From Class to Culture: The Ideological Transformation of the Left and the Rise of Identity Politics

This paper examines the historical and ideological transformation of the political left from an orthodox Marxist, class-based movement to a culturally oriented constellation of identity politics. Drawing on the intellectual trajectory from the Soviet disclosures, through Repressive Tolerance, and toward contemporary intersectionality and lugar de fala theory, we trace the successive abandonment of the industrial working class as the privileged revolutionary subject and its replacement by an expanding catalogue of oppressed identity groups. We argue that this transition—accelerated by the failure of actually-existing socialism, the material improvement of the Western working class, and the New Left’s migration into the academy—generated a form of politics structurally disconnected from majority popular sentiment, thereby opening political space for the ascent of the radical right. The Brazilian political context is used as a contemporary case study illustrating both the global pattern and its specific regional dynamics, including the challenges posed by a highly religious society and a persistent institutional center (centrão). We conclude that both the republican left and republican right face comparable crises of popular representation, and that the polarization feeding on ressentiment may be traced to structural features inherent to identity-based political mobilization itself.