Specters of the Popular Front: A review of Ash Sarkar’s Minority Rule
Dan Davison
Platypus Review 180 | October 2025
Ash Sarkar, Minority Rule: Adventures in the Culture War (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025).
IN MINORITY RULE: Adventures in the Culture War, British Left commentator Ash Sarkar seeks to expose how “minority elites” use the culture wars to stoke fear and panic in the media landscape. In particular, they fuel an irrational fear that minority populations, such as immigrants and trans people, are attempting to overturn and oppress majority populations — to impose “Minority Rule.” Sarkar argues that, by cultivating such anxieties, these elites strategically misdirect blame for the inequalities and pathologies in society and sustain their own positions of power. In her words, “the paranoid fantasy of Minority Rule upholds a real minority rule, by keeping us divided and competing against one another for attention” (20).
Over the course of her analysis, Sarkar mounts an extended criticism of contemporary identity politics on the Left. She contends that, through the kind of politics of victimhood and grievance it adopted, “the left unwittingly forged the political weapons being used against it by our political opponents” (21). Sarkar identifies three major preoccupations that have driven what she calls the “liberal turn” in identity politics and enabled the forces of reaction to appropriate and weaponize elements of identity politics in the form of grievance politics: “the notion of irreducible difference between identity groups, the idea that identity groups have competing interests, and that lived experience is a form of unassailable political authority” (32).
The timing of Sarkar’s book is somewhat puzzling. I don’t mean that in the sense that she has brought out a book criticizing contemporary identity politics right when the Trump Administration is waging a “war on woke.” That timing — which probably stems from most of the book being written before the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, but not published until a few months afterwards — is why many have characterized Minority Rule’s publication along the lines of “big-name Lefty comes out against ‘woke’ politics after years of peddling it!” Rather, what I find puzzling about the book’s timing is how it seems a good few years behind the broader debate on class and identity politics. From around 2017 to 2022, multiple books on this topic came out and became common points of reference on the self-identified Left, often in response to criticisms of Bernie Sanders in the U.S. and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.1 While I appreciate that many factors can delay a book’s release, it’s still hard to shake the feeling that Sarkar has arrived somewhat late to the party.
In this review, I am not especially concerned with how I found Sarkar’s book in terms of reading experience.2 Rather, I want to examine the book as an attempt to grapple with symptoms of a particular moment in the Millennial Left’s trajectory which is itself a symptom of that moment. Sarkar tries to provide a critical account of how the liberation politics of the 1960s–70s became the identity politics of the 1980s–90s, and how her and my generation, the Millennials, picked up that identity politics. She hopes that providing this account will help the Left to shake off its ideological encumbrances and thereby fight oppression and exploitation more effectively. How Sarkar goes about this ends up continuing the Millennial Left’s curious love affair with the New Left. That is, Sarkar repeats the Millennial Left’s attempt to transcend the dark years of reaction that marked the Gen X era of the 80s–90s by reconnecting with the New Left of the 60s–70s. This effort by the Millennial Left ultimately failed to interrogate and learn from the New Left’s own errors and blind spots, including those caused by what the New Left inherited in turn from the Old Left.3
One of Sarkar’s central claims is that identity politics had genuinely radical origins, only to be captured or co-opted for conservative ends over the following decades. In her words, “As identity politics became untethered from Marxist thinking and more bound up in liberal individualism it became less concerned with transforming society, and more focused on being represented in it” (44). To support her claim, Sarkar discusses the famous black lesbian feminist group the Combahee River Collective (CRC) (29–30, 42). The CRC are often credited with articulating an early iteration of what Kimberlé Crenshaw would later term “intersectionality.” They saw themselves as socialists and stressed the need to bring down capitalism and imperialism, but warned against thinking of the working class as “merely raceless, sexless workers.” In contrast to contemporary formulations, the CRC’s formulation of identity politics was “unambiguously anti-capitalist, collective, and international in scope” (31).
Another major example Sarkar discusses is the Black Panthers’ Rainbow Coalition (37–38). Formed in 1969 by Fred Hampton, the Rainbow Coalition brought together various community-based organizations in Chicago to confront issues like housing and police brutality. This included the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the Southern white Young Patriots. Sarkar notes that the Panthers were more than happy for Vietnamese anti-war organizations and white radicals to name themselves the “Yellow Panthers” and “White Panthers” respectively. She highlights this attitude to sharing names and political slogans to make a pointed contrast with contemporary identity politics, whose “logic of competing interests can create an antagonism and ill-feeling between groups who could otherwise find common cause in their experiences of discrimination and violence” (37 [emphasis removed]).
Minority Rule’s basic narrative closely follows such previous books on identity politics as Asad Haider’s Mistaken Identity (2018) and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture (2022), with Sarkar making multiple direct references to the latter. Much like those previous works’ authors, Sarkar sees a need in the present to reacquaint ourselves with earlier, more radical formulations. For example, bemoaning how there has been “a retreat from thinking about the interconnectedness of racism, sexism, the exploitation of labour, ableism and homophobia beyond how they intersect at the level of the individual,” she highlights the importance of what the CRC termed “simultaneity” (36–37, 50). This is the idea that, as racism, sexism, etc., operate and are experienced simultaneously, they must be fought simultaneously. Without an emphasis on simultaneity, Sarkar argues, people easily slide into “a feeling of paralysis,” because they “are held responsible for what goes on in ‘their’ community, and told that good allyship means tackling oppressive behaviours amongst those who share identity characteristics with you” (37).
In holding up these examples from the New Left as providing a lost, “truer” form of identity politics that still holds lessons directly applicable to the present-day Left, Sarkar fails to make any serious examination of their politics. In particular, she fails to make any critical consideration of the extent to which these New Left examples were themselves shaped by ideas inherited from the Old Left’s Popular Front turn in the 1930s, including via Maoism.
As Mike Macnair observes, the oft-cited 1977 CRC “Statement”4 brings together ideas about the combined effect of multiple oppressions that were widespread on the 70s Left and “were linked to ‘soft Maoist’ interpretations of the ‘labour aristocracy’ theory, the idea that the bulk of the actual organised working class movement was corrupted by privileges.”5 In contrast to Sarkar’s affirmative treatment of the “Statement” and its authors, Macnair points to how, in the “Statement” and its subsequent promotion, one can see several characteristic elements of contemporary identity politics. These include the vulgarization of Marxism to find it in need of “extension” (with CRC author Beverly Smith claiming that “if someone’s a socialist, it’s only about economics”), the emphasis on single-issue campaign coalitions, and the demands for organized black women to have leadership and veto within these coalitions.6
This brings us to the legacy of the 30s Popular Front. Under this policy, the Stalinized Third International directed each Communist Party to build a cross-class alliance against fascism (or, in the colonized world, against colonialism) within its respective country.7 Macnair argues that the Popular Front gave rise to the now-widespread notion of a “trinity” of class, gender, and race. This is because the Popular Front led the Communists to treat the “official” black community and women’s movement leaders as legitimate representatives of their specific group interests that were separate from the class interests of the working class.8 As Pamela Nogales puts it, this meant seeing labor as “one interest group among the many,” “represented by the Communist Party affiliated unions allied with the Democrats” in the U.S.9 Through the Popular Front, “the communists turned socialism into the social management of labor discontents through union representatives, for whom they fought to get a seat at the table.”10 In other words, there is a distant but straight line between the Popular Front of the 30s and the politics of identity-group representation and “allyship” that Sarkar associates with present-day identity politics.11 Indeed, one could point to 30s Stalinism as one of the main origin points of the largely cultural or identitarian understanding of class that Sarkar criticizes (138–41). After all, socialist realism, the artistic and literary style adopted as official Communist doctrine in 1934, only makes sense if one conceives of the working class in terms of a distinct social experience and corresponding set of virtues that need to be represented and embraced.
Maoism retained the Stalinist practice of the Popular Front, coupling it with a form of anti-colonial internationalism. Significantly, Maoism also developed methods of “consciousness-raising” that the New Left adopted in the late 1960s and 70s. Many New Leftists at the time were inspired by Mao’s Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, which ostensibly aimed to purge the Chinese government and Chinese society of infiltrating bourgeois elements that were seeking to restore capitalism. Vital to the “struggle sessions” of the Cultural Revolution, where alleged class enemies were publicly denounced, humiliated, and beaten, was the practice of “speaking bitterness.” Developed during the final years of the Chinese Revolution of 1927–49, this was the practice of encouraging peasants to confess the great injustices they had experienced and presenting the Party as their only means for retribution. Whatever might be said about this approach in its original context, the New Left adopted it in the absence of any mass party. This led to a kind of internalized, self-castigating consciousness among activists. Within organizations like Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), this consciousness manifested in a Maoist struggle session-style approach of “recognizing and de-centering racial/gender privilege.”
In the 1960s and 70s, these problems became especially noticeable in connection to the Third Worldist variant of Maoism.12 This took as its point of departure the understanding that the “primary contradiction” was that between the colonial First World and the colonized or decolonizing Third World, and that the class struggle within Third World nations should therefore be subordinated to the anti-colonial struggle.13 Many on the New Left gravitated towards this outlook as part of their broader disillusionment in the metropolitan working class, which turned them towards the national liberation movements against colonial rule and the new nation states established in their wake.14 This process involved rediscovering the 30s Stalinist “Black Belt” thesis that black people in the black-majority parts of the Southern U.S. constituted “a nation within a nation” and that Communists should therefore advocate national self-determination for them. Many black radicals came to view China as offering “a ‘colored,’ or Third World, Marxist model that enabled them to challenge a white and Western vision of class struggle.”15 Early Black Panther Party leader Eldridge Cleaver “stressed the ‘community imperialism’ imposed on the ghettoes,” with the Party financing its gun purchases in part from sales of Mao’s infamous Little Red Book and running “full-page quotations from Chairman Mao and encomia to China in their newspaper.”16
On the New Left, ideas about the struggle for black national self-determination in the U.S. as the domestic front of the anti-colonial struggle found mutual reinforcement with the notion that workers in the First World constituted a labor aristocracy who benefitted from the exploitation of oppressed people in the Third World.17 This gave rise to the view that “white-skin privilege” was the domestic manifestation of the primary contradiction between oppressor and oppressed nation. The white-skin privilege theory of racism often led to the conclusion that, as white people enjoy privileges at the expense of black people and racism serves white people as a whole by defending and maintaining these privileges, “whites are necessarily conservative until and unless they are willing to give up the privileges they have obtained, since these privileges are enjoyed at the expense of the oppression of others.”18 In accordance with the white-skin-privilege approach, Maoist currents involved in SDS in the mid- to late-60s advocated struggle for democratic rights only in the oppressed nations, including the black nation within the U.S. In their work among whites, the primary task was instead “to bring them to ‘understand that they are part of the oppressor nation and that they must learn to identify with the struggles of the oppressed.’”19 Again, the resemblance to the later privilege-theory understandings of oppression that Sarkar criticizes should be clear. The sort of self-castigating consciousness and struggle-session “recognizing and de-centering privilege” approach seen in the original SDS in the 60s became part of the identity politics of the 80s and 90s that the Millennial Left took up, returning as an obstacle to thought in the New SDS established in 2006 after the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.20
In short, contra Sarkar’s narrative, which affirms the identity politics of the 70s New Left as a high point from which it regressed because of a “liberal turn” and co-option, many of the perspectives Sarkar negatively associates with today’s grievance politics were already present in the New Left of that time, often due to the dead weight of earlier regressions bearing down on the New Left as it confronted the problems of its own moment. At one point, Sarkar cites as a positive example of solidarity a moment at the 1968 Hemispheric Conference to Defeat American Imperialism when the North Vietnamese Minister of Culture Hoàng Minh Giám announced to a leading Panther, “You are Black Panthers, we are Yellow Panthers!” (43). In doing so, she elides how the Stalinist-Maoist politics of anti-imperialism of the time led many New Leftists to see white workers in the U.S. struggling against their own country’s government as essentially fifth columnists for the anti-colonial revolution in the Third World rather than as part of a shared proletarian struggle for self-emancipation. And despite highlighting a gesture of solidarity from a North Vietnamese apparatchik to a black nationalist militant, Sarkar does not seem to recognize the role of such events in whitewashing Stalinist regimes and movements in the Third World, or to consider how such politics in even more degenerated form might have shaped present-day, “campist” forms of anti-imperialism, especially those that romanticize armed struggle.21 Indeed, I would push the point about whitewashing one step further: the “anti-imperialism” that Sarkar praises was one of the primary means by which Stalinism ideologically sustained the lie that the World Revolution was still going on.
My point here is not simply to find the New Left wanting. However imperfectly, the New Left possessed some sense of its historical condition, marked by the sundering of theory from practice, and of its task of recovering that which history had liquidated. And compared to the generations of the Left that followed them, the New Left had genuinely broad horizons for social and political change. But if perfunctorily dismissing the New Left would be one error, another would be failing to think seriously about why the New Left was not able to find an adequate response to the problems of the post-20s and 30s Old Left, and why the New Left ultimately degenerated into resignation and abdication. That is what Sarkar’s book fails to do. Indeed, it’s quite striking that the main examples Sarkar reaches back to for contemporary guidance are from the post-68 New Left, that is, from a period when the New Left had already fractured and degraded.
Thus, Sarkar’s book is symptomatic of the experience of the Millennial Left. It is not just that the book continues the broader Millennial Left trend of looking back to the New Left for answers while failing to learn from the New Left’s mistakes. It is that, much like those New SDSers in the early years of the Millennial Left, Sarkar does not seem to even recognize many of the problems she identifies with the contemporary Left as problems of the New Left that have persisted into the 21st century.22 By recognizing symptoms of the Left’s regression only (or at least predominantly) from the 80s onwards — that is, only from the transition to neoliberalism onwards — Sarkar obscures the deeper history of these symptoms. Perhaps more to the point, she obscures how much of that later regression itself flowed from the New Left’s own failure to constitute itself as a Left in the first place.
At this point, it’s worth remarking on the broader framing of Sarkar’s analysis: that of “minority elites” strategically maintaining their own power. This is something else Minority Rule has in common with previous books on the trajectory of identity politics since the 70s, perhaps most obviously Táíwò’s Elite Capture.23Since Sarkar explicitly holds out the possibility of a society beyond elites, it would be unfair to treat her chosen conceptual language of “elite” versus “mass” as an imprint of the originally Right-wing elite theory that such terminology is associated with. After all, elite theory presumes that an elite is a permanent fixture for any political community.24 Most probably, Sarkar has inherited a certain bourgeois-radical conception of a parasite elite that needs to be done away with, doubtless shaped in part by the rhetoric of “the 99%” versus “the 1%” coined during the 2011 Occupy movement that was a formative experience for much of the Millennial Left. And, in the absence of a mass workers’ movement and party for socialism, understanding society in terms of different elites replacing each other gains a certain empirical plausibility. Still, despite attempting to articulate a Marxist class perspective as her own and repeatedly emphasizing the need to rebuild class consciousness, Sarkar never seems to acknowledge that, despite a superficial similarity, divisions of society into elite and mass do not correspond to class in a Marxist sense. As D. L. Jacobs puts it, “That there is a Left today that uses the terms ‘ruling elite’ and ‘ruling class’ interchangeably means a regression below the horizon of class struggle.”25 And even if it’s not intended to do so, emphasizing an “elite” often slides into or reinforces a conspiratorial view of capitalism as something imposed from above by a shadowy cabal of the powerful.26
In a curiously located set of passages, Sarkar cites the American and French Revolutions as examples of how, prior to the development of capitalism and the working class, “all great upheavals in the world had been driven by one section of the elite toppling another” (64). She proceeds to assert that “The French Revolution was about the city rich overthrowing the landed aristocracy, and the American War of Independence was more about keeping tasty colony revenues for themselves than any lofty Enlightenment ideals” (64). Sarkar frames this as an explanation of a previously quoted passage from The Communist Manifesto.27 While one can see how, when read in isolation, the relevant passage might appear to say what Sarkar believes it to say, in reality, the understanding of the bourgeois revolutions that Sarkar asserts here and attributes to Marx and Engels is a product of Stalinist historiography, reframed in language redolent of elite theory.
Marx, Engels, and other important thinkers in pre-Stalinist Marxism instead saw the bourgeois revolutions in terms of the rise of bourgeois social relations and the emergence of what is sometimes termed “commercial society.”28 This does not only mean the ascent of an economic class of merchants; it means a more thoroughgoing transformation of society from the end of the Middle Ages as relations based on free labor (as opposed to the unfree labor of serfdom) emerged and became predominant: the coming into being of a society where social life was primarily mediated by the sale of labor and its products. Without an understanding of the bourgeois revolutions that grasps this long-term development of bourgeois social relations that culminated in the armed, revolutionary conflicts themselves, one misses not only how feudal social relations came into crisis in the first place, but also how there even came to be a political conflict between those who saw untapped potentials for freedom within society that needed to be developed and those who opposed this. It also obscures what Marxism inherited from the bourgeois-revolutionary tradition, as well as the nature of capitalism itself as the self-contradiction of bourgeois society, that is, as the contradiction of bourgeois social relations and industrial forces of production.29
To be clear, I’m not accusing Sarkar of being a closet Stalinist. However, these uninterrogated assumptions in Sarkar’s understanding of society and history do point to a certain repetition of symptoms on the Left. Importantly, these symptoms are traceable to the Popular Front via the New Left. This is because the work of historians in and around the Communist Parties in the 1940s–50s that cemented the Stalinist understanding of the bourgeois revolutions became integrated into a progressive historiography coming out of, among other things, the New Deal: a historiographical Popular Front, if you will.30 In an ironic twist given the New Left’s emergence as a challenge to the New Deal coalition, in the 60s, New Leftists picked up elements of this Stalinist-progressive approach to history, stressing the importance of categories like white supremacy and patriarchy as they turned towards recovering historically marginalized people in an increasingly sentimental, moralistic, and affirmative manner.31 In other words, Sarkar again does not seem to notice how her own attempt at a critical account of the Left’s regression into contemporary identity politics is itself encumbered by many of the same errors and blind-spots inherited from the New Left and Old Left that enabled contemporary identity politics.
Of course, a skeptical reader might accept that Sarkar’s analysis of the Millennial Left’s symptoms is deeply flawed and unoriginal and that this analysis is itself symptomatic of several major problems that the Millennial Left received from the New Left, but still find Sarkar’s aim valuable. After all, isn’t Sarkar’s intention to help build a healthier Left that can take up material, working-class concerns like housing on the one hand, and identity-group concerns like trans rights on the other, in a way that reveals their interconnections beyond the level of the individual and unites the vast majority of people in contemporary capitalist society against their common exploiters and oppressors? And didn’t Lenin famously remark that it is important to be a “tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of people it affects”?32 Certainly many readers who share my frustrations with Sarkar’s account would also share her exasperations with the politics of grievance and victimhood. Nevertheless, the commonsensical appeal of Sarkar’s basic message that the Left needs to build large coalitions of diverse groups can easily occlude the vital matter of how one thinks and goes about this. There remains Lenin’s “who-whom” question: who is the subject and who is the object of political action?
This is why I have emphasized the numerous points in Sarkar’s analysis where the specter of the Popular Front lurks in the background. Many socialists and communists who participated in the Popular Front sincerely believed that they were advancing the cause of socialism. In reality, they were advancing the self-liquidation of Marxism and independent, socialist, working-class action: a self-liquidation from which the Left has never recovered. Instead of the ostensibly socialist and proletarian Left using the petty-bourgeois democrats, the petty-bourgeois democrats have time and again used — and ruthlessly disposed of — the ostensibly socialist and proletarian Left. Time and again, this has meant lowering the Left’s political horizons to merely better managing capitalism and its discontents. At the time of writing this review, “Left” social media is jubilantly greeting Democratic Socialists of America member Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic primary for the New York mayoral election — the lessons of the Millennial Left’s failures memory-holed to further the conflation of socialism with progressivism and the liquidation of the would-be Left into the Democrats. Tellingly the would-be Left is doing this in terms that strongly echo what Sarkar advocates, lauding Mamdani for forming a coalition that speaks to the concerns of the working class and of women and minorities.
To avoid the same self-liquidation, any future attempt to reconstitute the Left would need an honest reckoning with how the regressions of both the Old Left and the New Left brought us to our current moment and continue to ideologically encumber the would-be Left in the forms of both identity politics and welfare statism. While Sarkar’s book might provide interesting examples of these ideological encumbrances for a critical reader to dissect, ultimately her analysis is too weighed down by those same encumbrances to provide that needed reckoning. |P
1 See, e.g., Asad Haider, Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology (London: Verso, 2022 [2018]); Touré F. Reed, Toward Freedom: The Case Against Race Reductionism (London: Verso, 2020); Nancy Leong, Identity Capitalists: The Powerful Insiders Who Exploit Diversity to Maintain Inequality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021); Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022). For a review of the latter three of these books, see Ridhiman Balaji, “Identity politics in America: A review-essay,” Platypus Review 166 (May 2024), <https://platypus1917.org/2024/05/01/identity-politics-in-america-a-review-essay/>.
2 I didn’t like it.
3 Chris Cutrone, “The Millennial Left is dead,” Platypus Review 100 (October 2017), <https://platypus1917.org/2017/10/01/millennial-left-dead>.
4 “Combahee River Collective Statement” (April 1977), <https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/combahee-river-collective-statement/>.
5 Mike Macnair, “Intersectionalism, the highest stage of western Stalinism?”, Critique 46, no. 4 (December 2018): 546.
6 Ibid., 546–48.
7 This contrasts with the older Third International policy of the United Front, which sought to bring together the forces of the Left and the labor movement in particular and to win leadership over the mass working-class base of the reformist parties.
8 Macnair, “Intersectionalism,” 551.
9 Pamela C. Nogales C., “The cancel wars: The legacy of the cultural turn in the age of Trump,” Platypus Review 131 (November 2020).
<https://platypus1917.org/2020/11/01/the-cancel-wars-the-legacy-of-the-cultural-turn-in-the-age-of-trump>.
10 Ibid.
11 For reasons of space and focus, I can’t explore this point in detail here, but one important bridge between Popular Frontism in the 30s and identity politics in the 21st century would be Eurocommunism in the 1970s and 80s, which advocated a cross-class Popular Alliance rooted in the New Social Movements.
12 One can trace Third Worldism in general to the 1929 Sixth Congress of the Third International, which prioritized the struggle for national liberation and against imperialism over the struggle between classes, neatly dividing the world into countries where the immediate aim was working-class rule and countries where it instead was the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.”
13 Mao’s essays that are popular points of reference among New Left Third Worldists include “On Contradiction” (1937), “The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War” (1938), and “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People” (1957).
14 Ian Birchall, “The Third World and After,” New Left Review 80 (Mar/Apr 2013): 151–60.
15 Robin D.G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 1, no. 4 (1999): 8.
16 David Friedman, “The Roots of Repression,” Independent Socialist 13 (October 1969): 10, <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workerspower/is13.pdf>; Tom Milstein, “A Perspective on the Panthers,” Commentary (September 1970).
17 An important intellectual resource for this notion was the “dependency theory” outlined by scholars associated with the Monthly Review magazine and publishing house in the 1950s–70s, such as Paul A. Baran, Paul Sweezy, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Dependency theory claims that underdeveloped countries on the “periphery” have to sell resources like raw materials to advanced countries in the “core,” who then transform them into finished goods, leaving the underdeveloped countries to purchase them at high prices, thereby depleting the capital they might otherwise have devoted to developing their own productive capacity.
18 See Jack Weinberg and Jack Gerson, “SDS and the Movement: Where Do We Go from Here?,” and Jesse Lemisch, “‘If You Gotta Ask, Man, You’ll Never Know,’” Independent Socialist 12 (September 1969): 7, <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/workerspower/is12.pdf>.
19 Ibid.
20 On the politics of SDS and wider student activism in the U.S. in this period, see Pamela C. Nogales C., Carlos J. Pereira Di Salvo, and Laurie Rojas, “Politics of the contemporary student Left,” Platypus Review 15 (September 2009), <https://platypus1917.org/2009/09/30/politics-of-the-contemporary-student-left/>.
21 For an astute analysis of this, see Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 19, no.1 (2006): 93–110.
22 On the New SDS’s failure to recognize the persistence of the New Left’s problems, see Laurie Rojas, “The culture wars in the age of Trump,” Platypus Review 131 (November 2020), <https://platypus1917.org/2020/11/01/the-culture-wars-in-the-age-of-trump/>.
23 See Balaji, “Identity politics in America.”
24 This is perhaps most apparent in the Italian elite theorist Vilfredo Pareto’s concept of the “circulation of elites.” Pareto introduced this in his Trattato di Sociologia Generale (1916), published in English as The Mind and Society (1935).
25 D. L. Jacobs, “On Parvini's The Populist Delusion,” Sublation(July 16, 2025), <https://www.sublationmag.com/post/on-parvini-s-the-populist-delusion>.
26 This is perhaps most obvious in antisemitic understandings of capitalism.
27 The passage in question is from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” in The Communist Manifesto (1848), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/>: “All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority.”
28 For a thorough explanation of this and other points I summarize in this paragraph, see James M. Vaughn, “1776 in world history: The American Revolution as bourgeois revolution,” Platypus Review 62 (December 2013 – January 2014), <https://platypus1917.org/2013/12/15/1776-in-world-history/>.
29 Chris Cutrone, “Capital and labor,” Platypus Review 126 (May 2020), <https://platypus1917.org/2020/05/01/capital-and-labor/>.
30 I have in mind works like Christopher Hill’s The English Revolution, 1640 (1940) and Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution (1939) that put forward the view of a city-based merchant class developing in the womb of feudal society who came to experience the feudal mode of production as a fetter on its aspirations and profitability, leading it to break through this fetter by launching a political revolution. I thank James Vaughn for the phrase “historiographical Popular Front.”
31 For an account of aspects of this development in the context of labor history, including how the New Left English historian E. P. Thompson inspired Left-wing histories to put forward what the Hungarian Marxist philosopher G. M. Tamás called an “angelic view of the exploited,” see Will Stratford, “Labor history and the Left,” Platypus Review 149 (September 2022), <https://platypus1917.org/2022/09/01/labor-history-and-the-left/>.
32 V. I. Lenin, “Trade-Unionist Politics And Social-Democratic Politics,” in What is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/>.
