https://hammerandhope.org/issue/fall-2025
HAMMER AND HOPE: A MAGAZINE OF BLACK POLITICS AND CULTURE
No. 8Fall 2025
In Issue No. 7, Hammer & Hope published Michael A. McCarthy’s essay “The False Choice Between Identity Politics and Economic Populism,” which argued that “in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your base.” In the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s historic election as mayor of New York City, McCarthy highlights how Mamdani’s campaign accomplished that.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral race overturns the destructive bipartisan consensus that identity politics are simply a dead end. He won because he combined economic populist demands — rent freezes, universal child care, fast and free buses, municipally operated grocery stores to curtail inflation — with explicit solidarity with Palestine, immigrant communities, and New York’s most marginalized residents. In other words, the way Mamdani centered the cost of living in his campaign became the key way he incorporated different communities into his coalition through evocative appeals to their own unique experiences and struggles.
In his Nov. 4 victory speech, he said: “Thank you to those so often forgotten by the politics of our city, who made this movement their own. I speak of Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas. Senegalese taxi drivers and Uzbek nurses. Trinidadian line cooks and Ethiopian aunties. Yes, aunties.”
A less savvy economic populist might have just talked about a generic hard-working voter. But instead of downplaying people’s differences, Mamdani organized through them. In that speech, he continued: “I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist, and most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.” This is not a politics of retreat in response to the right wing winning elections and passing laws on anti-woke positions. It is what Stuart Hall, the Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, called the politics of articulation: the construction of political unity through negotiations of difference.
The deeper lesson of the campaign is that organizing, not mere messaging or style, wins in politics. This organizing undoubtedly involves articulation, but it also involves organization itself. The Democratic Socialists of America’s roughly 11,000-member New York City chapter created a political culture that DSA member Mamdani and his campaign were embedded in. Not only did NYC-DSA help shape the political messaging of the campaign, the organization also brought together a group of canvassers that anchored the campaign and helped it grow. More than 104,000 volunteers knocked on 3 million doors and made more than 4 million calls.
Those visits and calls involved both giving and receiving information in one-on-ones with New Yorkers living in many different situations. Feedback from those conversations in doorways worked its way through the task forces and field operations of both the campaign and NYC-DSA, in turn shaping the political messaging of the campaign itself.
Mamdani didn’t win by calibrating his message for some imagined homogenous group of voters or by selective interpretation of poll data. He won through a grassroots movement that created a sustained dialogue among the campaign, NYC-DSA, and the people of New York City. Organization, rather than messaging, was the method that articulated difference into a powerful political force. As Mamdani said in his DSA convention keynote address back in 2023, it all comes back to “knowing that I am a member of an organization that means what it says, that delivers on its promises.”
Read McCarthy’s essay here.
No. 7
Summer 2025
The False Choice Between Identity Politics and Economic Populism
A left that ignores the differences within the working class will never build power.
by Michael A. McCarthy
HAMMER AND HOPE: A MAGAZINE OF BLACK POLITICS AND CULTURE
Brittney Leeanne Williams, Inner Storm 2: Spiraling, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Alexander Berggruen, N.Y.
In building a politics to fight the right, economic populism is necessary but insufficient. Policies and rhetoric framed in the interests of the working class as a whole are crucial. But organizers have always known that in order to build a movement, you need to address specific yet important concerns that affect only some parts of your coalition while also speaking to the issues shared by everyone you want to draw into your base. Because the U.S. working class is already segmented, an emancipatory class politics that can beat the right must do both.
But recent conventional wisdom says otherwise.
In the wake of Kamala Harris’s catastrophic loss to Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, a narrative has taken hold: “Woke” costs elections. Only by abandoning so-called identity politics or issues specific to minorities will the left win working-class voters back.
This war on identity has powerful proponents across the political spectrum, including the tech billionaires Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, who continue to pour millions of dollars into initiatives aimed at destroying the causes they deem woke or antiracist. Even prominent centrists like The New York Times editorial board joined the right-wing activist Christopher Rufo’s side of the culture war when it recently complained that the Democratic Party “remains too focused on personal identity and on Americans’ differences — by race, gender, sexuality and religion — rather than our shared values.”
Instead, economic populism has emerged as a compelling alternative. On the left, some argue that economic populism is the only grounds for building a working-class movement that can reverse class dealignment. In this view, the left should simply pursue a politics of class while identity issues, such as immigration, gender, race, and sexuality, should be downplayed in political organizing. Others go further and treat conservative views on those topics as working-class majority views that the left must learn to embrace.
But this new common sense contradicts reality. Setting forms of identity, such as race, against class as fundamentally opposed bases of politics misrepresents how building working-class power works on the ground, both today and throughout history. Dismissing the social differences between working-class people as irrelevant ignores the key building blocks of class politics. And a left that embraces the right’s divide-and-conquer rhetoric on criminal justice, gender, race, and immigration will only deepen political divisions within the working class. Subscribing to either view would doom the working-class solidarity needed to win.
When it comes to building a working-class politics against the right, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Either we construct the solidarity needed to dismantle the political oligarchy and achieve the massive redistribution that the 99 percent needs, or our country will continue to slide into an authoritarianism that scapegoats the most precarious members of the working class.
A closer look at the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary shows how economic populism works best when combined with targeted appeals. Some have held up Mamdani’s win as vindication of the view that economic populism alone gets the goods, but he built a campaign on listening and meeting voters where they are. After his success in the primary, he told New York magazine, “We have tried to listen more and lecture less, and it’s in those very conversations that I had with Democrats who voted for Donald Trump many months ago that I heard what it would take to bring them back to the Democratic Party — that it would be a relentless focus on an economic agenda.” It’s true his campaign foregrounded bread-and-butter issues, but not at the exclusion of other aspects of working people’s lives that matter to them.
Though Mamdani leads with the cost of living and uses plain, sensible language, his platform also includes positions on particular sectors of the working class and the unique problems they face. He has been a principled voice of opposition against the genocide in Gaza, has vowed to oppose ICE, and celebrates his status as an immigrant and a South Asian. On policing and public safety, while he distanced himself from unpopular rhetoric such as “defund the police” on the campaign trail, he offered restorative justice proposals, including expanding non-police social workers to intervene in crises, providing mental health services, and ending Mayor Eric Adams’s plan to build a $225 million “cop city” in Queens. He invited people into his coalition by recognizing LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers; appealing to Haitian New Yorkers by calling Haiti its Creole name, Ayiti; and speaking to the particular experiences of Bangladeshi aunties, who turned out to be a powerful organizing force for his campaign. These complexities don’t fit easily into the economic populist playbook, and upend the view that working people have conservative cultural values that the left needs to defer to.
Mamdani’s campaign shows that working-class politics always relates to the ways people’s particular experiences move them to fight. The idea that workers simply have a one-dimensional set of interchangeable class interests that motivate them and that politicians can activate with the correct message deals in what Stuart Hall termed “low-flying economism masquerading as ‘materialism.’” The reality is that working-class political action always develops out of the intersecting forces, interests, and identities of the working class itself and cannot be activated or imposed from above. People don’t merely show up to a protest against ICE because they are immigrants themselves. They may be there because they have undocumented people in their personal networks or simply want to express solidarity for a group they feel is being treated unfairly. People voted for Mamdani not only because he promises to lower the cost of living in New York but also because particular aspects of his platform, targeted at subgroups such as parents who cannot afford child care, either benefit them personally or are things they believe in. Emancipatory working-class politics is about both what is good for workers and also what is good in general.
There are versions of the view that identity politics is a distraction from the real class struggle on both the left and on the right. A closer look shows that perspective is based on simplistic and distorting characterizations of working-class people and their interests, an error my colleague Mathieu Desan and I call class abstractionism.
The core claims of this view of the working class are: Everyone requires a basic set of material needs — housing, health care, and food — to live. In capitalist society, most people work for an employer to acquire these core goods. Capitalists depend on workers but have an interest in minimizing the wages and benefits they give their workers in order to increase profits. So far, so good, but here is the twist: Class is therefore more important than non-class social factors, including race, because it alone directly governs workers’ material well-being. Both capitalists and workers understand their antagonistic interests, and that understanding shapes them as political actors. Identity categories such as race occlude these core relations because they form social bases to organize politically that are distinct from class. The argument is that you can organize on the basis of class or race — the two do not overlap.
That leads to an important strategic upshot. The working class is the only group able to challenge the power of capitalists because its members make up the majority of society and, because of their unique role in production, can shut the system down by withholding labor. They have both the numbers and the leverage. Again, so far, so good, but class abstractionists further argue that that makes identity-based movements within the working class distractions from working-class politics at large because, as one commenter puts it, they are not “the central and the key players in this society that can bring the kind of changes we need.” Only a working-class majority can win, and to the extent that minorities are part of that majority, they need to subsume their own interests into those of the whole.
But this claim is absurd when set against demographic and historical facts. First, even within a working-class majority, it is always a minority of workers who are involved in major labor actions and strikes. The working class never acts as a whole; it isn’t a unitary bloc. Second, subgroups within the working class organize along non-class lines regularly and have dramatically changed history — see the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
More broadly, many aspects of how working people’s lives are structured beyond the worker-employer relation determine what they do to survive and therefore how they see their own material interests. This is obvious for Black politics. Consider, for instance, the greater historic risk of Black people dying of tuberculosis in the U.S. because of racial segregation. Or the stress and physical pain of social alienation caused by persistent racial dehumanization. Or the psychic burden of the double consciousness described by W. E. B. Du Bois that results from pervasive discrimination. Or the anxiety produced by the increased surveillance and hostile interactions with law enforcement a poor Black neighborhood endures. Or the difficulty in navigating labor or housing markets because of racism or fewer personal and familial networks to draw upon. The list goes on. The key point is that all of these factors shape what people have to do to get by and therefore their material interests. In New York, the Black teenager who regularly gets stopped and frisked by the police on the way to his underfunded public high school doesn’t merely have interests as a worker.
The wealth of elites can afford them the ability to transcend any hardships that might be particular to their demographic group, allowing them to have a laser focus on amassing more money and prestige. But working-class people aren’t defined only by the burden of capitalists gaining more and more at their expense; a wide range of things matter to them, too, and some are specific to their sectors of the working class. The fruit picker in California’s Central Valley is not only exploited by the Trump-voting farmer who withholds wages but also is dominated by the ICE agents stalking him through the fields.
What does this mean for working-class politics? First, workers come to redistributive and egalitarian projects through both class and non-class appeals. In the workplace, they do not form unions and withdraw their labor in protest only as workers but also as Democrats or Republicans, immigrants or citizens, free or incarcerated, straight or queer, Christians or Muslims, women or men, white people or Black people. The hard work of organizing involves creating shared goals that can speak to different needs, as well as acts of solidarity in which some segments of workers defend others, thereby creating the social context for broader collective action. It means building a view of what is good in general, not just what is good for an individual. The Knights of Labor slogan, which the organization sometimes struggled to live up to, captures it best: “An injury to one is the concern of all.”
Second, working-class politics develops and forms in all the places working-class people live, breathe, and form attachments, needs, and grievances, including outside the workplace. Look at organizing among Black prisoners led by working-class Black women connected to the carceral state through their families. The existence of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, Black Mamas Bail Out Action, and similar organizations shows that the issues workers fight for reflect their distinct positions in an overlapping set of material relations. This is precisely why, as the criminologist Beth Richie writes, “in the realm of issues related to incarceration, women have assumed key leadership positions, advocating for critical resistance to the prison-industrial complex, sentencing reform, a moratorium on the death penalty, and the development of alternative sanctions,” even when these are not narrowly understood as women’s issues or working-class issues.
The abstract class structure does not determine the form working-class politics takes. Anyone interested in the future of working-class politics needs to consider non-class social structures, such as race, gender, citizenship, and place — what are dismissed as identity issues in U.S. politics — not as distractions but as building blocks. The working class as an organizational and political force has always been assembled out of those segments.
As capitalism develops, it generates social differentiation within the working class itself. Competition between firms and workers creates uneven development both within and between places. Profit-driven competition does not raise all boats; some places receive more investment while others are starved. Similar to the way a city can have both food deserts and extraordinary food waste, the working class encompasses credentialed workers who have job protections and good wages, people in rural and urban areas with concentrated poverty whose work is poorly paid and precarious, and undocumented workers in the shadows earning below the minimum wage because of their citizenship status.
Class struggles that emerge from working-class communities where there are already strong communal bonds tend to be more effective. Capitalism doesn’t simply dissolve such bonds, leaving unorganized workers atomized; it also produces them or builds them anew. It segments the working class into subgroups with their own subcultures. This differentiation makes non-class identities such as race central to class politics. This is our basic reality. Working-class politics always starts with an already differentiated working class that is mobilized around different collective concerns.
It is also why building solidarity across social differences both at the workplace and beyond, where people have competing material grievances, is so hard. The challenge is exponentially harder at the national level. And it is even more precarious as an international project, as we see today, when some segments of the working class embrace immigration restrictions while others protest the armed forces defending ICE raids. Segments of the working class are often involved in opposing political projects that self-serving politicians across the political spectrum claim to be in their class interests.
It is no surprise that in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and the wave of foreclosures that disproportionately devastated Black and Latino working-class neighborhoods the collective political struggles springing up from working-class Black neighborhoods were articulated as Black struggles. These poor people’s movements took the form of a radical refusal not of work but of civil order. It was not a movement of workers in the workplace via strikes but rather, because of residential segregation and concentrated unemployment, a movement of workers in the streets via protests. Black politics was the form this class struggle took before political entrepreneurs, corporate boards, and diversity officers claimed the movement as their own.
Politicians using economic populist or class rhetoric don’t create working-class politics; at their best, they help assemble it. Class politics always arises out of the identities and bonds people have already formed, which is precisely why successful left politicians need multidimensional platforms.
Nowhere is the dynamic view of class more explicit than in the work of Du Bois. In his 1935 masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880, he gives an account of the democratic revolution of enslaved Black people and the counterrevolution of property as one of class struggle, domination, and divisions, expressed in racial terms. Du Bois explains the mass exodus of former slaves from Southern plantations during the Civil War as a general strike, in which Black power was class power. But the book is titled Black Reconstruction rather than Working-Class Reconstruction because it tells the history of poor and disenfranchised Black people liberating themselves and then seeing their gains ripped away. The bourgeois counterrevolution of the Southern planter class allied with Northern manufacturing, with the Southern white worker as junior partner, to crush the nascent Southern democracy by stripping away Black people’s newly won right to vote and destroying their organizations with racial terror. Du Bois writes, “The slave went free; stood for a brief moment in the sun, then moved back again toward slavery,” thanks to capital’s offensive and white workers’ failure to pursue working-class solidarity.
Earlier, in 1933, Du Bois wrote, “There is not at present the slightest indication that a Marxian revolution based on a united class-conscious proletariat is anywhere on the American far horizon. Rather race antagonism and labor group rivalry is still undisturbed by world catastrophe. In the hearts of black laborers alone, therefore, lie those ideals of democracy in politics and industry which may in time make the workers of the world effective dictators of civilization.” Du Bois’s claim is that it is through the unique political agency of the Black working class that America might move toward genuine interracial solidarity.
Many other Black socialists also understood Black people’s struggle for democratic rights as central to the working-class struggle. In 1948 the Trinidadian revolutionary C. L. R. James clearly centered Black agency, pointing out that the Black struggle of the emergent civil rights movement “has a vitality and a validity of its own” with “roots in the past of America” that give it “an organic political perspective” that “is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.”
The dynamic perspectives of Du Bois and James emphasize the way that working-class politics emerge out of particular historical moments by particular subsections of the working class itself — and not always under the banner of “workers.” They understood the working class as segmented and their unity as potential rather than given. When movements and organizers lose sight of the reality of working-class differentiation, solidarity has no ground to stand on.
The socialist movement in the U.S. had to learn this lesson early in the 20th century. At the Socialist Party’s founding convention in Indianapolis in 1901, members adopted a “Negro Resolution” that acknowledged the “peculiar position” of Black workers. Yet the resolution offered nothing more than an invitation to Black workers to join the party, asserting, “We declare to the negro worker the identity of his interests and struggles with the interests and struggles of the workers of all lands, without regard to race, or color, or sectional lines.” Socialist Party members pushed to remove a clause from the resolution recognizing Black people’s political disenfranchisement and subjection to lynching terror, instead opting to emphasize the homogeneity of the working class, declaring that “the only line of division which exists in fact is that between the producers and the owners of the world.”
There were real racists in the party, such as the founding party member Victor Berger, the first socialist elected to Congress. But the majority view within the Socialist Party was that Black people in America needed no special place on the party’s founding platform because Black working-class people were already part of that class and therefore entirely equal. Eugene Debs raged against the “savory bouquet of white superiority” and cancelled a 1912 speaking tour of the South in protest of segregation. Yet even Debs said “the class struggle is colorless” and supported the repeal of Socialist Party resolutions on the “Negro question” on the grounds that “we have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races.” In 1913, Du Bois argued that “the Negro Problem” is “the great test of the American Socialist.” What history shows ever since is that the class struggle is colorful.
There are, of course, far darker moments in the U.S. labor movement. Working-class politics and organizing can just as easily turn reactionary. Consider the massacre of East St. Louis, Ill., where in 1917 as many as 200 Black workers and their family members were shot, burned, or hanged by mobs of raging white workers. Investigating the mass violence for The Crisis, Martha Gruening and Du Bois homed in on the cause: Strikes of the relatively unskilled all-white manufacturing unions were being weakened by Black strikebreakers, who had recently migrated in the thousands from the South. Instead of organizing with them — an idea that was beyond the pale for the union — white workers opted for a murderous race riot. Of the union’s motto, “Labor conquers everything,” Du Bois wrote, “In East St. Louis it has conquered Liberty, Justice, Mercy, Law and the Democracy which is a nation’s vaunt.”
But socialism and labor in the U.S. have seen more than just missteps and massacres; an intertwining current of interracial solidarity also runs through their histories. In 1921, at Vladimir Lenin’s urging, the Communist Party USA explicitly recognized the special character of Black oppression in America, acknowledging that “the history of the Southern Negro is the history of a reign of terror — of persecution, rape and murder.” The party program pledged, “The Workers Party will support the Negroes in their struggle for Liberation, and will help them in their fight for economic, political and social equality.” It continued, “Its task will be to destroy altogether the barrier of race prejudice that has been used to keep apart the Black and white workers, and bind them into a solid union of revolutionary forces for the overthrow of our common enemy.” During the Great Depression, Black workers in both the North and the South joined the Communist Party in far greater numbers than they did the Socialist Party.
When the communists soon began to organize explicitly around struggles particular to Black people, such as the wrongful conviction of the Scottsboro Boys, their Black working-class membership grew. Robin D. G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe shows that in the early 1930s, Black membership in the Alabama Communist Party grew even more rapidly than white membership. The interracial solidarity of Reds in the workplace in turn helped to fuel the grassroots organizing that injected the CIO with militancy, leading to a major upsurge in labor organizing and an increase in union density. Despite the New Deal’s racial shortfalls, as a whole it established crucial labor provisions that were a direct result of this interracial solidarity.
After the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 demanded labor leaders submit affidavits disavowing communism and the Red Scare took hold, communists — many of them Black — were purged from American unions. The result was that many unions shifted into business unionism, weakening their militancy and inroads into interracial solidarity.
Class abstractionists view class politics and racial politics as mutually exclusive and competing alternatives when it comes to organizing. In reality, class struggles and antiracist struggles often feed into each other. As the labor scholar Cedric De Leon argues, Black working-class organizations played the driving role in desegregating the American labor movement. A. Philip Randolph helped create the Negro American Labor Council to fight against segregation when the AFL-CIO refused to desegregate its own unions. Work from the sociologist Matthew Nichter shows that many of the communists and socialists trained in the interracial labor organizing of the 1930s and 1940s became leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. In turn, the civil rights movement revitalized American labor militancy in the 1960s and 1970s. Continuing the pattern of one feeding into the other, following a series of labor strikes demanding hazard pay and coronavirus protections, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 led to new workplace organizing over the past five years. Working-class fights at work were triggered by Black struggles in the streets, and vice versa.
Through the lens of Black socialists like Du Bois, we understand that the working class is not an undifferentiated mass with a one-dimensional set of interests located in the employer-worker relation. Competition in the labor market, which pits workers against one another and divides working people into segments, makes solidarity across the workplace and beyond it the fundamental key to building a working-class politics that can ratchet up to the level of a national and international political project.
Working-class solidarity is cleareyed about these divisions and the different conditions they produce for the separate segments of the class. They cannot be papered over with empty theoretical abstractions. This is a challenge for working-class politics that nobody understands better than Steve Bannon and other economic populists on the right who manipulate insider-outsider divisions among the working class to build their own coalitions. When Trump described immigrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” he was framing his populism around the idea that there are good and bad workers. The right is undeniably practicing identity politics. An economic populism of the left that wishes such differences away will have only weak grounds for building a coalition.
Karl Marx himself came to similar conclusions. In an 1870 letter to America, he compared intra-class divisions between poor white workers and Black workers there to the divisions between Irish workers and English workers: “Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life.” He continued, “This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.” Working-class power in England had to be forged through solidarity, he argued, and the work had to be done by the workers themselves, because “the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.”
What is the future of working-class politics in America? Either organizers in the workplace and community and politicians on the campaign trail and in Congress build a project that links the distinct segments of the working-class together in solidarity through both economic populism and targeted appeals, or the fascists will win.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael A. McCarthy is the director of community studies and an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent book is The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It).
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