SWP's Judy Cox Debates Marc James Léger: Identity, Class & the Dream Factory

The Statue and the Strike

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.

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.

Léger’s framework, pushed to its logical conclusion, produces something uncomfortably close to the George Galloway position: class issues are universal, identity issues are sectional, and sectional concerns should wait. They will not wait. They cannot wait. And a left that asks them to will find, as it has repeatedly found, that the people being asked to wait have correctly identified the request as a form of domination wearing a red rosette.

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.

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Post-script, 7 May 2026: I was not aware that Marc James Léger had replied to Judy Cox's original piece in International Socialism, at greater length in Communis. Having read that reply, one correction to the above is necessary. The comparison between Léger's position and George Galloway's was borrowed from Cox without independent substantiation from Léger's own work. That was a failure of the rigorous characterisation standard this publication claims to hold, and it should not have appeared. Léger explicitly rejects Wagenknecht's red-brown populism and has never written in support of Galloway's politics; it was the SWP, not Léger, that entered the Respect coalition, and defended him at his most indefensible. The comparison is withdrawn. The substantive disagreement, between two conceptions of how socialist universalism is built in practice, remains real and will be addressed in a separate piece.

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