"Don't tread on my identity, for your difference oppresses me" (said the bourgeois).

Identity politics fails because it treats inequality (of wealth, though exploitation, or power, through domination) as difference.  In this it actually presumes the irrelevance of structural inequalities), which is systematically reduces to matters of difference. 

The remedy for all structural injustices then becomes the mixture of representation and moralism that defines so much of bourgeois political thought.  The ‘oppressed’ group identifies with itself, or the Idea it has of itself, and opposes itself to the others who are different, and does so with claims about injustice. 

It also claims for itself demands for more visible appearance through strategies of representation, which recognizes an appearance that can be shifted from latent to manifest, both personally and politically.  This is homologous and related to demands for a lessening of stratification, since these amount to claims of an economy of a more and a less that can be subjected to redistribution (without changing the systemic production of inequalities). 

Talk of stratification only means inequality of more and less, and is completely different from theories like Marx’s of class conflict, that are based on different and exclusive (one cannot recognize the other) ways of being related to things like property and labor power. Strictly speaking, a society could be classless and have great economic inequality. That may be just as much cause of suffering, but it doesn’t explain the possibility of a revolution as driven by a conflict between relations of production or forms of life.

At least on a personal or micro-social level (one involving individuals who are present and not just classes or systems or tendencies that must be represented to be contested), the politics of identities cannot decide on identity or difference.  Which is often taken to mean that ‘the oppressed’ can and must talk about their identity and difference, while the others, as the price of not being held to' ‘oppress’ them, must make neither claim. The truth of which is that to be considered equal, people don’t have to be like or unlike the (once-)dominant group, and indeed, minoritarian groups are always both.

Maybe the ultimate reason for that is that the source and nature of the problems lie elsewhere.  In fact, local decisions about justice between or among individuals from different ‘backgrounds’ usually amounts to claims to equality through recognition that in the end just reiterate bourgeois notions of opposition to aristocracy.  (“So you think you’re privileged—that is, important, and you don’t have to work for your status”). 

The funny thing about this is that America has never had an aristocracy.  Maybe that is why Americans tend to be so militant in enforcing the bourgeois ideas of liberty and equality (that is, the characteristic forms of these demands in bourgeois society, which favor self-made riches).  

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Every reformist political project is, by definition, limited. What those of us who consider ourselves as on the left should say to limited solutions is not necessarily that we are against them as that they are not enough. The Marxist and left-wing objection to capitalist liberalism stems from the observation that liberals are satisfied with things that we could never be very content to live with. That that perspective often comes from artists and thinkers who have enjoyed some relative ‘privilege’ (so that they can do creative work and worry little about being subject to systematic or official sanctions and social regulations that are inhibiting) is an argument not for suppressing privileges but universalizing them.

”It’s true I don’t want to be a factory worker,” said the violinist. “But you want a world of factory workers, and I want a world of violinists. (Yes, lessons should be free).”