Corrected 22 August 2026. This article originally described an exchange between Judy Cox and Marc James Léger as a debate. It was not one. Cox’s piece appeared in International Socialism 186 in May 2025; Léger replied in International Socialism 189 in December 2025 and, at greater length, in Communis in the same month, four months before this article was published, and this article took account of neither. Two characterisations that followed from that failure have been corrected below and are set out in full in the afterword.
TL;DR: Léger is right about zoological materialism. Cox is right about Lenin. Neither is right enough. People do not radicalise in the abstract: they radicalise through a particular injustice, in a particular body, in a particular situation. The job of the revolutionary left is not to tell them their experience is secondary. It is to stand with them until the system comes into view.The 2026 Oscar ceremony cost more to stage than the annual budget of most trade union federations in the Global South. That is not an incidental detail. It is the beginning of the analysis.
Two debates have been grinding against each other on the international left since Trump’s re-election, and the annual spectacle of the Academy Awards brings both into sharp focus. The first is the argument between Judy Cox, writing in International Socialism, and the Marxist cultural theorist Marc James Léger: whether postmodern identity politics strengthens or weakens the capacity of the working class to fight. The second is the argument buried inside that one, which neither Cox nor Léger quite resolves: whether the left’s strategic task is to subordinate questions of oppression to class unity, or to build class unity through the practice of mutual solidarity. The Oscars, that meticulously produced ritual of the Dream Factory, happen to illuminate both.
The Material Base First
Start with what the Oscars ceremony will not tell you. The film industry in 2026 has completed what Ernest Mandel, in Late Capitalism, would recognise as the full technofeudal turn: platform capital extracting rent from creative data and labor, generative AI substituting dead labor for living labor, below-the-line workers negotiating the terms of their own redundancy in office parks while above-the-line talent competes for statues on television. The organic composition of capital in Hollywood has risen sharply. The source of value production is being systematically undermined. The writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023 were not an aberration; they were a preview of a structural shift that the Academy’s diversity commitments do nothing to address and everything to obscure.
This is the terrain. Not the speeches. Not the representation statistics. The terrain.
Cox argues that Marxists must confront oppression directly, as a component of class struggle, not a distraction from it. Léger argues that postmodern identity politics has colonised the left’s strategic imagination, substituting symbolic representation for material transformation, and that this has weakened the capacity to fight. Both are partly right. Neither is right enough.
Léger’s Partial Truth
Léger is correct on the structural point. A diverse boardroom at a streaming monopoly is not liberation. The Academy’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives function precisely as what Herbert Marcuse identified as repressive tolerance: the system incorporates the challenge, digests it, and excretes it as brand strategy. Mark Zuckerberg dismantling Sheryl Sandberg’s DEI programmes the moment Trump made it commercially advantageous to do so is not an accident or a betrayal. It is the system working exactly as designed. Neoliberal identity politics was always a management strategy, not a movement one.
Léger reaches for a Trotsky concept that sounds, to contemporary ears, deeply strange: zoological materialism. In his 1933 analysis of National Socialism, Trotsky used the term to describe politics grounded in ontology rather than political commitment — identity as biology, identity as fixed essence, identity as something people possess rather than something they make together through struggle. The language carries the particular contempt of a man who watched fascism mobilise workers against each other along lines of race and nation rather than against the class that exploited them all. One hundred years on, the phrasing jars. The underlying diagnosis does not.
One qualification, since this article originally leaned on the phrase harder than its author does. Léger uses “zoological materialism” narrowly, to show that race reductionism has a history before Touré Reed named it. It is not the keystone of his position, and he is right to say that a summary of him resting this much weight on it is a summary that has not read him.
What Trotsky was identifying — and what Léger correctly extends into the contemporary moment — is the mechanism by which the ruling class deploys identity to prevent the formation of class consciousness. Not by inventing racism or sexism or homophobia: those structures are real, material, and independently devastating. But by ensuring that the political response to those structures remains trapped within an identitarian frame that addresses the symptom while leaving the system intact. The Oscars do this with extraordinary efficiency. More Black directors on the prestige slate. More women winning best picture. Meanwhile, the studios automate the camera operators, the editors, the visual effects artists out of existence. The symbolic victory is real. The class war is invisible.
So far, Léger is right. The problem is what he does with the insight.
Where Léger Goes Wrong
The conclusion Léger draws — that socialist strategy must refocus on universal issues of labour rights, employment, housing, healthcare — is not wrong in itself. It becomes wrong the moment it functions as an instruction to subordinate the specific struggles of the oppressed to a class politics abstractly defined in advance. Cox cites Lenin against Léger, and here she is on solid ground: working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse, no matter what class is affected. This is not supplementary to the strategic question. It is the strategic question.
The awards season provides a precise test case. When Hattie McDaniel collected her Oscar in 1940, she did so from a segregated table at the back of the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel — the hotel had a strict no-Blacks policy and David O. Selznick had to call in a favour simply to get her through the door. She was contractually excluded from the premiere of the film she starred in. Those were real material conditions, not discursive ones. When the Academy’s membership was revealed in 2012 to be 94 percent white and 77 percent male, the films that got made, the stories that were funded, the perspectives that were treated as universal — all of this had material consequences for whose experience was rendered intelligible and whose was not. The subsequent campaign that forced the Academy to reform its membership, imperfect and co-optable as it has proved, was a genuine movement victory. To describe it as merely identitarian distraction would be bankruptcy masquerading as rigour.
[Corrected 22 August 2026. This paragraph originally compared Léger’s position to George Galloway’s and described it as asking the oppressed to wait. Both characterisations were taken from Cox without checking them against Léger’s own work, and neither survives that check. See the afterword.] Léger’s position is not that sectional concerns should wait. He distinguishes identity politics, which he attacks, from anti-oppression struggles, which he does not, and he states that his critique “does not refer to women’s struggles, struggles for civil rights, anti-imperialist liberation struggles or struggles for Indigenous sovereignty.” The disagreement is real, but it lies elsewhere and is worth stating precisely rather than caricaturing. It is about how a particular struggle becomes a universal one: whether by a class constituting itself across its own divisions through the struggles it actually mounts, or by a socialist universality carried into those struggles from outside them. That is the argument, and the rest of this piece takes a side in it.
Cox’s Partial Truth and Its Limits
Cox, by contrast, insists that oppression must be confronted directly and argues convincingly that the right’s intersectionality of hate — its coalition of racists and transphobes and climate deniers, held together by the symbolic glue of anti-gender ideology — cannot be overcome with identity politics alone. She is right. Judith Butler’s analysis of how the far right constructs “gender” as a phantasm that mobilises disparate reactionary forces is genuinely useful here. The film industry has its own version: the culture warrior who claims the Oscars have been captured by the woke mob, who treats diversity nominees as an existential threat to Western civilisation, who can in the same breath support an industry that pays its cleaners poverty wages and its stars eight-figure fees. This is intersectionality of hate performing its characteristic conjuring trick: making the audience look at the diversity hire instead of the wage theft.
But Cox does not fully resolve the problem either. Her answer — build the biggest movement against racism and link it to anti-capitalism — is formally correct and strategically inert without an account of how that unity is actually built in practice. France has seen successive waves of industrial and social struggle over three decades, as Cox herself notes, and the Rassemblement National has continued to grow. Naming the enemy is not sufficient. The question is what organisational and political practice actually produces the unity that slogans proclaim.
There is also an institutional problem that Cox cannot avoid by insisting on the SWP’s anti-oppression credentials. The 2013 rape allegation crisis exposed, with brutal clarity, what happens when a revolutionary organisation substitutes internal bureaucracy for democratic accountability, prioritises the apparatus over the membership, and treats the complaints of women as a threat to organisational unity. That history does not invalidate Cox’s political arguments. It does mean the SWP is not the vehicle for the synthesis she is pointing toward.
Solidarity as Method: What the Oscars Actually Teach Us
Here is what the Dream Factory teaches, if you watch it closely enough. People do not typically radicalise in the abstract. They radicalise through the specific experience of their own oppression and exploitation: the woman who cannot get a directing credit despite her evident talent; the Black actor told his face is not commercial enough for the international market; the below-the-line worker who discovers, through the strike, that solidarity across craft divisions produces collective power that individual grievance cannot. Radicalisation does not begin with class as a theoretical category. It begins with a particular injustice experienced in a particular body in a particular situation.
This is what Trotsky understood about the law of uneven and combined development, and what Mandel applied to cultural politics: capitalism does not develop uniformly, and neither does consciousness. It fuses archaic oppressions with the most advanced forms of exploitation. The woman fighting for equal pay on a film set and the visual effects artist fighting against AI automation of her labour are not fighting the same fight. They are fighting different expressions of the same system. The question is whether the left has the political capacity to make that connection intelligible to both of them, through practice rather than proclamation.
Mutual solidarity is the answer to the Cox/Léger impasse — not as a slogan but as a method. Not class first, then identity. Not identity politics as an autonomous sphere. But the patient, material practice of standing with people in their specific struggle while arguing for the connections that make collective power possible. The 2023 Hollywood strikes produced moments of genuine cross-craft solidarity, with WGA pickets joined by Teamsters, IATSE members and SAG-AFTRA simultaneously on the line for the first time since 1960. Those moments do not happen because someone has resolved the theoretical question of identity versus class. They happen because people in motion discover that the person next to them on the picket line, who looks different and experiences the industry differently, shares an interest in the same victory.
This is what “zoological materialism” points toward, almost a century after Trotsky coined the phrase. Not a dismissal of the specific experiences of the oppressed, but a warning: the moment identity becomes ontology rather than politics, the moment it becomes fixed essence rather than the beginning of a conversation about shared interests, it is available for capture. Available for corporate branding. Available for the ruling class to deploy, as it deploys everything, as a mechanism for preventing exactly the solidarity that would threaten it.
The Stage and the Factory
The 2026 Oscars asked, as they always ask, who wins the statue. The ceremony will be watched, live and in recordings, by tens of millions of people who work in industries that are automating them out of existence, who live in cities where housing costs consume more than half their income, who voted for — or chose not to vote against — demagogues who promised to protect them from the liberal elite. Some of those people will see a diverse slate of winners and feel represented. Others will see the same slate and feel that the liberal establishment has confirmed everything they were told about it. Both responses are, in their different ways, exactly what the Dream Factory is designed to produce.
The socialist response is neither. It is to point at the below-the-line workers, the technicians and writers and editors whose labour makes the spectacle possible and who are being systematically replaced by algorithms. To recognise that the campaign for Black representation in the Academy was a genuine movement victory while insisting that it is insufficient. To take seriously, as Cox does, that oppression requires political confrontation, while insisting, as Léger does, that political confrontation without a class analysis of the system producing that oppression leads nowhere that the system fears.
The synthesis is not a compromise between Cox and Léger. It is a supersession of the false choice both leave on the table. People radicalise through their immediate experience. That is a fact, not a concession. Mutual solidarity — standing with others in their specific struggle, learning from it, building trust through it — is how immediate experience becomes collective power. The liberation of each is the condition for the liberation of all: not as a slogan borrowed from socialist universalism, but as an organisational practice tested on picket lines, in tenant assemblies, in the 9pm meeting that runs long because someone has finally said the thing that needed saying.
The question is not who wins the statue. It is who owns the stage, who built it, who cleans it, and whether they know yet that they are standing on the same floor.
Afterword, 22 August 2026, revised the same day.
The record of what was corrected. Five things, in the order they were found.
The title said Cox and Léger “debated.” They did not. Cox published a critique in International Socialism 186 in May 2025; Léger answered in International Socialism 189 in December 2025 and at greater length at Communis in the same month. He says he tried to contact Cox and had no reply. The title was changed on 22 August.
The comparison with George Galloway was borrowed from Cox and had no basis in anything Léger has written. Withdrawn on 7 May and struck in the body of the article, not only at its foot, on 22 August.
The claim that his framework asks the oppressed to wait was also taken from Cox, and his published work disclaims it. Corrected in the body on 22 August.
This afterword’s own account of the Zhenotdel was wrong, and is corrected below.
The article’s closing line, that the question is not who wins the statue but who owns the stage, is left standing in the body because it is what the article argued, but this afterword now judges it wrong and says why.
This article was published in March 2026 and was wrong in ways that its own standards should have caught. The reason is simple and worth stating rather than dressing up: it was written four months after Léger’s answer to Cox appeared, and it did not read it. His position was reconstructed from his critic. Two of the characterisations that followed came from her rather than from him, and neither survives contact with his own text.
What he actually argues is this. Emancipation is universal or it is nothing, and a politics organised around identity as such tends to be captured, most visibly by the Democratic Party, which has spent two decades offering representation in place of redistribution. He distinguishes sharply between identity politics, which he attacks, and what he calls anti-oppression identity struggles, which he does not, writing that his critique “does not refer to women’s struggles, struggles for civil rights, anti-imperialist liberation struggles or struggles for Indigenous sovereignty.” He rejects, in terms, the red-brown populism the Galloway comparison implied. Whatever one concludes about the argument, it is not a demand that anyone wait.
The disagreement that remains is worth stating properly, because it is not the one this article staged.
Léger’s answer to the question of how particular struggles become universal runs through the universality itself. What mediates the interests of contending particulars, he argues, is either a capitalist universality or a socialist one, and the socialist task is to carry the second into every struggle rather than to accumulate struggles and hope a universal emerges. He is consistent about the consequence: “The socialist position is not to stand alongside people in their specific struggle, in a logic of allyship. The socialist position takes a Marxist or class line on all struggles and oppressions.” That is a direct hit on this article’s proposed synthesis, mutual solidarity as method, and the hit lands. Allyship logic is liberal, not socialist, and an argument that reduces to standing next to people has not answered the question.
The answer this article should have given is not allyship, and it is not his either. It is in the tradition both of us argue from. Ernest Mandel, in The Leninist Theory of Organisation, sets out three layers of the class in which action, experience and consciousness arrive in different orders: for the revolutionary cadre, consciousness first and then action; for the advanced workers, experience, then consciousness, then action; and for the broad masses, action, then experience, then consciousness. From which he draws the conclusion that governs the whole question: “The broad masses learn only through action. To hope to ‘impart’ to them revolutionary consciousness through propaganda is an endeavour worthy of Sisyphus, and as fruitless.”
Read the disagreement against that and it stops being class versus identity and becomes a question about the order in which consciousness arrives. The demand that a struggle first situate itself in the socialist universal, and only then count, is the cadre’s order of arrival offered to a layer for whom the order runs the other way. It is propaganda addressed to an audience that can only be reached by agitation. The masses move on the grievance in front of them, which is always a particular one and is very often the wage that is lower, the queue that is longer, the border that will not open. That motion is not a detour around the universal. On Mandel’s account it is the only road to it.
And organising on that terrain is not allyship at all. It does not place socialists alongside women as external supporters. The case made in the Fourth International’s 1979 resolution, and carried forward in the tradition this publication writes from, is that women’s liberation is a constitutive condition of socialist transformation, because women are in the class and their oppression is a class question fought on the terrain of social reproduction. Léger’s own formulation makes the point for him: it is not socialists on one side and women on the other.
A word of precision that the first version of this afterword got wrong. It described “the Zhenotdel and the autonomous women’s movement” together as class organisational forms, which welded two different things and misdescribed the first. The Zhenotdel was not an autonomous movement. It was a department of the Party Secretariat, founded in 1919, run by Inessa Armand and then Kollontai, with branches attached to party committees, and the women in it called themselves socialists or communists while defining themselves consciously against bourgeois feminism. “Socialist feminism” is a term of the 1970s, not of theirs. What the Zhenotdel shows is narrower and more useful: that a revolutionary party found it necessary to build a specific instrument to work on the terrain of reproduction, inside its own structures, and that the counter-revolution closed it in 1930. Whether a women’s movement should be independent of the parties is a separate question belonging to 1979 and after, and it answers a different situation.
That is the argument this article should have made, and it will be made at length elsewhere. What is owed here is the correction, not the rest of the case.
A last point, on which this article was told it was wrong and now thinks it was. Léger objected that the closing line, about who owns the stage rather than who wins the statue, is “not Marxist in the least,” and he named the primer: Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski’s Marx and Engels on Literature and Art. Having read Morawski’s introduction, the objection holds.
The relevant argument is what Morawski calls unequal development. The idea of progress, he writes, “must be qualified by recognition that there has been an unequal development of the cultural as compared with the economic and technical fields,” and we would “be completely perplexed in describing and estimating historically early art if we assumed its attainment must correspond to the material level in its time.” Marx on Greek art is the classical warrant. Art, on this account, “emerges and functions as a specific mode of the social consciousness,” and Morawski distinguishes two Marxian emphases on how class conditions it, calling the deterministic one, in which the work simply conforms to a class ideology, the less adequate. Balzac is the standing case: his royalist convictions “did not prevent him as a novelist from portraying contemporary French society with a breadth and acuity which offered a major indictment of royalist politics.”
Set the closing line against that and the fault is not the one this article previously admitted. Comparing the cost of a ceremony to the budgets of union federations was indeed a gesture rather than an analysis, but the deeper error was the opposition itself. Not the statue but the stage sets the aesthetic against the material and treats the artwork as cover for something realer behind it. That is the reduction Morawski names, and it throws away the thing a Marxist criticism is supposed to be able to read.
What survives is worth keeping and does not need the reduction. The industry is automating the people who make the films. The awards discourse obscures that. The Academy’s diversity reforms were a real victory and a co-optable one. None of that requires setting the statue against the stage, and the line that did should not have been written.
*Sources: Judy Cox, “Class struggle and identity politics in the era of Trump,” International Socialism 186 (13 May 2025). Marc James Léger, “Postmodern identity politics will not solve the crises of capitalism: a reply to my critics in the Socialist Workers Party,” International Socialism 189 (December 2025); “In Defence of Marxism,” Communis (2 December 2025); Class Struggle and Identity Politics: A Guide (Routledge, 2024); Identity Trumps Socialism (Routledge, 2023). Ernest Mandel, The Leninist Theory of Organisation, the chapter “Proletarian class struggle and proletarian class consciousness” and ch. X, “Historical pedagogy and communication of class consciousness.” Fourth International, “Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women’s Liberation” (11th World Congress, 1979). Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, eds., Marx and Engels on Literature and Art (Telos Press, 1973).*
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Judy Cox and I never debated one another, although I did try to contact Cox, with no reply. Not only that but the public secret that has been orchestrated around me often causes me to be sceptical of who is who and what is what, especially when it comes to phoney attack pieces meant to put out misconceptions about my work that outlive their refutations.
It's not worthwhile for me to respond to this Red Mole Substack article in detail because it does not begin to try to address my work - same problem as Judy Cox in fact. As far as George Galloway is concerned, this is a ridiculous accusation by Cox that has been lazily repeated in this article, with no substance to the claim, and a charge of class reductionism that is addressed in my reply to Cox published in International Socialism. The argument I make is along the lines of Ellen Meiksins Wood that class is central but not exclusive. Just take Engels' The Origin of the Family and already you have a more complicated picture than the one presented here, and unlike most post-Left thinkers I have no intention of moving backward from the radical leftist canon. The often repeated argument made in this article that women or racial groups etc do not want to wait until after the revolution for their issues to be addressed is not a Marxist or Leninist argument, or a Trotskyist one for that matter, it's a petty-bourgeois argument that I reject. The example of the Bolshevik Revolution, in the early stages until Stalinism took over, is the simplest refutation of that cliché argument - and my reply to Cox mentions Martha Gimenez in that regard, so please do your homework before you pretend to correct me.
A longer reply to Cox than the one the that International Socialism allowed was published on the Communis website: https://communispress.com/in-defence-of-marxism/. My work and my position can't be summed up with a few one liners, not even the notion of zoological materialism. For example, how does that concept, which I use to suggest that Touré Reed did not invent the concept of race reductionism (which for him has implications of later historical developments), relate to Alain Badiou's critique of democratic materialism, or Slavoj Zizek's essay argument in "Postmodernism or Class Struggle, Yes Please," or the critique of post-politics or of autonomist Marxism, just off the top? These are issues that concern me and that are integral to my work even if they are off the radar of reviewers like this one.
If someone wants to know what I think, they could read my last four books on the subject: Class Struggle and Identity Politics, the edited anthology Identity Trumps Socialism: The Class and Identity Debate after Neoliberalism, Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation, and Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (only the version on my academia page is free of typos that were hacked into the final print version).
People who know me know that I've been at work on a book in film studies for some time, with a long essay on Sean Baker's Anora and SRT which took me over one year to research. People could at least wait until the book is published to comment on the manuscript that is in progress. In any case I reject the claim that it's not who wins the Oscar statue that's important but the stage they are standing on. That's not Marxist in the least. That is the kind of nonsense matterism that passes for materialism these days. Moreover, my work does not asses what is important in culture on who wins the awards - and I wrote something to this effect after Macklemore was ignored in almost all of the end of year lists in 2024.
To put things simply on the class and identity discussion, I reject both the "either or" class or identity position, as well as the "do both" class and identity logic that you find for example in intersectionality - there are countless other examples.
Please do me a favour and drop the Galloway comparison. This is a caricature by Red Mole Substack, repeated from Cox, which shows that the said mole is not burrowing but staying on the surface and pretending to burrow. Do some reading before blathering please.
It's very good article Duncan. It is a really helpful guide to reflection on practice. Thanks