The Recuperation of Class Struggle

The recuperation of class struggle under contemporary capitalism cannot be understood simply as the incorporation of radical movements into established political institutions. It also involves the transformation of the very language, organisational practices and interpersonal relationships through which opposition to capitalism is articulated. A movement can retain the vocabulary of liberation while progressively abandoning the social relationships, collective capacities and practical objectives that might make liberation possible.

One of the central mechanisms through which this transformation occurs is the displacement of collective class antagonism by forms of political activity organised around individual identity, personal morality, reputational legitimacy and the policing of ideological boundaries. This displacement is particularly significant when it takes place within organisations that understand themselves as progressive, socialist, anti-racist, feminist or otherwise emancipatory.

The problem is not that questions of racism, sexism, colonialism, discrimination or other forms of domination are unimportant. They are indispensable dimensions of any serious critique of capitalist society. The problem arises when these questions become detached from their material and institutional conditions, transformed into competing claims to moral authority, and employed as instruments for regulating political participation rather than developing collective capacities to challenge domination.

Under these circumstances, politics increasingly becomes a contest over who is entitled to speak, whose credentials are sufficiently respectable, whose language is sufficiently acceptable, and whose personal history can be presented as evidence of political legitimacy or illegitimacy.

The resulting politics can be intensely antagonistic while remaining remarkably compatible with the continued reproduction of existing social relations.

This is the paradox of recuperated dissent: political energies that might otherwise contribute to collective resistance are redirected into processes that reproduce the hierarchies, dependencies and managerial relationships they ostensibly oppose.

The professional managerial class (PMC) occupies an especially important position in this process. Its members are not necessarily capitalists in the conventional sense. They may be employees, academics, journalists, administrators, NGO professionals, consultants, institutional activists or political organisers. Nevertheless, their occupational positions frequently involve the administration of other people’s activities, the mediation of institutional relationships, the management of information and the reproduction of organisational norms.

Their relationship to political movements is therefore potentially contradictory. They may sincerely oppose particular forms of exploitation while simultaneously defending the institutional arrangements through which their own professional authority is reproduced.

This contradiction helps explain why apparently radical politics can become preoccupied with symbolic recognition, professional accreditation, reputational management and individual moral performance while neglecting the development of working-class self-activity.

The central argument of this essay is that middle-class identitarianism, liberal single-issue politics and professional managerialism can function as mutually reinforcing mechanisms of class pacification when they substitute the management of political identities for the collective transformation of material social relationships.

The significance of this argument becomes especially apparent when considering the politics of personality-based attacks against political figures, including the controversy surrounding Noam Chomsky and his association with Jeffrey Epstein. Such controversies raise legitimate questions about political judgement, accountability and the responsibilities of public intellectuals. However, they also provide an opportunity to examine how criticism of an individual’s conduct can become a vehicle for displacing substantive political disagreements, constructing reputational wedges and reorganising political allegiances around questions of personal legitimacy.

The appropriate response is neither the unconditional defence of influential intellectuals nor their ritual denunciation. It is to distinguish substantive accountability from political scapegoating, and criticism that develops collective understanding from criticism that functions primarily to discipline, fragment and pacify opposition.

That distinction is central to understanding recuperation.

1. Recuperation: how opposition becomes a mechanism of social reproduction

The concept of recuperation has an important history in Marxist and Situationist criticism. It describes the capacity of capitalist society to absorb, neutralise and reconstitute oppositional practices, ideas and movements within the very social order they initially sought to challenge.

Recuperation is not simply repression. Repression attempts to suppress opposition; recuperation attempts to transform its meaning and function.

A workers’ movement might begin by demanding control over production, only to become incorporated into institutional bargaining arrangements in which workers are represented by professional negotiators. A movement against racial oppression might develop into a programme of corporate diversity management that leaves ownership and workplace authority untouched. A feminist movement might be transformed into a competition for professional advancement within existing hierarchies. An anti-capitalist movement might become a cultural milieu whose participants accumulate intellectual and reputational capital through their association with radical ideas.

In each case, something of the original movement survives. Its vocabulary, symbols, personalities and institutional presence may even become more prominent. What disappears is its capacity to reorganise social power.

This distinction is essential because the survival of radical language does not necessarily indicate the survival of radical politics.

The Class Autonomy essay, The Recuperation of Dissent Under Capitalism, makes precisely this distinction. It argues that communist theory risks becoming a form of cultural capital through which educated social strata distinguish themselves from capitalism without necessarily challenging their material relationship to it. Political identity becomes a substitute for political activity, while radical discourse becomes a form of symbolic consumption.

The argument is especially important when applied to professionalised activist environments.

An individual can accumulate considerable prestige through demonstrating familiarity with Marxist terminology, anti-racist discourse, feminist theory or anti-colonial criticism. Yet none of these accomplishments necessarily develops the capacity of workers to resist exploitation, organise collectively or exercise control over their circumstances.

Indeed, intellectual sophistication can sometimes conceal organisational impotence.

The distinction is between possessing radical opinions and participating in the development of radical social power.

1.1 From antagonism to representation

The recuperation of dissent frequently operates through a transition from direct collective activity to institutional representation.

Rather than exercising power directly, people are encouraged to find representatives who will negotiate, petition, lobby, campaign or speak on their behalf.

This is not automatically undesirable. Representation and negotiation can be useful components of collective organisation. The problem arises when representation becomes a substitute for participation and when representatives acquire interests independent of those they ostensibly represent.

The Class Autonomy essay The Recuperation of Popular Power identifies this problem through its distinction between direct and indirect political action.

Direct action attempts to address problems through the exercise of popular capacities. Indirect action attempts to influence existing institutions so that they will address those problems.

The distinction is not simply between two tactics. It concerns where political agency resides.

When people organise collectively to solve a problem, they develop practical knowledge, relationships, confidence and organisational capacities. When they surrender responsibility to professional representatives, they may obtain an immediate concession while remaining dependent upon institutions over which they exercise little control.

The danger is that a movement becomes increasingly effective at representing grievances while becoming less capable of resolving their underlying causes.

This produces a peculiar political economy of representation:

1. A social problem generates collective dissatisfaction.
2. Dissatisfaction produces a movement.
3. The movement develops representatives and institutional intermediaries.
4. These intermediaries acquire authority through their relationship with the movement.
5. Institutions recognise and negotiate with the intermediaries.
6. The movement becomes increasingly dependent upon those intermediaries.
7. Political activity becomes concentrated around maintaining access to institutions.
8. The original collective capacities of the movement gradually atrophy.

The result can be a movement that continues to speak in the name of popular power while increasingly exercising power on behalf of institutions.

This is the fundamental contradiction of recuperation.

1.2 Co-optation as the management of consent

The most important theoretical contribution to this discussion comes from the passage supplied from The Co-option of Class Struggle.

The passage describes managerial manipulation through selective information and the conscious structuring of events:

“One common form of manipulation is co-optation. Co-opting an individual usually involves giving him or her a desirable role in the design or implementation of the change. Co-opting a group involves giving one of its leaders, or someone it respects, a key role in the design or implementation of a change. This is not a form of participation, however, because the initiators do not want the advice of the co-opted, merely his or her endorsement.”

This is an extraordinarily useful framework for understanding the relationship between professional managerialism and recuperated political movements.

Its significance lies in distinguishing participation from endorsement.

Participation involves having a meaningful capacity to influence the direction, substance and implementation of collective decisions. Endorsement involves being invited to legitimise decisions whose fundamental parameters have already been determined.

The distinction is crucial.

A worker might be invited to participate in a management committee without having any meaningful influence over ownership, investment, staffing or production. A community activist might be invited to participate in a government consultation after the essential policy decisions have already been made. A movement representative might be invited onto an institutional advisory board, not because the institution intends to redistribute power, but because the representative can provide legitimacy among constituencies that otherwise distrust it.

In each instance, the invitation appears inclusive.

Yet inclusion can become a mechanism of exclusion when it removes the participants from the collective relationships that originally gave them their political significance.

The co-opted individual becomes a bridge between the institution and the movement. The institution gains legitimacy, while the movement loses some of its independent capacity to challenge the institution.

This is particularly important when considering the PMC.

Professional managers frequently possess the ability to determine which demands are considered realistic, which grievances receive institutional recognition, which representatives are considered responsible and which forms of protest are classified as unacceptable.

Their authority need not depend upon explicit coercion. It can operate through the selective distribution of access, recognition, employment opportunities, advisory positions, professional credentials and reputational rewards.

The most effective co-optation does not necessarily require anyone to abandon their stated principles.

It only requires that their practical role becomes increasingly dependent upon maintaining relationships with institutions that have an interest in containing the consequences of those principles.

The distinction between participation and endorsement therefore offers a powerful analytical test:

Does an invitation increase the collective capacity of ordinary participants to determine their circumstances, or does it primarily increase the institutional authority of the person invited?

This question should be applied to trade unions, political parties, NGOs, universities, activist organisations, social movements and professional associations alike.

It also provides a useful framework for understanding tokenism.

1.3 Tokenism and the individualisation of collective grievances

The essay Success Under Tokenism: Co-option of the Newcomer and the Prevention of Collective Protest, by Stephen C. Wright and Donald M. Taylor, provides an especially useful empirical complement to this analysis.

The research examines the political consequences of individual upward mobility under conditions in which opportunities for advancement remain restricted. Its findings are significant: individuals who successfully cross the boundary into a higher-status group can become less supportive of collective action by those who remain disadvantaged.

The research suggests that successful tokens may shift their identification towards the advantaged group, even while continuing to recognise the injustice experienced by their former group. Class Autonomy

This provides a way of understanding the relationship between representation and class mobility.

An institution does not necessarily need to overcome inequality to undermine collective opposition to it. Sometimes it is sufficient to create limited opportunities for individuals to escape the consequences of inequality.

The individual who receives a promotion, appointment, grant, media platform or professional opportunity may acquire a new interest in the preservation of the institutional arrangements that made their advancement possible.

This is not necessarily a conscious betrayal. Nor does it mean that individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds inevitably abandon collective interests when they achieve professional success.

The point is structural rather than psychological.

The institution creates incentives that reward individual accommodation while leaving collective grievances unresolved.

The successful newcomer becomes evidence that the system is open to advancement. Their presence can then be used to undermine arguments that the system itself requires transformation.

The same mechanism operates in corporate diversity programmes, university administration, professional activism and electoral politics.

Consider a corporation that employs a small number of individuals from historically disadvantaged backgrounds in senior management positions. Their appointments may be celebrated as evidence of institutional progress. Yet the corporation might simultaneously continue to suppress wages, exploit precarious workers, outsource production and resist collective bargaining.

The symbolic composition of the management structure changes without the underlying relationship between management and labour changing.

This is why representation and redistribution must be distinguished.

Representation can matter enormously, especially when historically excluded people gain access to positions from which they can exercise meaningful influence. But representation is not itself proof that power has been democratised.

The critical question is whether the newcomer acquires the capacity to challenge the institution or whether the institution acquires another person who can legitimise its continued authority.

There is also a further implication.

When advancement is individualised, those who remain excluded can be encouraged to interpret their circumstances as personal failures rather than collective problems. Their grievances become increasingly difficult to articulate because the institution can point to its successful tokens as proof of fairness.

The result is a politics in which individual mobility substitutes for collective emancipation.

This is one of the most important connections between identitarianism, the PMC and the recuperation of dissent.

2. The professional managerial class and the institutionalisation of radicalism

The concept of the professional managerial class is useful because it draws attention to a social stratum whose relationship to capitalism cannot be adequately described through the conventional opposition between capitalists and industrial workers.

The term was developed by Barbara and John Ehrenreich to describe a class of salaried professionals whose work involves the reproduction, supervision, administration and management of capitalist social relations.

The category encompasses a heterogeneous range of occupations, including:

• Corporate and public-sector managers.
• University administrators and academics.
• Human resources professionals.
• Lawyers and consultants.
• NGO administrators.
• Policy researchers and advisers.
• Professional journalists.
• Institutional communications specialists.
• Certain categories of social workers and educators.
• Professional political organisers.
• Cultural and intellectual intermediaries.

Not everyone employed in these occupations necessarily belongs to the same class fraction. Nor should the category be treated as a sociologically uniform bloc.

Nevertheless, it identifies an important structural contradiction.

Many PMC occupations involve the exercise of authority over other people’s labour, the administration of institutional priorities and the translation of political demands into professionally manageable programmes.

The PMC can therefore occupy an intermediate position between capital and labour.

Its members may depend upon wages rather than ownership income, but their occupational authority can nevertheless be connected to the reproduction of managerial control.

This contradiction becomes particularly important when professional employees participate in radical movements.

2.1 The PMC as an intermediary between capital and labour

The PMC does not necessarily exercise the ultimate authority associated with capital ownership. Nevertheless, it frequently exercises delegated authority over the conditions under which other people work and participate.

A human resources manager does not necessarily own the company. Yet they may administer disciplinary procedures, determine hiring practices, manage performance reviews and implement redundancies.

A university administrator may not own the institution. Yet they can exercise considerable influence over funding allocations, employment conditions, research priorities and acceptable forms of institutional dissent.

An NGO professional may sincerely oppose poverty while participating in an organisational structure in which poverty becomes the basis for continued institutional funding, employment and professional specialisation.

This does not mean that individual professionals secretly want the problems they address to continue.

It means that institutional interests can become detached from the declared purposes of the institutions themselves.

An organisation established to address a social problem can develop an independent interest in maintaining its organisational position as the recognised administrator of that problem.

The distinction between solving a problem and managing it becomes increasingly important.

The same contradiction can emerge within political movements.

Activists who acquire professional positions through their relationship with movements can become intermediaries between ordinary participants and institutional authorities.

Their influence may depend less upon their continuing accountability to participants than upon their capacity to maintain access to funding bodies, political representatives, universities, media organisations and professional networks.

This creates a potential conflict between two different sources of legitimacy:

1. Legitimacy derived from participation in collective struggle.
2. Legitimacy derived from recognition by established institutions.

These sources of legitimacy are not necessarily compatible.

An organiser who becomes dependent upon institutional recognition may eventually find that the demands of their constituency conflict with the requirements of their professional position.

The pressure to remain institutionally respectable can then become a pressure to moderate collective demands.

2.2 Catherine Liu and the politics of virtue hoarding

Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class offers an important contribution to this discussion.

Liu examines the relationship between PMC social position, cultural distinction and liberal moral self-presentation.

Her argument is particularly relevant because it identifies how moral and cultural superiority can become forms of class distinction.

The PMC does not merely possess professional qualifications. It can also cultivate a particular conception of itself as more enlightened, responsible, sophisticated and socially conscious than the people it regards as culturally or politically inferior.

This can produce a peculiar combination of progressive rhetoric and class contempt.

The PMC may advocate equality while expressing disdain for working-class cultural practices. It may celebrate diversity while treating ordinary workers as politically unsophisticated. It may condemn hierarchy while reproducing hierarchical relationships through professional expertise and institutional authority.

Virtue becomes a form of social capital.

Political opinions, cultural preferences, consumption habits and displays of moral awareness become markers through which individuals establish their position within professional and educated social environments.

The issue is not that ethical commitments are inherently fraudulent. Rather, the problem arises when moral distinction becomes a means of securing social distinction.

A person can acquire prestige through demonstrating that they possess the correct opinions without participating in the difficult practical work required to transform the conditions about which those opinions are expressed.

This is particularly relevant to the contemporary politics of social media.

The public performance of political awareness can become a form of professional self-promotion. Demonstrating the ability to identify problematic language, condemn an unpopular figure or denounce an insufficiently progressive position can generate reputational rewards.

Meanwhile, the development of a tenants’ association, a workplace organising committee or a functioning democratic union may receive comparatively little recognition.

The difference is not that symbolic politics is always meaningless. Symbols can be important, and public criticism can expose genuine injustice.

The difference is that symbolic recognition can become detached from the development of collective power.

The PMC can consequently reproduce itself through a political economy of moral distinction.

Its members gain status by demonstrating their ability to interpret, administer and police the norms of progressive politics.

Those who do not possess the necessary cultural vocabulary, professional credentials or institutional fluency can find themselves marginalised.

The movement then begins to reproduce the very social hierarchy it claims to oppose.

2.3 The contradiction between expertise and self-activity

There is a further problem concerning expertise.

Capitalist society requires specialists. Modern production, medicine, engineering, education and scientific research depend upon specialised knowledge.

A serious socialist or anarchist critique cannot simply reject expertise.

The question is whether expertise remains accountable to collective needs or becomes an independent source of authority.

The distinction is between expertise as a resource available to society and expertise as a mechanism through which society becomes dependent upon professional intermediaries.

The first expands collective capacities.

The second can diminish them.

This distinction is particularly important in political movements because ideological and organisational expertise can become a source of informal hierarchy.

A small group of experienced organisers may gradually monopolise strategic knowledge, communications, external relationships and institutional access.

Ordinary members become increasingly dependent upon them.

The movement may retain democratic procedures while losing the practical capacity of its members to exercise meaningful control.

The professionalisation of political activity can therefore produce a situation in which people participate in meetings without determining the decisions that matter.

This brings us back to the passage on co-optation.

An organisation can invite people to participate in its procedures while reserving the decisive questions for professional intermediaries.

It can offer representation without transferring power.

It can celebrate participation while structuring events so that the participants’ principal function is to endorse decisions made elsewhere.

The danger is not simply bureaucratisation. It is the gradual replacement of collective self-activity by dependence upon those who claim to represent collective interests.

3. Middle-class identitarianism and the displacement of class antagonism

A serious Marxist critique of identitarianism must begin by distinguishing between the existence of identities and the political uses to which identity is put.

People experience society through historically specific relationships involving class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, disability, religion and other social divisions.

These experiences are neither imaginary nor politically irrelevant.

Capitalism has historically depended upon racialised divisions of labour, gendered reproductive arrangements, colonial dispossession and differentiated access to social resources.

A materialist analysis must therefore investigate how these relationships are produced and reproduced.

It cannot simply declare that class is important and everything else secondary.

That would reproduce a narrow economic reductionism incapable of explaining the actual organisation of capitalist power.

The relevant distinction is between an intersectional analysis of material social relationships and an identitarian politics that treats identity as a self-sufficient source of political authority.

The first can strengthen class struggle.

The second can sometimes fragment it.

3.1 Robin D. G. Kelley: identity politics and the problem of class reductionism

The Class Autonomy article Identity Politics and Class Struggle republishes Robin D. G. Kelley’s 1997 intervention in debates about identity politics.

Kelley’s argument is especially valuable because it challenges the tendency to blame racial, feminist and other liberation movements for the weakness of the organised Left.

He examines how prominent critics of identity politics attempted to explain the decline of the American Left by attributing its fragmentation to multiculturalism, ethnic particularism and radical feminism.

Kelley challenges this explanation.

The problem, he argues, is that class politics cannot be restored by demanding that people experiencing racial and gender oppression subordinate their experiences to an abstract conception of class unity.

Such an approach does not produce solidarity. It demands that some people accept the political priorities of others.

The history of the labour movement demonstrates why this is inadequate.

Trade unions have sometimes excluded Black workers, women and migrants, defended racial segregation and treated the concerns of marginalised workers as secondary to the interests of more privileged sections of the workforce.

A class politics that refuses to confront these practices cannot reasonably claim to represent the working class as a whole.

Kelley’s intervention therefore provides an important corrective to simplistic attacks on identity politics.

The question is not whether identity-based oppression should be acknowledged. It must be.

The question is how to organise against the material relationships that reproduce it.

This is where an intersectional class politics becomes indispensable.

A working-class movement cannot develop meaningful solidarity by demanding silence about racism or sexism. Nor can it overcome these divisions by treating the experiences of workers as interchangeable.

Solidarity has to be constructed through confronting the actual divisions that capitalist society produces.

The alternative to middle-class identitarianism is not a return to an imaginary class universalism.

It is the construction of a class movement capable of incorporating the different experiences and struggles of those subjected to exploitation and domination.

Kelley’s intervention is important precisely because it refuses the false choice between class and identity. Class Autonomy

3.2 When identity becomes a credential

Nevertheless, there is a substantial difference between recognising structural oppression and treating identity as a political credential.

The latter can generate a hierarchy of political legitimacy in which the authority of an argument becomes subordinate to the demographic characteristics of the person making it.

This can take several forms.

First, political arguments may be judged according to the identities of their advocates rather than their substantive merits.

Second, individuals may be treated as possessing automatic political authority because of their membership in a particular demographic category.

Third, criticism of representatives can be dismissed as an attack upon the identity they represent.

Fourth, political disagreements can be transformed into accusations of personal prejudice without adequately examining the substance of the disagreement.

Fifth, people may acquire reputational authority through demonstrating their proximity to particular identity-based constituencies, regardless of their actual accountability to those constituencies.

The result is a political economy in which identity becomes a form of credential.

This is not the same as recognising that people directly affected by a particular form of oppression often possess important knowledge about it.

Such knowledge deserves serious consideration.

But experience does not automatically resolve questions of strategy, political economy, organisational practice or institutional power.

Nor does the identity of a speaker make their arguments immune from criticism.

A movement that cannot distinguish between respect for experience and the automatic authority of identity will struggle to develop collective political judgement.

It risks replacing democratic deliberation with a competition over who possesses the strongest claim to moral authority.

This can be particularly attractive to professional managerial environments because it transforms difficult questions of institutional power into questions of representation and accreditation.

A university can celebrate the diversity of its leadership while retaining hierarchical employment relations.

A corporation can appoint representatives from historically excluded groups while continuing to oppose workers’ collective bargaining rights.

A political party can celebrate the identity of its candidates while maintaining policies that deepen economic insecurity.

The institutional question becomes who is represented rather than who exercises power.

3.3 Intersectionality versus the oppression Olympics

It is important not to confuse intersectionality with the competitive ranking of identities.

Intersectionality emerged as a critique of analytical frameworks that treated social categories as separate or assumed that everyone within a particular category experienced oppression in the same way.

Its materialist potential lies in examining how different forms of domination interact.

A working-class migrant woman, for example, may experience labour exploitation through arrangements that cannot be adequately understood by examining class, gender or nationality independently.

An intersectional analysis should make the political picture more complex and more accurate.

It should not establish a hierarchy of who is entitled to speak.

The danger arises when the recognition of intersecting oppressions becomes transformed into a competition over whose suffering confers the greatest authority.

This is the phenomenon commonly described as the oppression Olympics.

The resulting politics can become self-defeating.

Instead of investigating the institutional arrangements that produce exploitation, participants compete for recognition as the most disadvantaged, the most morally authoritative or the most entitled to determine the direction of political discussion.

The political problem is then individualised.

Rather than asking how a workplace reproduces racialised and gendered divisions of labour, participants may become preoccupied with determining which individuals possess the appropriate identities to discuss those divisions.

Rather than examining how professional hierarchies reproduce inequality, an organisation may focus on whether its spokespersons adequately represent different demographic categories.

The result can be a substitution of symbolic inclusion for structural transformation.

This is precisely the problem identified by the Class Autonomy essay Principles Not Personalities: Collective Solutions to Collective Problems.

Its central argument is that middle-class liberalism tends to understand progress in terms of individual advancement, whereas working-class politics must be concerned with collective transformation.

The essay describes the substitution of institutional access for substantive action as a form of political capture. It also criticises the way corporate hierarchies can acquire an egalitarian appearance through the inclusion of individuals from diverse backgrounds without changing the underlying structure of exploitation. Class Autonomy

3.4 The difference between emancipation and admission to the exploiting class

This distinction becomes particularly clear when considering the politics of corporate diversity.

Suppose a corporation introduces a programme designed to increase the number of women, Indigenous people or members of racial minorities in senior management.

There may be genuine benefits in dismantling discriminatory barriers to professional advancement.

But the appointment of more diverse managers does not necessarily change the corporation’s relationship to its workforce.

The company can remain organised around the extraction of surplus value, the suppression of wages, the intensification of work and the concentration of decision-making power.

The composition of the exploiting class changes without the exploitative relationship disappearing.

This is not an argument against equal access to employment or against challenging discriminatory recruitment practices.

It is an argument against confusing access to positions of authority with the abolition of hierarchical authority.

The same principle applies to political movements.

A movement can become more diverse while becoming less democratic.

It can develop a more sophisticated vocabulary of inclusion while concentrating organisational authority in a smaller professional stratum.

It can become more representative in its public presentation while becoming less accountable to the people whose interests it claims to represent.

Consequently, the question of representation must always be connected to the question of power.

Who controls the resources?

Who determines the agenda?

Who can initiate decisions?

Who can reverse decisions?

Who is accountable to whom?

Who possesses the practical ability to refuse?

These are questions of political economy, not merely political symbolism.

4. Liberal single-issue politics and the fragmentation of class struggle

Liberal single-issue politics is particularly susceptible to recuperation because it can separate particular grievances from the wider relationships that produce them.

A campaign might concentrate on an individual law, discriminatory policy, corporate practice or political scandal. It can mobilise public opinion, attract media attention and secure institutional concessions without necessarily developing a broader challenge to the economic and political arrangements responsible for the problem.

There is nothing inherently wrong with single-issue campaigns. Specific campaigns are often essential to building wider movements. Workers need to organise around particular grievances, and oppressed communities need to confront specific injustices.

The problem is the institutionalisation of single-issue politics as the dominant conception of political action.

When each issue becomes a separate professional specialisation, the connections between different struggles become obscured.

Racism becomes the responsibility of diversity professionals. Poverty becomes the responsibility of charities. Environmental degradation becomes the responsibility of sustainability consultants. Workplace exploitation becomes the responsibility of industrial relations specialists. Housing insecurity becomes the responsibility of housing policy advocates.

The social relationships connecting these problems disappear behind the administrative categories through which they are managed.

4.1 The professionalisation of grievances

Professionalisation can change the relationship between a movement and the problem it seeks to address.

A campaign initially organised by people directly experiencing a particular injustice may gradually become dependent upon professional advocates, researchers, fundraisers and institutional representatives.

These specialists can make important contributions. But they can also acquire a separate organisational interest in maintaining their position as intermediaries.

This creates a distinction between the interests of the campaign as a collective movement and the interests of the professional infrastructure that develops around it.

The movement might want to abolish the conditions producing a particular injustice.

The professional organisation might be primarily concerned with securing funding, maintaining its institutional relationships and demonstrating measurable programme outcomes.

These objectives can diverge.

A charity may be highly effective at providing services while having little interest in challenging the economic arrangements that continually produce the need for those services.

An advocacy organisation may become skilled at securing incremental policy concessions while remaining dependent upon the political institutions responsible for limiting more substantial reform.

A university-based activist network may become increasingly influential within academic debates while remaining disconnected from the practical organisation of workers.

The result is not necessarily deliberate deception.

It is the emergence of institutional interests that can progressively displace the original objectives of collective struggle.

4.2 Single-issue politics and the division of labour

The specialisation of political grievances also creates opportunities for the division of labour within movements.

Different professionals become responsible for different issues, while ordinary participants become clients, audiences or constituencies.

The movement’s practical capacities become fragmented.

This is especially problematic when different campaigns are encouraged to compete for limited institutional resources and public attention.

A housing campaign might be encouraged to compete with a migrant-rights campaign for funding. A workplace campaign might be told that its demands are less urgent than a symbolic institutional initiative. An environmental organisation might concentrate on consumer behaviour rather than the ownership relations governing production.

The institutional framework determines which demands are considered legitimate, fundable and achievable.

Political activity becomes increasingly dependent upon external recognition.

This can produce a form of managed pluralism in which many different causes are publicly acknowledged while the economic structures connecting them remain protected.

The appearance of political diversity increases as the capacity for collective opposition decreases.

4.3 The recuperation of popular outrage

The Class Autonomy article The Recuperation of Popular Power, drawing on Margaret Killjoy’s discussion of surveillance technology and political mediation, provides an illustrative example.

It describes how public opposition to surveillance systems can be redirected towards relatively limited reforms that leave the underlying surveillance infrastructure substantially intact.

Its example concerns municipalities withdrawing from one surveillance contractor only to transfer their business to a competitor.

The public grievance is acknowledged, but the institutional arrangements producing the grievance remain largely undisturbed.

This is a useful illustration of the distinction between changing an administrator and changing the system being administered.

A government can respond to popular opposition by replacing one contractor, establishing an oversight committee or introducing additional safeguards.

Such changes may have practical value. But they can also function as mechanisms for restoring institutional legitimacy without addressing the underlying expansion of surveillance.

The same logic operates across numerous political issues.

The campaign against exploitative employment practices can be recuperated through corporate ethical standards that leave workers without independent bargaining power.

The campaign against racial discrimination can be recuperated through diversity initiatives that leave ownership and managerial authority untouched.

The campaign against ecological destruction can be recuperated through consumer certification programmes that leave the growth imperative of capitalist production intact.

The campaign against austerity can be recuperated through electoral promises that leave the underlying distribution of economic power untouched.

The political system does not need to ignore popular grievances. It can recognise them, classify them, negotiate over them and eventually incorporate them into its own administrative procedures.

This is the political significance of recuperation.

The demand survives, but its antagonistic potential is neutralised.

5. Personality politics: turning structural conflicts into moral dramas

Personality politics is one of the most effective ways to individualise structural conflicts.

Instead of examining the institutional arrangements responsible for a particular problem, political attention becomes concentrated on the personal characteristics, motives, relationships and moral standing of individuals.

This can happen on both the political right and left.

A political leader becomes the embodiment of everything wrong with society. A public intellectual becomes the personification of an ideological tendency. A movement organiser becomes the supposed explanation for organisational failure. A dissident becomes a convenient scapegoat for contradictions that would otherwise require collective examination.

The attraction of this approach is obvious.

Structural analysis is difficult. It requires investigating relationships, institutions, historical developments and material interests.

Personality politics offers a simpler narrative.

There is a bad individual. There are virtuous opponents. The problem can be resolved through condemnation, exclusion or replacement.

This can be emotionally satisfying while being politically ineffective.

5.1 From politics of principle to politics of personality

The Class Autonomy essay Principles Not Personalities identifies this tendency as a displacement of collective political judgement by individual moral evaluation.

Its argument is that the politics of personality makes political legitimacy increasingly dependent upon conformity, reputation and public presentation.

Political disputes become contests over who is sufficiently virtuous, respectable or deserving.

The essay identifies several consequences:

• Structural criticism is displaced by personal criticism.
• Organisational disagreements become moral accusations.
• Political legitimacy becomes dependent upon conformity.
• Dissenters become vulnerable to exclusion and ostracism.
• Public reputations become more important than collective achievements.
• The underlying institutional arrangements escape scrutiny.

The particularly important point is that the production of an internal enemy can protect the political mainstream from criticism.

If an organisation is failing, the explanation becomes the presence of wreckers.

If a movement cannot attract working-class support, the explanation becomes the prejudices or deficiencies of ordinary people.

If a political organisation becomes bureaucratic, the explanation becomes the personal ambitions of particular individuals rather than the organisational structures that permit bureaucratic authority to develop.

If a campaign loses momentum, the explanation becomes the failure of its critics to demonstrate sufficient loyalty.

The problem is continually displaced from institutional arrangements onto individuals.

This is a remarkably convenient form of political reasoning for people whose positions depend upon those arrangements.

5.2 The manufacture of the wrecker

The figure of the wrecker has a long history in authoritarian political organisations.

A wrecker is someone whose alleged personal deficiencies are presented as the explanation for collective failure.

The accusation can be particularly useful because it makes the accused individual responsible for problems that may have been produced by organisational decisions, structural contradictions or leadership failures.

It also establishes a deterrent against dissent.

Other members learn that disagreement can result in reputational destruction.

The resulting atmosphere discourages independent judgement.

People begin to anticipate how their contributions will be interpreted by those possessing greater organisational authority.

Instead of asking whether a criticism is correct, they ask whether making it will expose them to accusations of disloyalty.

This is an important form of pacification.

It does not require the complete elimination of debate. It requires making disagreement sufficiently costly that people increasingly regulate themselves.

Personality politics can therefore function as a system of informal discipline.

5.3 Moral entrepreneurship and reputational capital

There is also an economic dimension to personality politics.

In competitive media environments, controversy generates attention.

The ability to identify, denounce and publicly distance oneself from a supposedly discredited individual can become a means of accumulating followers and reputational influence.

The person who initiates a denunciation can position themselves as a moral authority.

The person who amplifies it can demonstrate ideological loyalty.

The people who participate in the denunciation can establish their membership in a particular political community.

Meanwhile, the substantive political question can become secondary.

This is especially significant when political commentators and activists depend upon social media visibility, publishing opportunities, professional recognition or institutional affiliations.

Moral outrage becomes a form of cultural capital.

The denunciation of an individual can produce more immediate rewards than the patient work of building an organisation capable of exercising collective power.

The Class Autonomy article The Left’s Self-Destructive Obsession with Shame examines the psychological and organisational consequences of this tendency.

It draws attention to the distinction between criticising particular conduct and treating an individual as fundamentally defective.

The latter can produce cycles of shame, anger, withdrawal and reciprocal hostility.

The article also makes an important historical distinction: movements such as Black Consciousness sought to overcome the internalisation of inferiority produced by oppression. This is very different from using shame as a means of controlling political participation. Class Autonomy

There is an important lesson here.

A movement needs the capacity to confront harmful behaviour, recognise wrongdoing and establish boundaries.

But it also needs the capacity to distinguish accountability from humiliation.

Accountability should enable people to understand what happened, repair harm where possible, change behaviour and restore relationships.

Humiliation frequently produces the opposite.

It encourages concealment, defensiveness, factionalism and the displacement of responsibility.

The question is whether criticism strengthens collective capacities or merely demonstrates the moral authority of the critic.

6. The Chomsky controversy: personality politics, reputational wedges and the management of dissent

The controversy surrounding Noam Chomsky’s association with Jeffrey Epstein provides a particularly interesting case through which to examine these questions.

The issue requires careful treatment because several distinct questions are frequently collapsed into one.

They include:

1. What was the nature of Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein?
2. What did Chomsky know about Epstein’s criminal history and conduct?
3. What was the significance of Chomsky providing Epstein with public-relations advice?
4. What ethical responsibilities do public intellectuals have when associating with wealthy and politically influential individuals?
5. How should Chomsky’s political and intellectual contributions be evaluated?
6. When does legitimate criticism become a vehicle for reputational destruction?
7. How can political disagreements be transformed into personality-based divisions?

These questions should not be treated as interchangeable.

Chomsky’s association with Epstein deserves scrutiny. Epstein’s criminal history and the exploitation of vulnerable young people were serious matters, and the ethical significance of providing advice to him cannot simply be dismissed.

At the same time, association with someone who committed crimes does not automatically establish that every associate participated in those crimes or knew the full extent of their conduct.

The distinction between documented conduct, reasonable ethical criticism and unsupported allegations is essential.

6.1 Michael Tracey’s defence of Chomsky

The Compact article supplied, Noam Chomsky Was Right About Epstein, by Michael Tracey, published on 13 February 2026, takes a strongly defensive position.

Tracey’s central argument is that Chomsky’s relationship with Epstein has been subjected to a disproportionate campaign of moral condemnation.

He argues that critics have confused association with culpability and that public discussion has frequently failed to distinguish verified information from speculation.

The article focuses particularly on the 2019 correspondence in which Chomsky advised Epstein about responding to public criticism.

Tracey argues that Chomsky was warning against the dangers of a media environment in which accusations can become accepted without sufficient examination.

He also discusses the financial and legal assistance Epstein provided to Chomsky and his family, presenting this as important context for understanding their relationship.

Tracey further criticises the conduct of former Chomsky associates, particularly Vijay Prashad and Chris Hedges, who publicly expressed their disapproval.

His argument is that these denunciations demonstrate how reputational pressure can encourage people to abandon previously valued relationships and political commitments. Compact

There are aspects of this argument that deserve serious consideration.

It is legitimate to question whether public condemnation has exceeded what the available evidence establishes.

It is legitimate to distinguish between association, ethical misjudgement and direct culpability.

It is legitimate to ask whether political commentators have applied consistent evidentiary standards.

And it is legitimate to examine whether reputational incentives influence the way people publicly distance themselves from controversial figures.

However, Tracey’s article should not be treated as an impartial adjudication of the entire Epstein controversy.

It is a polemical defence of Chomsky. Its treatment of allegations, victims, investigative journalism and the available record is itself open to criticism.

In particular, the article’s dismissal of important investigative reporting and its sweeping characterisations of people who reported abuse require independent scrutiny.

Rejecting unsupported allegations does not require dismissing documented abuse or discrediting people who experienced it.

Likewise, criticism of Chomsky’s judgement does not establish that accusations of criminal complicity are true.

A materialist analysis should resist both forms of reductionism.

6.2 The reputational wedge

The most interesting political question is how the controversy can operate as a reputational wedge within the Left.

A reputational wedge is a controversy that creates pressure for people to demonstrate their political legitimacy through their relationship to a particular individual.

The political issue becomes less about the substance of a person’s ideas and more about whether one is willing to associate with them.

This can produce several competing positions:

• Those who defend the individual are accused of excusing their conduct.
• Those who criticise the individual are accused of opportunism or betrayal.
• Those who refuse to adopt either position are accused of evading moral responsibility.
• Those who question the available evidence are accused of defending the indefensible.
• Those who question the motives of the critics are accused of attempting to silence legitimate accountability.

The controversy then becomes an organising principle for political identity.

People are increasingly judged by their position within the controversy rather than by the quality of their political arguments.

This is the personality-politics mechanism.

The individual becomes a symbolic dividing line through which political loyalties are tested.

The potential consequences are significant.

Chomsky has spent decades criticising American foreign policy, imperialism, corporate media and the relationship between state power and elite interests.

One can disagree with many aspects of his politics while recognising that his work has contributed substantially to public understanding of these subjects.

A controversy surrounding his personal associations can become an occasion for revisiting his political arguments.

That is entirely legitimate.

But there is a difference between critically reassessing an intellectual’s work and treating their entire political legacy as morally contaminated by association.

The former is intellectual criticism.

The latter can become a form of reputational purification.

The important question is whether the controversy produces greater political understanding or merely establishes new boundaries of acceptable association.

6.3 The asymmetry of moral scrutiny

A further question concerns the selective application of moral scrutiny.

Why do some political figures become objects of intense moral investigation while others receive comparatively little attention?

Why do some associations become defining characteristics of a person’s political identity while other associations are treated as incidental?

Why are some people’s historical contributions considered inseparable from their personal failings, while others are permitted to maintain a public reputation largely independent of their conduct?

These questions cannot be answered by assuming that every controversy is orchestrated or that every critic is acting in bad faith.

But they do require examining the institutional and political environments in which reputations are produced.

Media organisations have commercial interests.

Political organisations have strategic interests.

Activists have reputational interests.

Professional commentators have career interests.

These interests can influence which controversies receive attention, how they are framed and which interpretations become dominant.

The point is not to construct a conspiracy theory about the Chomsky controversy.

It is to recognise that public moral judgement takes place within an unequal political economy of attention.

Some individuals possess considerable institutional protection.

Others are exposed to reputational attacks with relatively little capacity to respond.

The same standards should apply regardless of political affiliation.

6.4 Criticism of Chomsky and the question of intellectual accountability

There is also a legitimate political argument that Chomsky’s public standing should not exempt him from criticism.

Intellectual influence creates responsibilities.

A person who has spent decades criticising the power of wealthy elites should be prepared to explain their own relationships with wealthy and politically influential individuals.

The fact that Chomsky was an important critic of imperialism does not automatically vindicate every personal judgement he made.

Nor does the importance of his scholarship make questions about his association with Epstein irrelevant.

But the reverse is also true.

Questions about personal judgement do not automatically invalidate his analysis of American foreign policy, corporate media, imperialism or political propaganda.

The appropriate approach is to evaluate particular claims and actions on their merits.

This is precisely where personality politics becomes counterproductive.

It encourages the belief that the entire value of an intellectual’s contribution can be settled through a single moral verdict.

Political analysis becomes a form of character assessment.

A person is either defended or repudiated, rather than critically examined.

This is particularly damaging to the development of independent political thought.

If political arguments are accepted or rejected primarily according to the moral standing of their authors, intellectual life becomes dependent upon reputational authority.

People cease to investigate arguments independently.

They instead consult the prevailing moral consensus surrounding the individual who made them.

This is a form of intellectual dependency.

6.5 The danger of reversing the accusation

There is an additional danger in using the Chomsky controversy to attack critics as a homogeneous group of opportunistic moralists.

Vijay Prashad, Chris Hedges and other critics should be assessed according to their actual arguments, evidence and conduct.

Their criticism may be excessive in some respects without being entirely illegitimate.

Similarly, defenders of Chomsky may raise valid questions about evidence while also minimising the ethical significance of his association with Epstein.

The purpose of materialist criticism is not to reverse the direction of moral denunciation.

It is to investigate the relationships that produce particular forms of political behaviour.

This means asking:

• What evidence is available?
• What claims are actually being made?
• Which claims are substantiated?
• What ethical responsibilities were involved?
• Are equivalent standards being applied to different individuals?
• What political interests are served by particular framings?
• What substantive political questions are being displaced?
• Does the controversy strengthen or weaken collective political understanding?

This approach avoids turning the analysis itself into another personality cult.

It also protects the distinction between defending due process and defending powerful individuals from accountability.

6.6 Chomsky as a case study in the limits of moral authority

The broader significance of the controversy concerns the relationship between intellectual authority and political accountability.

Chomsky’s influence has often rested upon his reputation for challenging official narratives and examining the interests behind public communication.

The irony is that the controversy surrounding his own relationship with Epstein has generated competing claims about the proper interpretation of evidence, public relations and moral judgement.

There is a valuable lesson here.

No intellectual should be exempt from the standards of scrutiny they apply to others.

But neither should intellectual contributions be discarded simply because an individual becomes controversial.

A movement that depends upon moral heroes will inevitably experience crises when those heroes disappoint it.

A movement that develops independent collective capacities can evaluate individuals without becoming dependent upon their reputations.

The distinction is between a politics organised around personalities and a politics organised around principles.

This is why the Chomsky controversy is relevant to the wider discussion of recuperation.

The political energy generated by a controversy can either contribute to a more rigorous examination of power or become absorbed into a spectacle of denunciation and reputational management.

The decisive question is what happens to the political capacities of the people involved.

7. Marxist attacks on opponents: the danger of turning criticism into political policing

The question of Marxist attacks on political opponents requires particular attention because the Left has its own history of using moral denunciation, ideological accusations and political exclusion as mechanisms of organisational control.

This history cannot be understood simply as a departure from otherwise democratic revolutionary traditions.

It raises deeper questions about the relationship between political organisation, class authority and the reproduction of hierarchy.

Marxism is frequently presented as a method of analysing social relationships through material conditions and historical development.

Yet Marxist organisations have sometimes transformed Marxism into an apparatus for classifying people according to their ideological conformity.

Instead of investigating the material basis of disagreements, they interpret opposition through categories of political deviance.

The distinction is important.

A materialist critique asks why particular positions emerge, what interests they express, what contradictions they reveal and what practical consequences they have.

An authoritarian critique begins by determining which ideological category an opponent belongs to.

Once the category has been assigned, the individual’s arguments can be dismissed without serious examination.

7.1 From political disagreement to ideological deviance

The history of the international socialist movement contains numerous examples of disagreements being transformed into accusations of political betrayal.

Terms such as opportunist, reformist, revisionist, adventurist, sectarian, counter-revolutionary and wrecker have sometimes been used to describe genuine political tendencies.

But they can also function as labels through which organisational authorities protect themselves from criticism.

The problem is not the existence of political categories.

Marxist analysis necessarily distinguishes between different political programmes, class interests and organisational strategies.

The problem is when classification replaces investigation.

An opponent is described as petty bourgeois, liberal, revisionist or counter-revolutionary, and the label becomes a substitute for explaining why their position is incorrect.

This is particularly damaging when the accusation is made by people possessing institutional or organisational authority.

The accusation can carry consequences for employment, membership, reputation and access to political networks.

The resulting relationship is not one of intellectual debate between equals.

It is a relationship in which one side possesses the authority to determine the political legitimacy of the other.

7.2 Marx’s critique of abstract universalism

Marx’s criticism of bourgeois political economy provides a useful starting point.

He repeatedly challenged the tendency to treat historically specific social relationships as universal and natural.

Bourgeois society presents the individual as formally free and equal while concealing the material inequalities through which capitalist exploitation is reproduced.

The same analytical approach can be applied to liberal identitarianism.

Formal inclusion can coexist with material domination.

Equal recognition can coexist with unequal ownership.

Diversity in leadership can coexist with authoritarian management.

Individual opportunity can coexist with collective powerlessness.

However, Marx’s critique should also be turned against those who claim to represent the working class.

A party or organisation cannot establish its working-class character simply by declaring itself Marxist.

Its actual organisational relationships must be examined.

Who makes decisions?

Who controls information?

Who determines strategy?

Who can challenge leadership?

Who controls organisational resources?

Who possesses the ability to remove representatives?

These questions are more revealing than ideological self-description.

A Marxist organisation that reproduces managerial relationships while denouncing managerialism has failed to apply its own materialist method to itself.

7.3 Leninism and the bureaucratic problem

The historical experience of Bolshevism raises especially important questions.

The Bolshevik tradition developed under extraordinary conditions of war, revolution, economic collapse and political isolation.

These circumstances cannot be ignored.

Nevertheless, the consolidation of party authority over workers’ independent organisations created a major contradiction.

The party increasingly claimed to represent the historical interests of the working class while restricting the independent political activity through which workers might have exercised those interests themselves.

This raises a fundamental question:

Can a political organisation emancipate a class by monopolising the authority to determine what that class’s interests are?

The problem is not merely whether a party’s leadership is composed of honest individuals.

It is whether the organisational structure enables ordinary workers to exercise independent political judgement.

If criticism can be dismissed as evidence of ideological backwardness, political immaturity or counter-revolutionary influence, the organisation can become insulated from the class it claims to represent.

The same problem can occur in contemporary socialist organisations.

A leadership may interpret disagreement as evidence that members have absorbed bourgeois ideology.

Instead of examining whether the leadership has made mistakes, it attributes opposition to the ideological deficiencies of the opposition.

This creates an asymmetrical system of accountability.

The leadership judges the membership, but the membership cannot effectively judge the leadership.

The organisation consequently becomes a mechanism for reproducing its own authority.

7.4 The political usefulness of the petty-bourgeois accusation

The accusation of petty-bourgeois politics deserves particular scrutiny.

Historically, Marxists have used the concept to identify political tendencies associated with intermediate social positions, small property ownership, professional status and contradictory class interests.

It can be analytically useful.

But it can also become a convenient way of dismissing critics.

A worker who questions union bureaucracy can be accused of anarchist adventurism.

A member who criticises party leadership can be accused of petty-bourgeois individualism.

An activist who rejects ideological discipline can be accused of liberalism.

A person who refuses to subordinate their judgement to a political line can be characterised as politically immature.

The accusation becomes especially problematic when applied without investigating the actual social relationships involved.

A criticism of bureaucracy does not become petty-bourgeois simply because it challenges an established organisation.

A criticism of party hierarchy does not become liberal simply because it rejects centralised authority.

A demand for workers’ autonomy does not become individualist simply because it questions the authority of professional revolutionaries.

Indeed, these criticisms can emerge from a deeply materialist understanding of class power.

The important question is whether an organisational form actually increases the capacity of workers to exercise control over their own activity.

7.5 Trotskyist accusations and the production of internal enemies

Trotskyist organisations have sometimes developed particularly elaborate systems of ideological classification.

The distinctions between centrism, opportunism, sectarianism, ultra-leftism and revisionism can become central to organisational identity.

These categories can clarify real political disagreements.

But they can also produce a political culture in which maintaining ideological distinction becomes more important than developing relationships with other workers.

A group may become more concerned with proving that rival socialist organisations are politically illegitimate than with developing practical relationships with people outside its own milieu.

The result is an organisational inversion.

The development of class struggle becomes secondary to the preservation of ideological identity.

This is especially problematic when disagreements become personalised.

A dissident member may be presented as a wrecker.

A rival organisation may be characterised as objectively serving the interests of the ruling class.

A critic may be accused of sabotaging the movement simply because their criticism threatens the authority of existing leaders.

Such accusations can become self-sealing.

The organisation treats opposition as proof of the necessity of its own ideological discipline.

The more criticism it receives, the more it believes that its political line must be defended against internal enemies.

This resembles the bounded rationality of closed ideological communities.

Evidence that should prompt reassessment is instead interpreted as evidence of hostility.

7.6 The Moscow show trials and the institutionalisation of accusation

The Moscow show trials provide one of the clearest historical examples of political accusation becoming an instrument of authoritarian rule.

During the Stalinist purges, former Bolsheviks and political opponents were publicly accused of conspiracy, sabotage and treason.

The proceedings did not operate as ordinary processes of independent judicial investigation.

They were embedded within a political environment in which the ruling apparatus controlled the conditions under which accusations were produced and interpreted.

The accused were required to explain their political disagreements within a framework that already presumed their guilt.

The broader significance is the destruction of the distinction between political opposition and criminal disloyalty.

Once disagreement is treated as evidence of conspiracy, the possibility of meaningful political criticism disappears.

This history should not be used to suggest that every contemporary socialist organisation operates like Stalin’s Soviet Union.

That would be an absurd equivalence.

The relevant comparison concerns the mechanisms through which political organisations can transform criticism into evidence of disloyalty.

The danger exists wherever leaders possess the power to determine which disagreements are legitimate and which constitute proof of an opponent’s political degeneracy.

The appropriate response is to build organisations in which criticism is protected, leadership is accountable and political disagreements can be resolved through transparent collective procedures.

7.7 The liberal and Marxist mirror image

There is an especially important irony here.

Some liberal identitarian environments and some authoritarian Marxist organisations can reproduce surprisingly similar methods of political exclusion.

Their ideological justifications differ.

Their stated objectives may be entirely different.

But their organisational mechanisms can converge.

Both can:

• Reduce substantive disagreements to questions of personal legitimacy.
• Treat criticism as evidence of defective political character.
• Establish informal hierarchies of authorised speakers.
• Reward public demonstrations of ideological loyalty.
• Encourage denunciation of internal deviants.
• Use reputational sanctions to regulate participation.
• Protect institutional authority by displacing criticism onto individuals.
• Treat conformity as evidence of political responsibility.

In one environment, the accusation might be that someone is insufficiently progressive.

In another, it might be that they are insufficiently revolutionary.

In both cases, the central question can become whether the person has demonstrated sufficient conformity to the prevailing political identity.

This is why a materialist critique of managerialism must also examine the Left’s own organisational practices.

It is not enough to denounce the professional managerial class while reproducing professional managerial relationships inside radical organisations.

It is not enough to criticise liberal moral policing while developing an equivalent system of ideological policing.

And it is not enough to oppose the concentration of power in capitalist institutions while concentrating political authority in an unaccountable party leadership.

The organisation must embody the principles it claims to advance.

8. The relationship between identitarianism and liberal authoritarianism

An important consequence of personality politics is that it can produce forms of authoritarianism that present themselves as the defence of freedom and equality.

This is not necessarily authoritarianism in the conventional sense of a centralised state exercising coercive power.

It can operate through informal hierarchies, professional gatekeeping, reputational sanctions, social exclusion and the control of access to institutional resources.

The individual is formally free to express disagreement.

But the practical consequences of doing so can be sufficiently severe that people learn to regulate their own behaviour.

This is particularly relevant to professional environments in which reputation, networking and institutional recognition determine career opportunities.

8.1 The informal administration of political conformity

Consider a university department, NGO or activist organisation in which a small group of influential professionals determines the boundaries of acceptable political discussion.

There may be no formal prohibition against disagreement.

Nevertheless, individuals learn that particular criticisms can lead to exclusion from networks, loss of opportunities or reputational damage.

The organisation does not need to formally censor people.

Its informal hierarchy performs the same function.

This can be especially effective because it allows the institution to maintain the appearance of openness.

People are technically free to disagree, but they understand that some disagreements carry consequences.

The resulting political environment rewards conformity without requiring explicit commands.

This resembles the managerial mechanisms described in The Co-option of Class Struggle.

Information is selectively distributed, participation is structured and influential individuals are incorporated into decision-making processes in ways that secure endorsement rather than meaningful control.

The process is not necessarily centrally coordinated.

It can emerge from the accumulated incentives and dependencies of institutional life.

8.2 The moralisation of class conflict

Another important development is the transformation of class conflict into a contest over moral legitimacy.

Instead of examining the economic relationships that determine who exercises power, political discussion becomes increasingly concerned with the personal morality of participants.

This can have several effects.

First, it individualises responsibility for structural problems.

Second, it encourages people to seek personal absolution rather than collective transformation.

Third, it makes political participation dependent upon demonstrations of moral conformity.

Fourth, it discourages cooperation with people who possess different cultural backgrounds, political histories or personal characteristics.

Fifth, it can make criticism of institutional hierarchy appear morally suspect.

The resulting political culture is highly moralistic but potentially incapable of confronting the material conditions that produce the injustices it condemns.

This is one of the contradictions of middle-class liberalism.

It can become preoccupied with the ethical characteristics of individuals while remaining comparatively tolerant of the economic structures within which those individuals operate.

8.3 The politics of shame as a substitute for collective power

The Class Autonomy article on shame provides an important psychological dimension to this argument.

Shame is particularly useful as an instrument of informal social control because it encourages people to internalise the judgement of others.

Rather than simply being told that a particular action is unacceptable, individuals can come to understand themselves as fundamentally defective.

This distinction matters.

Criticism directed at behaviour can encourage reflection and change.

Condemnation directed at the whole person can produce withdrawal, defensiveness and resentment.

In political organisations, these reactions can become self-reinforcing.

A person is criticised.

They become defensive.

Their defensiveness is interpreted as evidence of guilt.

The original criticism escalates.

The target becomes increasingly alienated.

Their alienation is then interpreted as proof of their political unreliability.

The organisation has produced the very antagonism it subsequently cites as justification for exclusion.

This process can be particularly damaging in movements that require cooperation between people with different backgrounds and experiences.

A movement cannot build solidarity if every disagreement becomes a referendum on the moral worth of its participants.

It needs mechanisms for resolving conflict without turning every conflict into a struggle for social survival.

The article’s discussion of Steve Biko is especially important here.

Biko’s work on Black Consciousness addressed the psychological effects of oppression and the internalisation of inferiority.

The objective was to develop the confidence and collective agency necessary for political liberation.

This is fundamentally different from a politics that uses shame to establish moral hierarchies among activists.

One seeks to overcome the psychological conditions of domination.

The other risks reproducing them.

9. The relationship between recouperation and the political economy of media

Personality politics cannot be adequately understood without examining the economic conditions of contemporary media.

Social media platforms reward attention.

Political commentators compete for visibility.

Professional activists compete for recognition.

Publishing opportunities, institutional affiliations and public influence are frequently connected to the ability to generate attention.

These conditions can encourage political communication that prioritises outrage over explanation.

9.1 The commodification of dissent

The Class Autonomy article The Recuperation of Dissent Under Capitalism identifies how radical politics can become a form of cultural capital.

Its argument is that radical ideas can be incorporated into the cultural economy without producing corresponding changes in material power.

The individual who identifies with radical politics may acquire social recognition through their consumption and presentation of radical ideas.

But the political content of those ideas can become secondary to their function as markers of identity.

This creates a contradiction.

Radicalism becomes increasingly visible as a cultural phenomenon while becoming less effective as a practical challenge to capitalism.

A person can accumulate substantial influence by denouncing capitalism without participating in any activity that materially challenges capitalist power.

A commentator can build a following through denunciations of political figures.

An academic can develop a professional reputation through critical scholarship.

An activist can become institutionally recognised as a spokesperson for a movement.

None of these activities is inherently objectionable.

The problem arises when the accumulation of individual influence becomes the primary measure of political success.

9.2 Outrage as a political commodity

Social media makes personality politics particularly attractive because personal controversies are easily communicated.

Structural analysis is difficult to condense into short-form content.

An accusation against an individual is comparatively simple.

A complex discussion about the relationship between ownership, managerial authority, racialised labour markets and institutional power may require considerable explanation.

A public denunciation can be communicated in a few sentences.

This creates an asymmetry in the political economy of attention.

The more complex the structural problem, the greater the temptation to substitute a personalised explanation.

The result is a political environment in which people can become exceptionally well informed about the controversies surrounding public personalities while knowing relatively little about the institutions and economic relationships governing their own lives.

The political spectacle becomes a substitute for political understanding.

9.3 The professionalisation of dissent

There is also a relationship between media visibility and professional advancement.

People who become recognised as commentators on particular issues may acquire opportunities within universities, publishing, political organisations and NGOs.

Their position can depend upon continuing to occupy a recognised role within the political conversation.

This can create incentives to maintain controversy rather than resolve it.

Again, this does not establish that professional activists or commentators are necessarily cynical.

The argument is structural.

When political influence becomes connected to professional visibility, the incentives of professional advancement can diverge from the requirements of collective organisation.

The person who becomes an influential commentator may have little incentive to subordinate their public profile to the development of collective structures in which no individual occupies a privileged position.

A movement organised around collective self-activity can therefore become less attractive than a movement organised around prominent personalities.

This is an important challenge for contemporary socialist and anarchist organisations.

They need ways of using communication technologies without allowing the pursuit of visibility to displace the development of collective power.

10. Reconstructing class solidarity: beyond liberal identitarianism and authoritarian Marxism

The preceding analysis should not be interpreted as an argument for abandoning struggles against racism, sexism, colonialism or other forms of oppression.

Nor should it be interpreted as an argument for replacing liberal identity politics with an authoritarian conception of class unity.

Both approaches can undermine working-class emancipation.

The alternative is to reconstruct class solidarity through practical cooperation, democratic organisation and the development of collective capacities.

This requires recognising that class solidarity is not a pre-existing condition.

It is something people construct through struggle.

10.1 Solidarity as a practical relationship

Solidarity cannot be reduced to agreement with a political programme.

Nor can it be reduced to declarations of shared identity.

It involves developing practical relationships through which people become capable of defending one another’s interests.

Workers develop solidarity by organising collectively around wages, working conditions, housing, healthcare and other material needs.

They develop it by learning to cooperate across differences.

They develop it by confronting discriminatory practices within their own organisations.

They develop it by creating institutions through which collective decisions can be made and implemented.

Solidarity is therefore both a political principle and a practical achievement.

This is important because it provides an alternative to the politics of moral certification.

People do not need to demonstrate that they possess perfectly consistent opinions before participating in collective action.

They need to develop the capacity to cooperate, learn, resolve disagreements and act together.

10.2 The importance of worker self-activity

Worker self-activity is central to this process.

It means that workers develop the capacity to determine and organise their own struggles rather than surrendering political agency to professional representatives.

This does not mean rejecting organisation, expertise or leadership.

It means ensuring that these things remain accountable to collective activity.

An organisation should increase the capacity of its members to make decisions.

It should not make them increasingly dependent upon the people who administer it.

This distinction has important implications for union organisation.

A union that relies entirely upon professional officials to negotiate on behalf of passive members can become an institution for managing industrial conflict.

A union that develops active workplace committees, rank-and-file participation, transparent decision-making and democratic accountability can become a vehicle for expanding workers’ power.

The same principle applies to community organisations and political movements.

The objective should be to develop institutions through which ordinary participants acquire greater capacities rather than institutions that merely represent them.

10.3 The difference between leadership and managerial domination

Collective movements need leadership.

Experience, knowledge and strategic judgement matter.

But leadership should be understood as a function exercised within collective relationships rather than a permanent entitlement to authority.

A useful distinction is between leadership that expands the capacities of others and leadership that makes others dependent upon it.

The first develops collective intelligence.

The second monopolises it.

This distinction provides a practical means of evaluating political organisations.

Does leadership encourage independent thought?

Does it make information accessible?

Does it permit criticism?

Does it distribute organisational knowledge?

Does it cultivate new organisers?

Does it make itself accountable?

Does it enable members to replace representatives when necessary?

These questions matter more than the ideological credentials of the leadership.

An organisation that cannot tolerate criticism is unlikely to develop the collective capacities required for emancipation.

10.4 Reclaiming the meaning of inclusion

Inclusion should be understood as the expansion of collective participation and power.

It should not be reduced to the inclusion of selected individuals within existing hierarchies.

This means confronting discriminatory practices while also examining the institutional relationships that reproduce economic inequality.

It means recognising that people experience capitalism differently without treating those differences as obstacles to solidarity.

It means developing forms of organisation in which people can articulate particular grievances while connecting them to wider struggles.

It means refusing the false choice between class politics and struggles against racial, gendered and colonial domination.

Most importantly, it means distinguishing the advancement of individuals within existing institutions from the collective transformation of those institutions.

10.5 Accountability without humiliation

Movements also need to develop better approaches to political disagreement and interpersonal conflict.

This requires distinguishing several things that are frequently collapsed:

• Criticism of an argument.
• Criticism of particular conduct.
• Recognition of structural discrimination.
• Accountability for harmful behaviour.
• Attempts to humiliate or exclude individuals.
• Attempts to silence political disagreement.

These are not equivalent.

A movement must be able to confront genuinely harmful conduct.

It must also protect the ability of members to question leadership, challenge political assumptions and disagree about strategy.

Without these capacities, accountability becomes a potential instrument of organisational domination.

A healthy organisation should seek to resolve conflict in ways that increase the collective ability of participants to work together.

It should not treat the humiliation of opponents as evidence of political success.

10.6 The practical test of political radicalism

Ultimately, the question is whether political activity increases or diminishes the capacity of people to exercise control over their circumstances.

This provides a useful test for evaluating both liberal identitarianism and authoritarian Marxism.

Does a diversity initiative improve the collective power of workers, or does it merely diversify management?

Does an activist campaign develop independent organisational capacities, or does it make participants increasingly dependent upon professional intermediaries?

Does a political controversy improve public understanding, or does it primarily generate reputational rewards for those involved?

Does an organisation develop independent judgement among its members, or does it reward ideological conformity?

Does criticism strengthen solidarity, or does it produce increasingly elaborate systems of exclusion?

Does representation expand participation, or does it substitute endorsement for participation?

These are material questions.

They concern the distribution of power rather than the moral presentation of political actors.

11. Bakunin, Marx and the danger of reproducing domination within emancipatory movements

The question of how movements reproduce the relationships they claim to oppose has a long history within socialist thought.

One particularly important contribution comes from Mikhail Bakunin’s criticism of revolutionary authority.

Bakunin was concerned that revolutionary organisations could reproduce relations of domination through the concentration of political and intellectual authority.

His criticism was not simply that individual leaders might become corrupt.

It was that the social position of those exercising authority could become structurally separated from the people they claimed to represent.

A revolutionary elite could emerge that claimed to understand the historical interests of the working class better than workers themselves.

The result could be a new form of domination presented as the administration of emancipation.

This criticism remains relevant to the contemporary PMC.

The professional intermediary can become the person who determines which demands are realistic, which forms of participation are appropriate and which individuals are politically qualified to speak.

The language of emancipation becomes a justification for the administration of others.

11.1 The revolutionary organisation as a potential managerial institution

There is a danger that revolutionary organisations can reproduce managerial relationships even when their stated objectives are radically different from those of capitalist institutions.

This can happen through the accumulation of specialist knowledge, control over communications, informal leadership networks and unequal access to organisational resources.

Over time, the organisation can develop a division between those who administer political activity and those who participate in it.

The administrators become increasingly indispensable.

The membership becomes increasingly dependent.

Political activity is progressively professionalised.

The organisation begins to resemble the institutional structures it originally sought to abolish.

This is not inevitable.

But it requires constant attention to organisational form.

11.2 Marx’s emphasis on practical transformation

Marx’s criticism of abstract philosophy is particularly relevant here.

His emphasis on transforming the material conditions of society was also a criticism of political approaches that treated emancipation as something that could be bestowed upon passive populations.

Emancipation requires the practical activity of those who are emancipated.

This is why the question of self-activity is so important.

A political organisation cannot substitute its own authority for the independent capacities of the class.

It can contribute to developing those capacities, clarify strategic questions and help coordinate collective action.

But when it claims a monopoly over political understanding, it risks transforming itself into another authority over the people it claims to liberate.

11.3 Building the future in the present

Bakunin’s emphasis on constructing the facts of the future within the present provides a useful organisational principle.

If the objective is a society based upon cooperation and equality, movements must develop habits of cooperation and equality in their own practices.

If the objective is the abolition of domination, organisations must confront the emergence of domination within their own structures.

If the objective is collective autonomy, members must develop the practical capacities required to exercise it.

This cannot be postponed until after a hypothetical revolutionary victory.

The means through which a movement organises itself influence the social relationships it is capable of producing.

An organisation that relies upon obedience, professional dependency and ideological conformity is unlikely to produce a society characterised by independent collective agency.

This is the deeper connection between recuperation and the problem of organisational form.

Capitalism does not only reproduce itself through ownership and markets.

It also reproduces habits of dependency, competition, deference and individual advancement.

A revolutionary movement must actively develop alternative habits and relationships.

12. Conclusion: From the management of identities to the organisation of collective power

The intersection between middle-class identitarianism, liberal single-issue politics, the professional managerial class and the recuperation of class struggle reveals a fundamental contradiction within contemporary political culture.

The language of emancipation can become detached from the practical development of emancipatory power.

Movements can become increasingly sophisticated in their symbolic presentation while becoming increasingly dependent upon the institutions they originally sought to challenge.

Political activity can be transformed into professional advancement.

Solidarity can be replaced by competition for moral legitimacy.

Collective grievances can be fragmented into specialised campaigns administered by professional intermediaries.

Political disagreement can become a struggle over reputational standing.

The figure of the wrecker can be used to displace criticism of organisational failure.

And the individual advancement of selected representatives can be presented as evidence of collective progress.

The central contribution of the PMC analysis is to explain why these developments are not simply matters of individual hypocrisy.

They reflect structural tensions within a social stratum whose professional position frequently depends upon administering, mediating and reproducing institutional relationships.

This does not mean that all professionals are enemies of working-class emancipation.

Nor does it mean that professional expertise is inherently incompatible with socialism.

It means that the relationship between expertise, representation and collective power must remain an object of political scrutiny.

The passage from The Co-option of Class Struggle provides an especially useful starting point.

Its distinction between participation and endorsement captures the central problem.

Institutions can invite individuals into decision-making processes without intending to redistribute meaningful authority.

They can offer desirable roles, recognition and access while retaining control over the fundamental direction of events.

The co-opted individual becomes a source of legitimacy.

The collective movement loses some of its independence.

This process is particularly effective when combined with tokenism, professional advancement and the politics of personal reputation.

The Chomsky controversy illustrates another dimension of the same problem.

Public controversies can become occasions for testing political loyalties through personal denunciation.

Legitimate questions of accountability can become entangled with reputational incentives, factional alignments and attempts to establish moral authority.

The appropriate response is neither unconditional defence nor ritual repudiation.

It is to investigate the evidence, distinguish different forms of responsibility and refuse to allow personality politics to substitute for substantive political analysis.

The same principle applies to Marxist attacks on political opponents.

Marxism loses its critical force when it becomes a system of ideological classification through which organisational authorities protect themselves from criticism.

The accusation of petty-bourgeois politics, opportunism or revisionism cannot substitute for an examination of actual material relationships.

A revolutionary organisation cannot establish its emancipatory character through declarations of ideological correctness.

Its character must be demonstrated through the relationships it develops and the capacities it creates.

The decisive issue is whether political organisation expands or diminishes the independent activity of the people involved.

This leads to a broader conclusion.

The alternative to middle-class identitarianism is not the suppression of identity, and the alternative to liberal personality politics is not authoritarian ideological conformity. It is the reconstruction of class solidarity through the practical organisation of collective self-activity.

Such solidarity requires confronting racism, sexism, colonialism and other forms of domination as material features of capitalist society.

It also requires refusing to treat individual identity as a substitute for political principle.

It requires recognising that professional advancement is not collective emancipation.

It requires distinguishing representation from participation.

It requires building organisations in which expertise serves collective capacities rather than replacing them.

It requires developing accountability without humiliation, leadership without domination and political disagreement without the production of internal enemies.

Above all, it requires understanding that the purpose of radical politics is not to produce a morally superior class of people who administer the emancipation of everyone else.

It is to abolish the social relationships that make such administration necessary.

The ultimate test of a political movement is therefore not the sophistication of its rhetoric, the moral standing of its spokespersons or the demographic composition of its leadership.

It is whether ordinary people become more capable of determining their own lives.

A movement that increases this capacity contributes to emancipation.

A movement that substitutes professional representation, moral policing and institutional endorsement for this capacity risks becoming another mechanism of social reproduction.

The challenge is to construct movements that do not merely oppose capitalist domination in their declared objectives but actively develop different relationships in their everyday practice.

That means building solidarity rather than demanding ideological uniformity, collective power rather than individual access, and practical cooperation rather than competitive moral distinction.

The future of class struggle depends upon this distinction.

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13. Selected references and further reading

The following sources provide the principal theoretical foundations for developing this argument further.

A. The supplied Class Autonomy articles

1. The Co-option of Class Struggle — managerial manipulation, selective information, endorsement and institutional co-optation.
   Class Autonomy: The Co-option of Class Struggle
2. The Recuperation of Dissent Under Capitalism — radicalism as cultural capital, professionalised dissent and the separation of theory from praxis.
   The Recuperation of Dissent Under Capitalism
3. Identity Politics and Class Struggle — Robin D. G. Kelley on the relationship between class politics, race and identity-based movements.
   Identity Politics and Class Struggle
4. The Recuperation of Popular Power — institutional mediation, direct action and the neutralisation of popular opposition.
   The Recuperation of Popular Power
5. Success Under Tokenism: Co-option of the Newcomer and the Prevention of Collective Protest — Stephen C. Wright and Donald M. Taylor on individual mobility and collective action.
   Success Under Tokenism
6. The Left’s Self-Destructive Obsession with Shame — the psychological and organisational consequences of shame-based political cultures.
   The Left’s Self-Destructive Obsession with Shame
7. Principles Not Personalities: Collective Solutions to Collective Problems — the relationship between personality politics, class hierarchy and collective action.
   Principles Not Personalities

B. The professional managerial class

8. Barbara and John Ehrenreich — The Professional-Managerial Class.
9. Catherine Liu — Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class.
10. Barbara Ehrenreich — Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class.
11. John and Barbara Ehrenreich — Between Labor and Capital.
12. James Foley — Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class (review and discussion of PMC politics).

C. Recuperation, spectacle and capitalist social relations

13. Guy Debord — The Society of the Spectacle.
14. Raoul Vaneigem — The Revolution of Everyday Life.
15. Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello — The New Spirit of Capitalism.
16. Herbert Marcuse — One-Dimensional Man.
17. Antonio Gramsci — Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
18. Karl Marx — The German Ideology.
19. Karl Marx — Theses on Feuerbach.
20. Karl Marx — Capital, Volume I.

D. Class struggle, identity and intersectionality

21. Robin D. G. Kelley — Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class.
22. Kimberlé Crenshaw — Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.
23. bell hooks — Where We Stand: Class Matters.
24. Angela Davis — Women, Race & Class.
25. Amílcar Cabral — Return to the Source: Selected Speeches.
26. Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth.

E. Bureaucracy, authority and revolutionary organisation

27. Mikhail Bakunin — Statism and Anarchy.
28. Alexandra Kollontai — The Workers’ Opposition.
29. Rosa Luxemburg — The Mass Strike.
30. Anton Pannekoek — Workers’ Councils.
31. Cornelius Castoriadis — The Imaginary Institution of Society.
32. Robert Michels — Political Parties.
33. Jo Freeman — The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

F. The Chomsky controversy

34. Michael Tracey — Noam Chomsky Was Right About Epstein, Compact, 13 February 2026.
    Compact: Noam Chomsky Was Right About Epstein

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Final theoretical proposition

The entire argument can be condensed into one proposition:

Capitalism does not need to eliminate dissent when it can organise the conditions under which dissent is expressed, represented, professionalised and ultimately rendered harmless.

Middle-class identitarianism can contribute to this process when identity becomes a credential for individual advancement. Liberal single-issue politics can contribute when structural antagonisms become fragmented into professionally administered grievances. The PMC can contribute when its institutional interests become detached from the collective interests of those it claims to represent. Personality politics can contribute when reputational denunciation substitutes for political analysis. And authoritarian Marxism can reproduce the same problem when ideological conformity replaces workers’ independent judgement.

The answer is not to abandon struggles against oppression, nor to abandon political criticism.

It is to reconnect both to the material development of collective power.

That means moving from access to autonomy, from endorsement to participation, from moral performance to practical solidarity, and from the politics of personalities to the collective organisation of class struggle.