Class Politics and Identity Politics

In the dialectical unfolding of modern social history, two powerful and often conflicting currents have emerged—class politics and identity politics. While both claim to emancipate the oppressed and reorganize society on more just foundations, they frequently clash in theory and practice. The framework of Quantum Dialectics offers a fresh, integrative lens through which to understand and reconcile these currents. In the study of social movements, class politics works as a manifestation of cohesive forces, and identity politics as the expression of decohesive forces. Their contradiction is not inherently antagonistic; rather, it forms a dynamic polarity whose resolution lies in achieving a higher-order equilibrium that sustains unity without erasing difference.

Identity-based oppressions and discriminations—such as caste hierarchy, racial segregation, patriarchy, and religious exclusion—are remnants of precapitalist socio-economic formations that have been carried over, adapted, and often intensified under capitalist modernity. These systems originated as tools of labor control, ritual order, and social stratification in feudal, slave-based, or tribal societies, where birth and identity predetermined one’s economic function and social worth. Capitalism, while dissolving many old structures through the commodification of labor and formal legal equality, did not eliminate these identity systems; instead, it appropriated and reconfigured them to serve its own logic of accumulation and social control. Thus, caste in India continues to structure labor markets, gendered divisions remain foundational to reproductive labor, and racial hierarchies persist in organizing global exploitation. From a quantum dialectical perspective, these identity-based oppressions represent historical residues of decohesive force—fragmentations embedded within the working class that obstruct the full realization of class consciousness. Their persistence signifies the incomplete transition from precapitalist to capitalist relations, demanding not only economic revolution but a dialectical negation of inherited ideological and cultural structures. Only by confronting these residual oppressions as integral contradictions within capitalist society can a genuinely emancipatory movement emerge.

In classical Marxist theory, class politics emerges from the material contradictions between labor and capital. The working class, through collective consciousness, organizes to challenge the exploitative structures of capitalist production. In this framework, class becomes the universal category that unites people across caste, race, religion, and gender, forging solidarity through shared economic interests and common struggle.

From the standpoint of Quantum Dialectics, class politics functions as a cohesive force—it binds diverse individuals into a singular social organism aimed at revolutionary transformation. Just as in physical systems, cohesion gives rise to stable structures, class-based solidarity generates organized resistance, party formation, and systemic change. It tends to subordinate particularities to the universal, emphasizing convergence over difference, synthesis over fragmentation.

Identity politics, in contrast, foregrounds the specific historical and cultural experiences of marginalized communities—be it along lines of caste, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or religion. It arises from the failure of class-based movements to address these unique oppressions adequately. Identity politics insists that difference matters—that lived experiences cannot be collapsed into economic abstractions.

In the language of Quantum Dialectics, identity politics represents a decohesive force. It introduces discontinuity into systems that might otherwise become rigid or totalizing. Decoherence in quantum systems refers to the loss of unified superposition due to environmental interactions; analogously, identity politics disrupts homogenizing narratives, reasserting the multiplicity of social reality. Yet, decohesion is not simply destructive—it is creative rupture, a necessary process that opens space for new patterns of understanding, recognition, and justice.

The seeming opposition between class politics and identity politics is best understood not as a binary antagonism, but as a dialectical contradiction—a dynamic interaction of polar forces that drive systemic evolution. In quantum dialectics, cohesion and decohesion are complementary and co-constitutive. Cohesion without decohesion leads to stagnation and authoritarianism; decohesion without cohesion leads to fragmentation and chaos.

Neoliberalism, as the dominant ideological framework of global capitalism since the 1980s, promotes deregulation, privatization, and market fundamentalism, often eroding collective welfare structures and class-based solidarities. In this context, identity politics—though emerging as a legitimate response to historical oppressions—has often been co-opted by neoliberal agendas to fragment collective resistance. Rather than challenging the structural roots of inequality, identity discourses under neoliberalism are frequently depoliticized and commodified, turning struggles for justice into performative recognitions or corporate diversity gestures. This creates a dialectical paradox: while identity politics reveals real social contradictions, neoliberalism instrumentalizes these contradictions to undermine cohesive, class-based movements. The result is a decoherence without structural sublation—a multiplicity of voices without a unifying force for systemic change. From a quantum dialectical standpoint, this illustrates how unmediated decohesive forces, when absorbed into dominant capitalist logic, become inertial rather than transformative, emphasizing the urgent need to re-anchor identity politics within a broader framework of collective, anti-capitalist praxis.

Ruling classes strategically promote and amplify identity politics—not to empower marginalized groups in any meaningful structural sense, but to fragment the collective consciousness of the working class and disrupt its potential for unified struggle. By shifting political discourse from systemic exploitation to individualized or community-specific grievances, they redirect attention away from the fundamental contradictions of capital and labor. Identity categories become sites of managed dissent, where struggles are atomized and confined within cultural or symbolic domains, rather than evolving into a unified class movement capable of revolutionary transformation. From a quantum dialectical perspective, this is a deliberate manipulation of decohesive forces to destabilize the cohesive potential of class solidarity, preventing the emergence of a dialectically unified working class that could challenge the prevailing capitalist order. Thus, identity politics, when decoupled from class analysis, becomes not a tool of liberation, but an instrument of capitalist control through engineered disunity.

Bourgeois intellectuals and proponents of anti-communist ideologies support identity politics precisely because it offers a safe outlet for dissent that does not threaten the structural foundations of capitalism. By championing struggles rooted in race, gender, caste, or sexuality in isolation from class, they reframe oppression as a matter of recognition and representation, rather than exploitation and systemic inequality. This allows them to appear progressive while deflecting attention from the material contradictions at the heart of capitalist society. In academic, media, and NGO circles, identity politics is elevated as a moral virtue, while Marxist or class-based analyses are dismissed as outdated, reductionist, or even oppressive. From a quantum dialectical viewpoint, this reflects a weaponization of decohesive forces to inhibit cohesive revolutionary synthesis. By keeping social contradictions compartmentalized and disarticulated, bourgeois ideologues neutralize the potential for dialectical unification of the oppressed classes, thereby preserving capitalist hegemony under the guise of pluralism and inclusivity.

This dialectic is evident in political movements. Pure class-based approaches often ignore structural oppressions like caste in India or race in the United States. Conversely, identity-focused movements, when isolated from class analysis, may be co-opted by neoliberal agendas, leading to tokenism without structural change. The challenge, then, is to sublate these contradictions—to transcend them into a higher synthesis without suppressing either pole.

Quantum dialectics calls for a dynamic equilibrium between cohesive and decohesive social forces. This does not mean compromising between extremes but establishing a recursive feedback loop—where class struggle informs identity struggles, and identity struggles enrich class politics.

Such equilibrium must be historically and contextually situated. In India, for instance, the annihilation of caste must be integral to the class struggle, not peripheral. In postcolonial contexts, anti-imperialist identity must converge with anti-capitalist critique. Feminist, queer, and indigenous movements must be interwoven into the fabric of broader systemic transformation—not as afterthoughts, but as integral expressions of social contradiction.

In a quantum dialectical society, the collective subject of revolution is plural—not an abstract “proletariat,” but a noospheric convergence of all those oppressed under interlocking systems of exploitation and exclusion. The vision is not of unity through sameness, but unity through complexity—a social superposition, stabilized by conscious political mediation.

Incorporating the fight against identity-based oppressions—such as caste, race, gender, religion, and sexuality—into the broader framework of class struggle is essential for forging a truly emancipatory politics that confronts all forms of exploitation and domination in their interconnected totality. Identity-based oppressions are not peripheral or secondary to class—they are historically embedded modalities through which class relations are mediated, enforced, and experienced. Caste, for instance, has been a mechanism of labor division and social control in Indian society, just as racial hierarchies have structured capitalist accumulation in colonial and postcolonial contexts. To ignore these identities is to ignore the specific contradictions through which the working class is fragmented and oppressed. From a quantum dialectical perspective, identity contradictions represent decohesive tensions that must not be suppressed but sublated into the cohesive project of class unity—not by erasing difference, but by integrating it into a higher synthesis of solidarity. Only by recognizing and organizing against identity-based oppression as integral to capitalist exploitation can the working class become a unified and conscious historical force capable of systemic transformation.

Identity extremism arises when legitimate struggles against oppression are transformed into rigid, exclusionary, and absolutist ideologies that elevate identity over universality, often rejecting broader solidarities and collective emancipation. It essentializes group identities—be it caste, race, religion, gender, or ethnicity—as fixed and sacrosanct, creating a worldview where political legitimacy is confined to lived experience rather than structural analysis or common interest. This form of extremism, while born out of historical injustices, often mirrors the logic of the oppressor by reproducing hierarchy, division, and antagonism within the oppressed. From a quantum dialectical standpoint, identity extremism represents an overaccumulation of decohesive force—a state where fragmentation overwhelms the possibility of synthesis, inhibiting the emergence of unified revolutionary consciousness. It becomes susceptible to co-optation by reactionary or neoliberal forces, serving as a barrier to class unity and systemic change. True liberation demands not the absolutization of identity, but its dialectical integration into a plural, collective project of transformation that sublates difference into revolutionary unity.

The tension between class politics and identity politics is not a problem to be solved but a dialectic to be navigated. Class struggle provides the structural cohesion necessary for systemic transformation, while identity politics introduces the critical decoherence that prevents ossification and exclusion. Their dialectical synthesis—viewed through the lens of Quantum Dialectics—offers a path toward a consciously organized social equilibrium, where solidarity does not erase difference, and difference does not undermine solidarity. This is the logic of becoming: a revolutionary quantum dialectical politics fit for the complexity of the 21st century.

The rise of identity politics is indeed a symptomatic expression of the failure of communist movements to adequately address identity-based oppressions as intrinsic elements of class struggle. In many historical contexts, communist parties either dismissed identity contradictions as secondary or attempted to subsume them prematurely under abstract notions of class, thereby alienating oppressed communities whose lived experiences of caste, race, gender, or ethnicity were not reducible to economic categories alone. This theoretical and strategic oversight created a vacuum that was filled by autonomous identity-based movements, often detached from materialist critique and vulnerable to co-optation by neoliberal forces. From a quantum dialectical standpoint, this failure represents a mismatch between cohesive organizing forces and unresolved decohesive contradictions—an imbalance that inhibits revolutionary synthesis. The task of communists, therefore, is not to reject identity politics but to reframe and integrate it dialectically—recognizing identity struggles as historically conditioned forms of class contradiction that require both political recognition and material transformation. Reclaiming leadership in these domains demands a radical reorientation of praxis, where identity is neither ignored nor fetishized, but sublated into a higher unity of collective emancipation.

Communist parties, guided by the principles of quantum dialectics, must approach identity politics not as a deviation from class struggle but as its dialectical enrichment and extension. Strategies and tactics must recognize that identity-based oppressions are not external to class but are historically conditioned expressions of class relations mediated through culture, hierarchy, and ideology. The party should act as a synthesizing force, integrating the decohesive energies of identity struggles—caste, gender, race, religion—into the cohesive framework of proletarian unity, without diluting their specific contradictions. This demands concrete analysis of concrete conditions, where tactical alliances, mass line approaches, and cadre education emphasize that identity liberation is inseparable from class emancipation. Quantum dialectics teaches that true unity emerges not by suppressing contradictions, but by sublating them into higher organizational coherence. Thus, communist parties must create platforms where marginalized identities find recognition, voice, and leadership, while strategically guiding these forces toward a revolutionary synthesis that transcends fragmentation and builds collective power against capital. This dynamic equilibrium—between identity specificity and class universality—is essential for the emergence of a dialectically unified revolutionary subject.