What Is Identity Socialism?

The theories of German philosopher, historian and economist Karl Marx focused on stirring revolutionary socialist sentiment among the working class, or proletariat, which Marx predicted would overthrow the elite bourgeoisie and seize control of the means of production.

The form of socialism increasingly taught on U.S. college campuses focuses less on economic status and more on race, gender and sexuality — pitting “underprivileged” identity groups against those perceived to be among the “privileged” majority.

Campus identity culture is metastasizing into the culture of the broader society. As liberal writer Andrew Sullivan declared “We all live on campus now.”: “When elite universities shift their entire worldview away from liberal education as we have long known it toward the imperatives of an identity-based “social justice” movement, the broader culture is in danger of drifting away from liberal democracy as well. If elites believe that the core truth of our society is a system of interlocking and oppressive power structures based around immutable characteristics like race or sex or sexual orientation, then sooner rather than later, this will be reflected in our culture at large. What matters most of all in these colleges — your membership in a group that is embedded in a hierarchy of oppression — will soon enough be what matters in the society as a whole.”

Identity socialism is founded on dividing people by various identity groups broken up by race, gender, sexuality, religion and culture. This ideology privileges groups that are defined as “historically underprivileged,” elevating some ethnic and racial minorities over whites and minorities that do not make the “intersectional” list. Women are privileged over men, LGBT individuals privileged over so-called “cis-genders.” The result is a culture of division.

Andrew Sullivan writes on the growing trend of treating people as representatives of designated groups rather than individuals: “Almost every corporation now has affirmative action for every victim-group in hiring and promotion. Workplace codes today read like campus speech codes of a few years ago. Voice dissent from this worldview and you’ll be designated a bigot and fired (see James Damore at Google). The media is out front on this too. Just as campuses have diversity tsars, roaming through every department to make sure they are in line, we now have a 'gender editor' at the New York Times…”

What is portrayed by the Left as the politics of “inclusion” inherently focuses on exclusion of those deemed “privileged” or who do not conform to left-wing ideology.

Political philosopher Herbert Marcuse (b. 1898) fled Germany at the dawn of the Nazi era and relocated in the U.S. After teaching at Columbia, Harvard and Brandeis, Marcuse moved to California, where he joined the University of California at San Diego in 1965. He was a “prominent member of the Frankfurt School of critical social analysis, whose Marxist and Freudian theories of 20th-century Western society were influential in the leftist student movements of the 1960s, especially after the 1968 student rebellions in Paris and West Berlin and at New York City’s Columbia University.”

Throughout the 20th century, economic socialism did not sell well in the U.S., where economic mobility has rated higher than many other countries and capitalism elevated the standard of living for citizens over the decades.

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, Marcuse tapped into the revolutionary movement among students of the 1960s and focused his Marxist theories on identity more than class struggle: “The student movements of the 60s were not based on class struggle, but rather, a rejection of their own repression as well as a growing lack of tolerance for war and waste. … The student protests of the 1960s were a form of Great Refusal, a saying ‘NO’ to multiple forms of repression and domination. This Great Refusal demands a new/liberated society. This new society requires what Marcuse calls the new sensibility which is an ascension of the life instincts over the aggressive instincts (Marcuse 1969: 23). This idea of a new sensibility is yet another move beyond Marxism insofar as it requires much more than new power relations. It requires the cultivation of new forms of subjectivity.”

The theories of Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proved appealing to many students in the 1960s, the era of the Vietnam War, for which students faced the prospect of being drafted. Marcuse and his acolytes turned self-interest into righteousness by teaching students that they were not draft-dodgers; rather, they were noble resisters who were part of a global struggle for social justice. Marcuse portrayed Ho Chi Minh and the Vietcong as a kind of Third World proletariat, fighting to free themselves from American Imperialism (The United States of Socialism, Ch. 3, p. 13).

This new identity socialism gained traction in the Black Power movement, a militant adjunct to the civil rights movement. The beauty of this group, from Marcuse’s point of view, was that, unlike white students, its members would not have to be instructed in the art of grievance since the black community had legitimate grievances dating back centuries. Through another Marxist transposition, race took the place of class (ibid).

Another emerging source of disgruntlement were feminists. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, Marcuse was extremely interested in the feminist movement because “he saw in this movement the potential for radical social change. The process of rethinking femininity and masculinity could be the beginning of redefining male subjectivity so that it develops in a way that males become less aggressive.”

Marcuse recognized feminists could be taught to see themselves as an oppressed class. “Women” would now be viewed as the working class and “men” the capitalist class; the class category would now be shifted to gender.

Over time, Marcuse maintained, the university could produce a new type of culture — radical students becoming radical professors who would produce even more radical students — and that culture would then spill into the larger society to infect primary education, the news media and entertainment. Eventually, even big business, the hated capitalist class, itself, would succumb.