As Parenti so eloquently put it
Class gets its significance from the process of surplus extraction. The relationship between worker and owner is essentially an exploitative one, involving the constant transfer of wealth from those who labor (but do not own) to those who own (but do not labor). This is how some people get richer and richer without working, or with doing only a fraction of the work that enriches them, while others toil hard for an entire lifetime only to end up with little or nothing.
Those who occupy the higher circles of wealth and power are keenly aware of their own interests. While they sometimes seriously differ among themselves on specific issues, they exhibit an impressive cohesion when it comes to protecting the existing class system of corporate power, property, privilege, and profit. At the same time, they are careful to discourage public awareness of the class power they wield. They avoid the C-word, especially when used in reference to themselves as in "owning class;' "upper class;' or "moneyed class." And they like it least when the politically active elements of the owning class are called the "ruling class." The ruling class in this country has labored long to leave the impression that it does not exist, does not own the lion's share of just about everything, and does not exercise a vastly disproportionate influence over the affairs of the nation. Such precautions are themselves symptomatic of an acute awareness of class interests.
Yet ruling class members are far from invisible. Their command positions in the corporate world, their control of international finance and industry, their ownership of the major media, and their influence over state power and the political process are all matters of public record- to some limited degree. While it would seem a simple matter to apply the C-word to those who occupy the highest reaches of the C-world, the dominant class ideology dismisses any such application as a lapse into "conspiracy theory." The C-word is also taboo when applied to the millions who do the work of society for what are usually niggardly wages, the "working class," a term that is dismissed as Marxist jargon. And it is verboten to refer to the "exploiting and exploited classes;' for then one is talking about the very essence of the capitalist system, the accumulation of corporate wealth at the expense of labor.
The C-word is an acceptable term when prefaced with the soothing adjective "middle." Every politician, publicist, and pundit will rhapsodize about the middle class, the object of their heartfelt concern. The much admired and much pitied middle class is supposedly inhabited by virtuously self-sufficient people, free from the presumed profligacy of those who inhabit the lower rungs of society. By including almost everyone, "middle class" serves as a conveniently amorphous concept that masks the exploitation and inequality of social relations. It is a class label that denies the actuality of class power.
The C-word is allowable when applied to one other group, the desperate lot who live on the lowest rung of society, who get the least of everything while being regularly blamed for their own victimization: the "underclass." References to the presumed deficiencies of underclass people are acceptable because they reinforce the existing social hierarchy and justify the unjust treatment accorded society's most vulnerable elements.
Seizing upon anything but class, leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face. The forces that impose class injustice and economic exploitation are the same ones that propagate racism, sexism, militarism, ecological devastation, homophobia, xenophobia, and the like.
https://archive.org/details/michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds
A good heuristic for deciding whether a position is reactionary or not is by asking whether it's uniting or divisive. The importance of class analysis is that it provides a common thread that unites people across different cultures, demographics. All workers can understand that they are being exploited because they experience it, and rising up against the exploitation is a unifying idea.
Meanwhile, what often happens with identity politics is that people end up being laser focused on their particular cause and see anybody championing a different cause as competition. This leads to the fracturing of the working class into small groups that fight each other.
Yes, that's definitely a good heuristic, if applied correctly.
If only that were true. But not yet. Class consciousness is lacking and structures like racism, sexism, etc. destroy class solidarity not just ideologically but materially. A cis, straight white male worker in the west is privileged in many very real ways, that allow him to profit off less privileged workers.
He profits from unpaid or badly paid reproductive labor and care work from women at home, can boss around racialized people in lower paying positions at work, has an advantage over openly queer people at the labour and housing market, has an material interest in maintaining global imperialism for a steady flow of cheap products and resources to his country and so on.
These are material contradictions in the marxian sense. Calling struggles around them "identity politics" can be problematic, because it implies, that they are only ideological rather than material.
Furthermore, they are structural. Sexism is needed in capitalism for reproductive labor. Racism for colonialism and imperialism.
So they have to be addressed along side the contradiction between socialized labor and privatized profits. Not just as an afterthought. That requires self criticism and giving up privileges. One can't do that by dismissing struggles that don't immediately concern oneself or saying:"Wait your turn, the main contradiction comes first".
Yes, I agree, that we shouldn't see these fights as separate or competing, but need to support all of them at once to unite them.
All in all the problem you describe is real, but not new, only it's real name is not "identity politics" but opportunism. And that's not foreign to labor struggles either. E.g. there are plenty of opportunistic unions.
This is precisely why issues such as racism, sexism, and so on should be contextualized within the overarching class struggle as opposed to being seen as individual issues to rally behind.
Yes, exactly. I completely agree.