.
Through Chomsky’s lens of manufactured consent, we can see how the liberal worship of capitalism – dressed up in the language of pragmatism and progress – represents the ultimate betrayal of human potential. The media apparatus, educational institutions, and cultural frameworks that reproduce liberal hegemony don’t just maintain capitalism – they actively work to prevent us from imagining alternatives – they inform our epistemology and shape our ontology [3]. When liberals valourise “moderate” politics while demonising genuine resistance, when they perform inclusion while defending exploitation, when they preach “civility” while enabling fascism, they aren’t just expressing personal political preferences – they are carrying out essential ideological work for capital. This betrayal cuts deepest at the intersections of oppression, where the violence of capitalism compounds with racism, patriarchy, colonialism, ableism, and other systems of domination. Liberal hegemony works overtime to obscure these connections, to prevent us from seeing how capitalism requires these interlocking systems of oppression to function [4]. The result is a profound distortion of human nature itself – our inherent capacities for solidarity, creativity, and collective flourishing constantly twisted into competitive individualism and performative politics. Breaking free from this hegemonic web requires more than just critiquing liberal politics – it demands building new forms of consciousness and organisation that can unite the multiply oppressed in struggle against capital and all its mutually reinforcing systems of domination. Only through this kind of radical, intersectional solidarity can we begin to imagine and create the kind of world our human nature actually calls for – and the start point, as always, is education.
In solidarity,
Aidan
https://mndrdr.org/2024/identity-politics-and-the-crisis-of-working-class-solidarity ↩︎
Arruzza, C., Bhattacharya, T., & Fraser, N. (2019). Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. Verso. ↩︎
Gramsci, A., & Hoare, Q. (1971). Selections from the Prison Notebooks. International Publishers. ↩︎
Chomsky, N., & Herman, E. S. (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books. ↩︎
Dear friends,
We live in a time of intensifying identity-based conflict, where every social and political issue becomes refracted through the lens of personal identity and group affiliation. Look no further than headlines shared here on mind reader every day. The deployment of identity politics – both by the ostensible “left” and the increasingly mask-off right – has become a primary mechanism through which hegemonic power maintains its grip on civil society while forestalling any genuine movement toward working class solidarity (let alone anti-capitalist movements). I think it is worth us spending additional time examining this phenomenon and its implications for building an intersectional movement capable of challenging capitalism’s death grip on our collective future. Because our future is collective, identities be damned.
Identity politics, in its current manifestation, represents both a genuine expression of marginalised groups’ experiences and grievances under capitalism and a tool cynically wielded by power to fragment class consciousness. What began as important movements highlighting specific forms of oppression – from feminist critiques of patriarchy to queer resistance against heteronormativity to racial justice struggles against white supremacy – has been co-opted and transformed by hegemonic forces into battles over representation and recognition that leave fundamental power relations untouched. Capitalism marches on, and indeed, intensifies, subsumes and co-opts in the wake of these divisive rhetorics. The right deploys reactionary identity politics centred on nationalism, whiteness, and “traditional values” (read: rape, plunder, pillage) to redirect working class anger toward marginalised groups, while liberal identity politics often reduces systemic critique to demands for more diverse faces in positions of power. Both varieties serve to obscure the material basis of oppression in capitalist relations. Don’t @ me.
The emotional power of identity as a mobilising force is incredibly significant in our current political context. The assumptions, roles, and realities of communities are important and they colour how we see the world. Our sense of self, our experiences of marginalisation or privilege, and our community affiliations shape our social epistemology – which is equally shaped by a capitalist ontology. The right understands this viscerally – their appeals to white grievance, xenophobia, and moral panic over gender and sexuality tap into deep wells of fear and anger among their base. The “mainstream media” amplifies these cultural conflicts, with Australia’s Murdoch-dominated landscape taking particular glee in stoking hatred toward LGBTQI+ folks through endless inflammatory coverage. One need only look at how trans people have been demonised and scapegoated, basic human dignity turned into fodder for manufactured outrage designed to drive engagement and distract from capital’s continued pillaging of our planet. Oh, and to sell Murdoch’s rags.
The Australian media’s complicity in amplifying identity-based division represents a textbook example of manufactured consent in action. By framing every issue through a culture war lens – whether it’s gender-neutral bathrooms, Indigenous Voice, or immigration – the corporate media ensures that genuine class analysis and critique of capitalism remains off the table. To them, that’s all this is – a way of keeping “the proles in their jobs, asking no questions, and hating each other” – you can’t make this shit up. The endless cycle of inflammatory coverage creates a feedback loop where legitimate grievances get twisted into weapons for attacking other marginalised groups rather than challenging the very system that creates the marginalisation in the first place. Headlines about “woke ideology” and “gender ideology” serve as convenient distractions while – in our case, both major political parties continue implementing anti-worker policies – and revelling in the hate they have manufactured to grab more power at the next election.
This devolution into identity-based warfare has devastating consequences for building working class solidarity. Not to mention on the mental and physical health of “minorities” and marginalised peoples across the gamut of the political spectrum (even when they vote for the leopards which eat their own faces). When workers are convinced that their real enemies are immigrants, trans people, or “cultural Marxists” (guilty) rather than the capitalist class stealing the surplus value of their labour, the prospects for unified resistance plummet. And that’s what we’ve seen deployed time and again over the last thirty years, particularly as the Labor party undermines any affective worker movement through it’s monopoly over (bourgeoise) “unions”. The right’s concomitant deployment of reactionary identity politics serves to actively prevent the development of class consciousness, while liberal identity politics often reduces intersectional analysis to performative representation that leaves capitalism’s core operations intact. Both varieties in their pernicious creep into identity battles only strengthen rather than challenge hegemonic power – thereby simply reinforcing the damaging power imbalances that created the issues in the first place.
The cost of this fragmentation falls hardest on those facing multiple, intersecting forms of marginalisation. When movements for social transformation devolve into competing claims of oppression rather than building genuine solidarity, it is invariably the most vulnerable who suffer – Indigenous workers, disabled folks, queer and trans people of colour, and so on. Their specific experiences of exploitation and exclusion demand an intersectional analysis that holds both the particularity of identity-based oppression and the universality of class struggle. We cannot build effective resistance by either ignoring difference or reducing everything to identity – we need an educative praxis that fosters deep understanding across lines of difference while maintaining focus on our shared enemy –capitalism. And this doesn’t mean “reasoning with the right” who are hellbent on running the globe into climate-based destruction just for shits and giggles (masochistic and religious nut jobs alike).
Where might we go from here? The path forward requires developing forms of solidarity that can honour both our differences and our fundamental commonality as members of the working class facing extinction under capitalism’s death drive. This means creating spaces for genuine dialogue and political education that help people understand how their specific experiences of marginalisation connect to systems of oppression. Only the 1% has “got it made” in this system, and just because someone has a veneer of privilege, does not make them an exploiter – though idly leveraging that privilege for personal benefit is deeply problematic. The panacea isn’t more identity-based battling, or divisive rubbish, but rather building movements that centre the leadership of the most impacted while fostering collective understanding of how capitalism relies on and reproduces multiple, intersecting hierarchies. And, in case I haven’t been clear enough, most importantly, it means maintaining laser focus on the real enemy – not each other, but the capitalist class and their political enablers pushing us toward fascism and ecological collapse.
The tools for this work already exist in our theoretical traditions – from intersectional feminism to social reproduction theory to Gramsci’s insights about building counter-hegemony. What we need now is the collective will to deploy them in service of genuine solidarity rather than allowing our identities to be weaponised for capital’s benefit. The ruling class wants us fighting each other over pronouns, level of personal exploitation and disadvantage, and “others that look like you made this system” all while the capitalists steal the future from us, our planet and our children. If you choose the path of lateral violence over identity battles you choose capitalism, the system that oppresses you. An alternate path, one of radical education, deep solidarity, and unified resistance against the death cult of colonial capitalism is a panacea for resistance that allows our strengths to shine – not dividing us on our (perceived) identities, labels applied by others to keep us busy.
In closing, friends, none of us are free until all of us are free. The revolution must be intersectional or it will be bullshit. Platitudes, or action? I think action.
In solidarity,
Aidan