The Pervasiveness of Identity

THE DEFEAT OF THE WORKERS’ MOVEMENT AND CONTEMPORARY CLASS STRUGGLE

In memory of Marina Vishmidt and Joshua Clover.

By Bruno Monfort

Identity-based politics remain a durable feature of our political landscape. As I write these lines in September 2024, far-right racist protests and riots have swept the UK, extending the state’s decades-long criminalization of migrant communities and asylum seekers through direct, personal violence against anyone they happen to apprehend for their perceived race. The extra-state violence these groups inflict further racialize their victims, in a recursive dynamic that the writer Chis Chen argues follows and reproduces capital’s impersonal point of view while simultaneously exposing them to new forms of interpersonal violence and direct domination[1]. In response, the people attacked for their identity are beginning to organize and defend themselves, articulating forms of solidarity that go beyond identity.  

Some on the left dismiss anti-racist, Black- and migrant-led struggles as limited by identity-based concerns, remaining mired in seeking recognition from the state and capital, rather than building class solidarity. This misunderstands these struggles, and the relationship between identity and class in our current era. Identity here is a moment in a dialectical movement the struggle passes through and beyond. In 2020, for example, we witnessed how the uprisings that took place in response to the murder of George Floyd—understood here as a moment of identity-based mobilization—did not limit itself to demands over recognition, but rather moved immediately to broader and more uncompromising demands such as abolishing the police. In organizing against racist violence, these movements opened onto revolutionary, abolitionist solidarities. 

Acknowledging the contemporary relevance and centrality of these forms of struggle organized around identity leads us to ask about the relationship between identity and class struggle in our historical conjuncture. Drawing on a Marxist problematic, class is mainly understood as an antagonistic relation that qualitatively structures the lives and experience of individuals, mediated by race, gender, nationality, and other stratifying criteria[2]. Identity, by contrast, comprises these criteria, coded in identity categories that provide a basis for shared political mobilization through a common narrative about the structural position brought by the class relation. A pressing question within leftist milieus, theorists and political organizers alike ask themselves: A pervasive debate asks: has identity replaced class as the main source of political action? Is class still relevant to understand our historical conjuncture? Could we understand class and identity politics as two different forms of politics emerging from two distinct modes of oppression? 

Some critics have argued that identity and class should be viewed as two opposed principles of social organization. One of the canonical examples of this position was that held by Nancy Fraser, who argued political mobilization took place in pursuit of two contrasting goals: redistribution of economic resources and power, characteristic of class-based struggles; and recognition, as seeking dignity and redress, embodied in her writing by gay and lesbian rights movements. Such an opposition is remarkably widespread as a common sense of writing about mass mobilization. Others have argued class is uniquely powerful as a basis of collective identity under capitalism, valorizing a narrow vision of the worker somehow stripped of sexuality, race, or gender. This position is perhaps best recently exemplified in Vivek Chibber’s The Class Matrix (2022) in which he elaborates a neo-Orthodox Marxist theory of capitalist reproduction and class formation. Chibber states that “[t]he peculiarity of class resides in the fact that is the only social relation that directly governs the material well-being of its participants.” (2022; 17). In his account, the political relevance of class derives from the fact that the class structure has primacy over nonclass social structures and that it dismisses any incompatible cultural forms, setting limits to cultural heterogeneity[3]. This analytical position has been identified as “class abstractionism” by Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan[4]. Sometimes class is imagined as another identity in coalition, implying an additive logic. What these seemingly opposed propositions have in common is that they both view the relationship between class and identity as either one of unresolvable antinomy or which collapses their difference altogether. But a Marxist understanding of the relation between class and identity needs to be conceptualized as a dialectical unity. 

The unity-in-difference, or in Hegelian terms, the identity of identity and non-identity, has a broad truth across the history of capitalism, but takes particular forms in our current era. For a queer Marxian account of the present, the centrality of identity politics must be explained by historical changes in capital accumulation processes, class composition, and the specific forms of resistance that emerge from within them. The pervasiveness of identity-based struggles, despite a generation or more of Marxist arguments against them, requires a new theory of the link between the latter and historical dynamics of class struggle, which will bear on questions any revolutionary political movement will face today. Instead of arguing for the primacy of one or the other, we need a dialectical reading of both identity and class as two categories that cannot be understood as isolated or in-themselves, but rather as internally mediated by one another, as a unity in motion.

There are multiple expansive literatures that have argued for the deep interrelationship between various identities and capitalist reproduction. In 1978, Stuart Hall argued “Race is the modality through which class is lived,” articulating a form of inner relation between race and class explored variously across decades of Black left and Black Marxist theory. Multiple currents of queer Marxism and Marxist feminism have made parallel interventions on questions of sexuality and gender[5]. For instance, Italian Marxist feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa stated that it is the formal exclusion of certain reproductive activities from socially organized production which gave womanhood the status of an identity, hence linking the capitalist organization of human activities to the lived experience of gender. Similarly, the late Kevin Floyd argued that the regime of sexual knowledge in which gender is conceived as an embodied cultural norm continually enacted is the result of the displacement of a previous regime of sexual knowledge brought by changes in the mode of capitalist accumulation[6]. 

I argue value-form readings of social reproduction offer a particular and useful framework for understanding the specific articulation of class and identity in our current era through locating it in large-scale changes in the structure of capital accumulation and the forms of struggle that emerge. In using a value-theoretic framework to argue for the pervasiveness of identity to contemporary politics, I am turning it against tendencies in contemporary Marxism that have minimized or rejected identity as a salient political category.

Capitalism entered a terminal crisis in profitability in the late 1960s, fully blossoming by 1973. Robert Brenner called this “the long downturn,” while others identify it as a period of “secular stagnation.” In this period, identity has come to mediate the expressions through which class struggle acquires a political character. Within this framework, identity is a social form—that is, a historically determined configuration of social relations taking a specific form of appearance, and which cannot be argued away—which mediates the uneven distribution of violence and subjection to which different groups are exposed to within the process of social reproduction. This description follows the Endnotes collective’s approach where class “remains the primary source of our separations…but class belonging is today calibrated by a multitude of variables such as age, gender, geography, race, or religion that act as channels, as well as real limits, for social struggles, and make identity politics a real expression of class struggle.” [7] As capitalism began to stagnate—that is, as the dynamism of capitalist economies began to slow down at the same time as surplus population begin tendentially to grow—class politics is less restricted to the workplace or conditions of employment and production. The proletariat, increasingly excluded from the wage and surviving as populations external to the process of value production, finds itself increasingly fighting for its reproduction beyond the workplace or the immediate point of production. The acknowledgment of this fact helps us explain the decay of the classical workers’ movement and its forms of organizing—mainly the party and the union—as it becomes harder to produce a coherent narrative about a shared condition of exploitation once the exclusion from waged labor becomes the norm rather than the exception. Today the proletariat is struggling to overcome that which internally maintains its separation—not only from the means of subsistence but also calibrated through identity and competition. This situation entails certain consequences for any strategic discussion around communist organizing, which will be addressed in the last section. It must be said that the following text does not intend to offer a global, historical perspective nor a universal account of the development of the class relation as its uneven development renders it geographically specific. Rather, my intention is to define in an abstract level of analysis certain historical tendencies that initially manifested in a few highly industrialized capitalist countries and their forms of class struggle.

1. On identity as an organizing principle

A dialectical reconsideration of the relationship between identity and class struggle has theoretical and strategic implications for communist or revolutionary political action. To do so, we might take a closer look to the actual forms of class struggle taking place today articulated around identity. In Madrid, but also in Barcelona, the political action of Street Seller’s Union (Sindicato de Manteros) [8] illustrates clearly the dynamic this text is trying to grasp. 

The Street Seller’s Union is a political organization that, as Malick Gueye, spokesperson of the Union explains, it is formed by workers practicing mutual support [9]. At its inception, the main goal of the organization was to make visible the institutionalized violence against racialized communities in the neighborhood of Lavapiés, but it also sought to expose the harmful effects of the Immigration Act in Spain, and fought for the decriminalization of “la manta” (selling goods in the street over a blanket). 

Over the years, through a sustained struggle against police violence, the Sindicato has consciously produced the conditions of possibility for reaching political autonomy. Having witnessed the consequences of a social democratic government in the city council in Madrid in 2014, the organization recognized the limits of political action within the administration when some of the people that had fought next to them a few years back now turned their backs on them and went silent about the sustained aggressions against racialized populations [10]. In the years that followed, the Union not only created a political community, but also a clothing cooperative that teaches clothing design skills to its members. 

The political action of the Street Seller’s Union depicts a form of resistance against the state that runs through the axis of race. Its activity operates as a contestation of the state’s sovereignty, a contestation over its management of racialized populations and its racial profiling mechanisms. These forms of biopolitical management of racialized populations cannot be understood without a sense of the contemporary production of surplus populations. As Marx argued regarding the dynamic of capitalist accumulation, “modern industry’s whole form of motion [(…]) depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed hands” by means of an ever-growing investment in machinery or fixed capital instead of variable capital or labour-power [11]. This transformation makes an ever-growing part of the working class into surplus population, that is, redundant for the valorization process. This transformation realizes itself through social differentiation, in the form of including gender, race, sexuality, nationality, disability and so on [12].

Racialized population’s social reproduction is rendered superfluous, having to find means to reproduce themselves outside waged labor. As Malick Gueye explains, the street sellers, mostly unemployed Senegalese men, find alternative means to reproduce themselves selling goods in the street [13]. Selling goods in front of the front door is a very extended practice in Senegal for unemployed people. 

Informalized forms of economic activity constitute a precarious, although extended, alternative to waged labor to ensure the reproduction of those dispossessed and racialized sectors of the population. The immediate fact of selling in the street and the political organizing that has resulted from this situation render visible the racially coded character of informal precarious work and the continued state abuse enacted against specific sectors of the population. The Union’s political activity constitutes a form of contestation against the structural injustice upon which a specific social formation is based that takes a spatial dimension, being a struggle over the control and use of public space. They render a condition of structural exclusion – the possibility of becoming a relative surplus population – needed to make a certain social order, in this case racial capitalism, cohere a terrain of class struggle or conflict. As Chris Chen states, “At play here are not only unwaged, coerced, or dependent forms of labor, but also crucially, the management of those populations that have become redundant in relation to capital.” [15]

Approaching race or gender as technologies of governance that reproduce a differential access to the means of social reproduction, we can begin to think about them as structuring features of capitalist social reproduction. In this light, the antinomy between race and class can no longer be sustained. Instead, race and class appear as a dialectical unity mediating the access to the means of social reproduction of those groups racially marked. The novelty of these forms of struggle, in contrast to classical class-based forms of conflict usually tied to the economic realm of the wage and the immediate point of production, is that they are articulated around racial and gender-based forms of exclusion. Exploring the cycles of labor unrest between 1991 and 2011, the researchers from the Global Social Protest Research Group have shown that there is a “secular trend of rising class-based protests among those who have been almost entirely excluded from capitalist exploitation.” [16] We could argue that these protests taking state action as one of its main targets protest against forms of active proletarianization, that is, state-managed forms of dispossession, exclusion, and deportation of superfluous sectors of the population [17]. The partial exteriority to the formal economy of some sectors of the population induced by coercion and the degree of violence they are exposed to result in forms of mobilizing that challenge the very foundations of this exclusion. The politicization of an apparently “natural” condition – race – brings into question the juridical, economical, and political coercive mechanisms that situate some sectors as redundant and state-managed populations. 

The forms of solidarity established in the course of these conflicts contain the condition of possibility to surpass their own limits. The Street Seller’s Union, being aware of the racial exclusion its members face, joined the Sindicato de Inquilinas, a Tenants Union, to fight against form of discrimination and exclusion in the access to a home. They surpass the separation sustained by social differences established by capital’s organization of social reproduction. On this basis we could say that solidarity is not built despite social difference but rather through its acknowledgement. A race-based form of contestation in fact opens up the possibility to politically coordinate, although in a spontaneous way, other sectors of the proletariat against the intervention of the state over the organization of social reproduction. In the course of the struggle, that which unites some sectors and separates others simultaneously is recognized and integrated in favor of a broader coalition in which belonging is no longer calibrated through recognition by the state. Particularity is surpassed in favor of a totalizing political action, capable of addressing several issues under a shared tactical or strategical orientation. This is not to say that a return to local communities or forms of local political action provide a satisfactory solution to our problems. Rather, the point is to show how some contemporary forms of class struggle retain an open-ended character that operates as a political promise, the promise of a political subject struggling to surpass that which maintains its condition of separation. We can glimpse in these forms of struggle a form of universality that operates through the acknowledgment of its differences and works through them, instead of dismissing them.

2. The Workers’ Movement: notes on class and identity

But what has changed in the terrain of class struggle given the new modalities of race-, gender-, and sexuality-based struggle? To historically situate the contemporary conditions enabling the aforementioned forms of contestation against racial violence, a periodization of the development of the capital-labour relation, understood as a moving contradiction that unfolds through history, is needed. “[W]ith the end of capital’s postwar boom (lasting roughly from 1950 to 1973), class war enters into a new phase,” [18] as Ray Brassier puts it. This is the beginning of what Robert Brenner refers to as the long downturn, a weakening economic performance and declining dynamism on the basis of a generally decreasing productivity of labor worldwide as new commercial actors increasingly enter the world market and deindustrialization begins to take place. This shift in production qualitatively changes the terrain of class struggle as the expanding surplus population is expelled from the circuits of valorization. Waged labor as a mass experience, once the premise of class politics itself, lost its pride of place as the material basis of any positive identity from which a political demand can be articulated. 

Class was no longer articulated through the classical organizing milieus—parties and unions. The conception of the collective worker as a social subject that sustained the workers’ movement project dissolved as the working class became less and less homogeneous, incapable of being unified on the basis of a shared relation to wage labor. The time of the workers’ movement being a counterforce opposed to capital passed as their separation increased. The problem of class unity could no longer be raised under the same terms, as those same terms—namely wage labor as the mechanism to integrate proletarianized masses into capitalist social reproduction—had become partially unreachable for some sectors of the global population, [19] a historical outcome of capital’s accumulation processes. Instead, a handful of new ways of organizing based on different categories such as gender, race, or citizenship began to emerge. The proliferation of “qualitatively different kinds of inequality” through “a social heterogeneity of wage dependency” [20] provided the background for new ways of struggling confronting the reproduction of that dependency. The divisions within the proletariat must not be treated as purely ideological. Rather, “the divisions are the ideological sedimentation of the definite social relations necessary to reproduce class society,” [21] in words of Joshua Clover. Do not get me wrong here, I am not claiming the end of class as a politicizing factor nor of class struggle. As the Endnotes collective states, “the end of the workers’ movement is not the same thing as the end of either capital or the working class.” [22]

Given the historical conjuncture depicted above, class can no longer be politically or analytically defined solely by its relation to wage labor or the dispossession from the means of production. Rather, class is perhaps best approached as a shared relation to the conditions of social reproduction, according to Søren Mau [23]. The proletariat is defined by its relation of dispossession regarding the means of production and subsistence, therefore, forced to sell the only commodity it possesses, that is, its labor power. This separation is the basis of the social constitution of capitalism as a specific mode of production. However, this definition finds itself still operating at a high level of abstraction; specifically, it operates as one of the simplest determinations of the capitalist mode of production defined in its ideal measure. 

The appearance of identity categories needs to be traced back to the concrete and lived experience of class mediated as it is by capitalist real abstractions. This approach demands thinking about the dual nature of domination under capital. On the one hand, capital’s domination operates as an abstract and impersonal type of domination emerging from the fetish character of capitalist social forms. Its essential feature is that it is a temporal mode of domination based on time averages, expressed through value, that market competition imposes on individual capitals in order to produce commodities according to the socially necessary labor time. This process produces a disciplinary temporal regime that subjects individuals to the needs of capital’s valorization. 

On the other hand, this abstract domination finds concrete expression through interpersonal forms of domination and subjection, that is, gendered, racialized, financialized, or ecological forms of subjugation; social relations that exceed the realm of the abstract character of capitalist social forms but that, nevertheless, constitute a precondition for capital’s movement. They are, in Rebecca Carson’s term, “immanent externalities.” [24] Social reproduction is structured and shaped by these interpersonal and directed forms of domination as they constitute a differential access to the means of social reproduction and the degree of exposure to violence different social groups have to confront. It is among these latter forms of domination that recent political struggles have organized themselves, being the identities or categories that emerge from these processes more and more central than class, understood in a narrow sense, to narrate and make sense of one’s own social position. The objective decomposition of the wage labor regime as a means of integration into capitalist social reproduction is expressed in the decomposition of the narratives around which the workers’ movement historically made sense of their position and political project, giving rise to a set of different points of view from to which articulate a coherent narrative. In other words, the conditions of social reproduction of a majority of the global population are not exclusively tied to a wage anymore, hence producing new forms of conflict tied to the gendered, racialized, ableist, sexual, dimensions of capitalist social reproduction. Understood this way, identity operates as a social form—a historically determined configuration of social relations with a concrete form of appearance—that internally mediates the relationship of the labour-force to its conditions of social reproduction, establishing a differential access to the means of subsistence on the basis of these categories (race, gender, citizenship, ableism, etc.). 

The historical ascendance of identity as a politically salient category increasingly posits the affirmation/negation paradox or the dialectic between affirmation and negation at the center of any kind of critical practice articulated through some kind of political action. That is to say that the development of the struggle will entail a moment of identification with the terms that produce a situation of exclusion or injustice, a moment of recognition on a common basis in order to politically organize against those same terms. This paradox also structured class struggle in the classical workers’ movement, as identified by Paul Mattick [25]. The late Marina Vishmidt puts it well: 

In any social movement, there needs to be an identification of a position (of exclusion, of injustice) in the contradiction, before the place of exclusion is negated by re-organizing the terms of justice or inclusion themselves on another basis. We can see this in the feminist and queer movements, where the structural role of the “woman” or “homosexual” must be accurately identified within the relations of capitalist patriarchy before gender and heteronormativity can be overturned. The same thing with the “classical” class struggle: the social affirmation of workers as a discrete class with interests incompatible with those of bosses and the organization this engenders is a precondition for the political imperative to negate wage-labour and capital [26].

The structure of the struggle is caught up between these two poles, namely affirmation and negation. However, there is a paradox in this definition: “if the subject is entirely constituted through capitalist relations where does the negativity come from?” [27] This is the paradox of self-abolition, the ultimate aim of a proletarian movement: to overcome the conditions of its existence. The Endnotes collective takes this paradox as the basis for their rejection of programmatism which they define, following Théorie Communiste, as a “theory and practice of class struggle in which the proletariat finds, in its drive toward liberation, the fundamental elements of a future social organisation which become the programme to be realised.” [28] This approach to revolution, they contend, entails the affirmation of the proletariat which is necessarily at odds with its self-abolition. 

Against Endnotes, it is possible to perceive in the concrete expressions of this paradox a new revolutionary subject which will abolish itself. Endnotes’ rejection of programmatism seems to imply that the self-abolition of the proletariat and the end of class society, the emergence of communism, is caught up in an insurmountable paradox. However, instead of raising the question of the self-abolition of the proletariat in a purely logical and abstract manner, what I find most compelling is rooting the possibility of self-abolition in the actual and concrete examples of class struggle. Identity categories, in this sense, have become the possibility and the limit to overcome of political action in our contemporary conjuncture. Nonetheless, it cannot be said that the negating moment of the paradox will necessarily imply a move towards emancipation. Rather, by way of negating a certain situation, a political movement could reorganize the terms of the exclusion by assimilating some subjects while dismissing others—respectability politics is the most familiar example. Considering this, what this paradox reveals about identity politics and class struggle is the political ambivalence and open-ended character which seeks to reorganize the general societal order from a particular position. 

III. The open-ended character of identity politics

Not all identity politics contain an emancipatory kernel; some of them are reactionary in their articulation. The contemporary deployment of transphobia and transmisogyny in both anti-trans feminisms, or TERFs, and gender-critical conservative movements can also be considered as forms of identity politics, although hardly ever recognized as such by their ideologues. Transmisogyny being the point of consensus between these two movements complicates progressive narratives of feminism which hold anti-feminism as inherently conservative. Violence against trans people and trans women more specifically, waged by TERFs in conjunction with the far-right should not be seen as an exceptional move. Rather, their political alliance ought to be located within a broader historical account of the tensions that have emerged from the strategic question of unity and separation, universality, and singularity, within feminism—ultimately leading us to the question of identity and the political subject of feminism. Anti-trans feminisms and gender-critical conservative movements do not share the same rhetoric or political program; their political views instead overlap and intersect at multiple points. Their approach to gender identity is one of those common places. As Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur write:

In both the avowedly feminist and the explicit articulations of gender-critical thinking, mobilization relies, in great part, on the ability of the addressee to identify politically and culturally as an “authentic woman,” which is itself a particular gender identification. [29]

What is at stake in the ideological mobilization of identity that gender-critical thinking does is the identification of a true womanhood that can only be found in some bodies, hence the positive moment of the dialectic of affirmation and negation. However, this affirmation of a true, authentic, and cis womanhood is rendered highly ideological as it converts the category of woman in an ontological and presocial state “whose normativity derives from its putative naturalness.” [30] At the same time, the affirmation of an authentic womanhood is the negation of trans femininity as a patriarchal invention or a byproduct of globalization and feminism, depending on who’s speaking, aimed at threatening and infiltrating women’s spaces. This double valence of transmisogyny is based on an ideological alignment between the contemporary crisis of gendered social relations—which is ultimately a crisis of capitalist social reproduction—and the figure of the trans woman as an abstract and disembodied figure of discourse that functions ideologically to condense a socially induced anxiety that rationalizes violence [31].

Following Felix del Campo’s analysis of the far-right’s rhetoric about politics and identity,  the affirmation of certain “natural identities” – woman in this case – is tied to a demand of political sovereignty that seeks to depoliticize socio-economic relations politicized and rendered fluid by different actors: woke ideology, feminist movements, queer and decolonial struggles, finance capitalism, and so on [32]. “The contemporary far-right ‘reveals’ capital’s hidden powers of abstraction, homogenization, and undifferentiation” [33] and demands a return to natural identities against the interests of the so-called economic globalist elites and in favor of state’s sovereignty. In their rhetoric, the state, as the embodiment of the political, is envisioned as the actor required to correct the limits of economic life, to ensure the reproduction of the national free market separated from the realm of the political. What this approach to transmisogyny shows is that statecraft, social reproduction, and forms of biopolitical management articulate themselves around the preservation and enforcement of certain identities. The affirmation of womanhood stands as a moment in the affirmation of political sovereignty through the recovery of the “real economy” against the workings of globalization and all its political expressions [34]. These reactionary forms of identity politics can be said to be based, following Moishe Postone and Iyko Day, on a romantic anticapitalism which identifies the abstract dimensions of capital’s movement with certain subjects that operate as scapegoats, as the embodiment of certain evils that stalk civilization. In the case of transmisogyny, the abstract figure of the trans woman embodies the dissolution of patriarchal gender relations and the sex-based categorization of bodies.

Transmisogyny as mobilized by the far right and the TERFs seeks to preserve and enforce existing gendered social relations and hierarchies, even more so as the classically conservative part of the dyad melancholically calls for a return to a specific type of womanhood tied to the social imaginary of the Fordist era and the nuclear family. 

IV. Abolitionist notes for communism

In short, once the static opposition between identity and class has dissolved — revealing class as the overarching social relation structuring the way in which identity categories are lived, experienced, and performed — we can begin to locate seemingly disparate expressions of conflict and antagonism as forms of class struggle within the dynamic terrain of social reproduction. Class as a structural relation historically produced a workers’ identity that, deprived of the historical conditions that enabled it – the wage as the main vehicle of integration into capitalist social reproduction – can no longer be sustained. Class is now generally experienced and articulated through different identity categories not directly tied to the immediate point of production. Strategically, what this analysis implies is that identity politics must not be dismissed as a perverted form of struggle; instead, it constitutes a contemporary expression of class struggle that desires to go beyond the processes that devalue some subjects  by exposing them to state and extra-state violence. However, it is also true that this desire in the form of identity politics can also take a reactionary form which seeks to delimit who fits in a category and who does not.  

A communist program which seeks to abolish the present state of things must assume emancipatory identity-based forms of struggle as concrete and actual expressions of the organization of the proletariat. How the political intervention within these spaces will look like cannot be answered in the abstract, but rather it is a matter of the class composition in specific places and times. Nonetheless, a general principle of communist organizing can be formulated. It is fundamental to connect the immediate necessities of the proletariat, and the forms of struggle that emerge from them to the realization and extension of the communist program. This principle requires a profound programmatic debate about the organizational, strategic, and tactical mediations needed to adequate our means to our ends—communist revolution.

1. Chris Chen. ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality. Notes towards an Abolitionist Antiracism’, Endnotes 3, 2013.
2.  Richard Gunn, ‘Notes on Class’, Common Sense 2, 1987.
3.  Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix. Social Theory after the Cultural Turn, 2022, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
4.  Michael McCarthy and Mathieu Hikaru Desan, ‘The Problem of Class Abstractionism’, Sociological Theory 41 (1), 3 – 26, 2023.
5. Mariarosa Dalla Costa. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, 2019, New York: PM Press. 
6. Kevin Floyd. The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism. Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2009.
7. Endnotes Collective, ‘Onward Barbarians’, Endnotes, 2020.
8. Although not directly translatable to English because of the racial connotation the word mantero carries, Sindicato de Manteros will be translated as Street Seller’s Union.
9. Malick Gueye, “El Sindicato de Manteros es un conjunto de trabajadores que practican el apoyo mutuo”, 4 January 2022, Interview, El Salto Diario. 
10. Malick Gueye, “El Sindicato de Manteros de Madrid y la lucha contra la criminalización racista por el Estado español”, in Cayetano Fernández, Danielle Pereira de Araújo, Sebijan Fejzula and Silvia Rodriguez Maeso (eds.), Racismo de Estado, Navarra, Txalaparta.
11.  Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, London: Penguin Books, 1990, 627.
12. Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot, 2016, London: Verso.
13. As Gueye explains, there used to be more women within the manteros (street sellers). However, over the last decade, Senegalese women have been entering the workforce as cleaning and domestic service employees, sometimes as live-in caregivers, while simultaneously having to take care of several children. 
14. Malick Gueye, “El Sindicato de Manteros de Madrid y la lucha contra la criminalización racista por el Estado español”, in Cayetano Fernández, Danielle Pereira de Araújo, Sebijan Fejzula and Silvia Rodriguez Maeso (eds.), Racismo de Estado, Navarra, Txalaparta. 
15. Chris Chen. ‘The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality’.
16. Sahan Savas Karatasli, Sefika Kumral, Ben Scully, and Smriti Upadhyay, ‘Class, Crisis, and the 2011 Protest Wave. Cyclical and Secular Trends in Global Labor Unrest’, in Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn, and Christian Stuter (eds.), Overcoming Global Inequalities, London: Routledge, 2015.
17. As I am revising this text, a handful of riots have spreaded across Los Angeles resisting against the detentions performed by the ICE. As the late Joshua Clover wrote, these spontaneous conflicts could be termed as riot prime, a spectacular form of circulation struggle where the rebellion of surplus racialized populations meets the state and its forms of management. See Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot.
18.  Ray Brassier, ‘Politics of the Rift: On Théorie Communiste’, e-flux, 2023.
19. For a global account of the history of surplus population, see Benanav, A. (2022).
20. Sourayan Mookerjea, ‘Accumulated Violence, or the Wars of Exploitation: Notes Towards a Post-Western Marxism’, Mediations Journal 32(1), 2018, 96.
21. Joshua Clover, ‘Ideologies of Riot and Strike’, in Natasha Ginwala, Gal Kirn, and Niloufar Tajeri (eds.), Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound, New York: Columbia University Press, 2021, 82-95. 
22. Endnotes Collective, ‘A History of Separation’, Endnotes 4, 2020.
23. Soren Mau, Mute Compulsion. A Marxist Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, London: Verso Books, 2023.
24. For a Marxian-Hegelian argument about the role of interpersonal forms of domination or ‘immanent externalities’ within capital’s reproduction process see Rebecca Carson, Immanent Externalities: The Reproduction of Life in Capital, London: Haymarket, 2023. 
25. Brassier, ‘Politics of the Rift’. 
26. Marina Vishmidt, ‘Human capital or toxic asset: after the wage’, Libcom.org, 2011.
27. Marina Vishmidt, Mira Matar, and Julia Calver, ‘Activated Negativity. An Interview with Marina Vishmidt’, Mahkzin, 2016.
28. TC quoted in Brassier, ‘Politics of the Rift’.
29. Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur, ‘Introduction: TERF’s, Gender-Critical Movements, and Postfascist Feminisms’, TSQ Special Issue: Trans-Exclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right 9(3), 312.
30. Serena Bassi and Greta LaFleur, ‘Introduction: TERF’s, Gender-Critical Movements, and Postfascist Feminisms’, TSQ Special Issue: Trans-Exclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right 9(3), 315.
31. For a value-form analysis of transmisogyny inspired by Postone’s account of antisemitism, see Naomi Aliza-Cohen, ‘The Eradication of “Talmudic Abstractions”: Anti-Semitism, Transmisogyny, and the National-Socialist Project’, Verso Blog, 2018.
32. Felix del Campo, Life in Value’s Shadow: Capitalist State Form, Neoliberal Depoliticisation, and the Spectre of the Right, unpublished manuscript. 
33. Ibíd.
34. Ibíd.