My fellow Jacobin editor Peter Frase wrote an impassioned piece recently calling for the Left to move beyond the “comforting . . . fable of class as the universal solvent that does away with all identity and leads directly to enlightenment.” In it, he calls out Barbara Ehrenreich, Sam Gindin, and Walter Benn Michaels as proponents of a “common” leftist sentiment that privileges a universalizing and unifying notion of class and rails against “identity” politics, thus ignoring or denying the importance of race and gender.

Frase says the arguments of people like Ehrenreich, Gindin, and Michaels rest on a “flimsy and inadequate reading” of race, class, and gender. He raises some important points that are worth fleshing out a bit more, but in order to do so it is necessary to first lay out his argument in brief.

Frase emphasizes that, contra Ehrenreich/Gindin/Michaels, there is much more to anti-racism and feminism than “liberal diversity politics.” He exhorts the Left to incorporate a more radical vision of abolishing race and gender into its emancipatory narratives and strategies, rather than stopping short at eliminating hierarchy or inequality.