[thrown_22]

That's been the case for quite a while. Especially US Marxists:

>The key struggle of workers is that of getting enough minority representation in corporate board rooms.

Like the problem with the Irish Potato famine being that Queen Victoria wasn't queer enough.

[nopenopenopeno]

Identity politics are antithetical to Marxism. Marxists focus on class.

[thrown_22]

Yes, I wish someone would explain this to US Marxists. Go to any university and see what the Marxists club is like.

>I'm a bi trans demi boy who is disabled due to anxiety and also the president of the society. Anyone who doesn't sleep with me is transphobic.

>>Ok but what about helping organize the proletariat?

>Ew, they are reactionary bigots who we need to deplatformed.

>>...

>You seem problematic. You're not allowed back here until you write an apology for the original land owners and sleep with me.

[rsj_hn]

Identity politics are antithetical to marxist theory but not necessarily to the marxist movements as they actually existed.

Here, things get more complicated because there were marxist movements all over the world, from Africa to Asia to Russia, and each had different motivations and often different goals.

In Russia, marxism was always about identity first and foremost, primarily the identity of various outcast/conquered groups: poles, jews, germans, lithuanians, etc. that were in the conquered regions in the Western part of the Empire - primarily the regions that used to be held by Poland. The abstruse economic theories served as a type of schelling point for a coalition of minorites against the Russian Orthodox majority, and after the revolution there was a systematic effort to suppress Russian identity and replace it with a new "Soviet" identity -- e.g. if you look at the list of Soviet general secretaries, only one of them was Russian (although there is some debate as several of the secretaties had mysterious, and in some cases, clearly invented pasts). There were explicit anti-Russian policies put in place, for example there were communist parties in all the provinces except the Russian province, which had no communist party, and thus no road for advancement except to join the overall Soviet Communist Party, but that preferenced non-Russians for membership.

Similarly when the Soviets drew the borders of various provinces, they explicitly made the minority provinces much larger, dragging in traditional Russian lands, even as they created local minority communist parties that barred Russians from participation, effectively meaning that 1/3 of Russians were living in an explicitly non-Russian province, even though often times they were the majority population in that province.

A good book that covers this topic in depth is Terry Martin's "Affirmative Action Empire" - https://www.amazon.com/Affirmative-Action-Empire-Nationalism...

At the same time, Marxism in other areas had a decidedly nationalist tone - for example in Africa, Indonesia, Vietnam or other nations fighting colonialism. Here, too, it was identity and nationalism that was the motivating factor and not the economic theories.

Really class-based movements are generally limited to the "West" -- e.g. Western Europe and North America. I'm not saying that class isn't important elsewhere, but when you look at what animates radical movements throughout the world, it's almost always race/religion/language that plays the dominant role, and this is as true for marxist movements as for other types of movements.