Alternative Leftism

In Pursuit of a Socialist America

The American left is at a crossroads. For decades, much of its energy has been trapped within the framework of identity politics, where struggles are defined primarily through categories of race, gender, or sexual orientation. While these struggles are real and rooted in centuries of oppression, the reduction of political life to identity has fragmented movements, weakened solidarity, and obscured the deeper force that drives inequality: capitalism.

We stand for a different path; an alternative left that centers the material struggle of the working class. The core division in our society is not between this or that identity group, but between those who labor and those who profit from labor. Capitalism creates and intensifies all forms of inequality, but its root logic is economic exploitation. To abolish oppression, we must abolish the system that sustains it.

This does not mean ignoring the lived experiences of disenfranchised minorities. Quite the opposite. Black, Brown, Indigenous, and immigrant communities bear the heaviest burdens of poverty, policing, incarceration, and environmental harm under capitalism. Women, queer, and trans people face unique forms of exploitation within workplaces, households, and the broader economy. Yet their struggles cannot be understood or overcome outside of the class system that profits from their dispossession. Real justice for oppressed groups is impossible without the transformation of society as a whole.

Identity politics as practiced in the liberal mainstream too often offers only symbolic recognition, corporate marketing, token representation, and empty gestures of “inclusion” while leaving the structures of exploitation intact. It divides the working class into isolated constituencies, each lobbying for narrow recognition rather than uniting for broad economic transformation. Alternative leftism rejects this model. We insist that the fight for racial justice, gender equality, and liberation of the marginalized must be fused to the struggle for housing, healthcare, education, jobs, and power over production.

Our politics are not about choosing one struggle over another, but about building a common front around the material conditions we all share. The factory worker in Detroit, the undocumented farmworker in California, the indebted student in New York, the single mother in Chicago’s South Side, all suffer under the same system of exploitation. Their particular challenges differ, but their liberation depends on a collective fight for economic freedom and power, not isolated battles over recognition.

This perspective is not new. The history of Marxism-Leninism, from its earliest days, has emphasized the universal character of class struggle while also acknowledging that capitalism exploits existing divisions of race, gender, and nation. What is new is the need to reassert this principle in an era when identity politics has become a substitute for material politics.

We believe that solidarity must be rooted in class, not as a way of ignoring difference, but as the only means of overcoming it. When workers stand together across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality, they gain strength. When they are divided into bitter groups, the ruling class wins.

Alternative leftism is therefore a call to rebuild a left that organizes people not as fragments of identity, but as members of a class with common material interests. It is a call for universal programs, living wages, healthcare, housing, education, and community power that benefit all, while paying special attention to the needs of those who have been historically excluded. It is a call to reject empty virtue signaling and demand concrete change. We fight not to diversify the ruling class, but to abolish it. We fight not to shuffle identities within capitalism, but to end capitalism itself. Only then can all people, regardless of who they are, truly become free.