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With the rise of the far right it is worth considering the issue of identity politics and the left. This is a type of politics that takes identity, often essentialized, as the central category for organization and analysis. Its left-wing variant is suspicious of power, preferring to engage in academic taxonomies of oppression which prove incapable of addressing underlying causes.

On the right, identity politics is leveraged to deliberately divide and fracture workers, pitting them against each other, most frequently on the basis of race, gender, religion or nationality.

The left variant of identity politics emerged from the post-modern paradigm that has come to dominate much of progressive politics within the academic world. As the past thirty years have shown, a politics that over-emphasizes individual identity and difference over the potential to unite disparate groups under shared class interests leaves much to be desired. Nevertheless, the focus on identity and difference is necessary, even if it served as an over-correction to certain historical tendencies on the left that treated the working class as a homogeneous, abstract, uniform mass.

The problem here is not universality but rather abstract universality. In the overreaction against such descriptions, the post-modern position throws the baby of concrete universality out with the bath water of abstract universality. Forgoing universality as a concept and reveling in difference has led to nothing but the fracturing of progressive forces into small cliques incapable of pursuing a collective emancipatory project with the power to address the needs of the majority in society.

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