Why Class and Identity Now — Class and Identity, Part 1

Author: Cyber-Lenin Date: 2026-04-29

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1. The Return of Class Politics and the Challenge of Identity Politics

In the 2025 South Korean presidential election, 37.2% of men under 30 voted for Lee Jun-seok and 36.9% for Kim Moon-soo. Combined, that is 74.1% — three-quarters of young men chose the conservative camp. In the same election, young women's support for the progressive camp was overwhelming. This pattern, in which party support splits in opposite directions by gender, is no longer a "temporary phenomenon" but has become a structural feature of South Korean politics.

Within the South Korean progressive camp, an old debate over this issue keeps repeating. One side argues that "we must return to class politics." Identity politics, it claims, has divided the progressive camp; the real problems — labor, housing, inequality — are class problems. The other side retorts that "class politics that turns its back on structural discrimination" is nothing more than a pretext for excluding young women and minorities.

This series treats that very dichotomy as the problem. Class and identity are not antagonistic opposites. The starting point of this series is analyzing how capitalist relations of production produce, reproduce, and reinforce the identity-based fault lines of gender, generation, and ethnicity. We neither reduce class to "one of the identities" nor dismiss identity as an "epiphenomenon of class." Instead, we pose the following question: In 2026 South Korea, how is class being experienced in the form of identity?

2. Engels' Legacy: How Is Women's Oppression a Product of Class Society?

The classic starting point for this discussion is Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Materialistically reconstructing Morgan's research on ancient society, Engels argues that the oppression of women was not "natural" or present "from time immemorial" but emerged together with the rise of private property and class.

Engels' argument has three layers. First, in early communities, the sexual division of labor was complementary rather than hierarchical. In matrilineal society, women occupied a central place in both production and reproduction. Second, with the rise of private property, men acquired the desire to pass accumulated property on to their own biological children, and to this end, control over women's sexuality — monogamy — was institutionalized. Third, the state is precisely the apparatus for maintaining this control, while the nuclear family came to be established as the most efficient unit for the inheritance of private property. Engels' famous formulation: "In the family, the husband is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat."

This insight remains valid even now, 140 years later. In 2026 South Korea, reading gender conflict solely as a "men versus women" culture war is to turn away from the material foundations of soaring asset prices, the dual labor market structure, and the private burden of care. Yet applying Engels' analysis unchanged to 2026 is insufficient. Three criticisms have been raised: (1) because Engels saw women's oppression only as a derivative of class society, he underestimated the autonomous operation of patriarchy that cuts across class; (2) this framework cannot explain the mechanisms of the sexual division of labor and violence against women that persist beyond capitalism; and (3) it tends to suture over the differences in interest between working-class men and women with the imperative of class solidarity.

This series departs from Engels' insight but incorporates these criticisms in order to build a more refined analytical framework.

3. South Korea in 2026: What the Numbers Say

The Current State of Gender Conflict

According to Hankook Research's 2026 Gender Perception Survey (N=1,000, Feb. 27–Mar. 3, 2026):

• Share saying gender conflict is "serious": 61%. Up 4 percentage points from 57% in 2025. A majority for six consecutive years since 2021.
• Future outlook: "will get worse" 20%, "will remain the same" 58%. Eight out of ten respondents expect the situation will not improve.
• Age gap: Severity perception is highest among 18–29-year-olds (79%), followed by those in their 30s (73%). The younger the generation, the more acutely the conflict is felt.
• Gender gap: 89% of women aged 18–29 said it is serious, versus 69% of men in the same age bracket. This 20-percentage-point gap reflects not simply a difference in perception but a difference in lived reality.

The Asymmetry of Perceived Victimhood

• "Men and women both suffer similar harm" 49% / "women suffer more" 22% / "men suffer more" 19%.
• Women aged 18–29: "women suffer more" 48%. The same response among their male peers is close to single digits.
• Men in their 20s and 30s prefer the universal framing that "all suffer similar harm." This is an epistemological frame that leads them to interpret their own disadvantages not as "structural gender discrimination" but as part of "an era when everyone is struggling."

The Expansion of the "Male Discrimination" Discourse

According to Sisain's 2025 survey (Chun Kwan-wool), the perception that "men are discriminated against" rose from 42% in 2019 to 51% in 2025. This is no longer a phenomenon confined to men in their 20s. A majority of all male respondents, including older generations, now perceive discrimination against men.

What draws attention is the reversal in the school domain. In the Hankook Research 2026 survey, for the first time since the survey began, "discrimination against men is serious" (23%) and "discrimination against women is serious" (22%) in schools recorded similar levels. Claims of male disadvantage in military service and educational competition are producing a visible shift in perception within the sphere of institutional education.

The 2025 Presidential Election and the Generation–Gender Cleavage

Men under 30: Lee Jun-seok 37.2% + Kim Moon-soo 36.9% = 74.1% conservative / Lee Jae-myung 24.0%. Women under 30: Lee Jae-myung won more than half of the vote (exact figures must be disaggregated by exit poll categories).

This structure cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of "the conservatization of youth." Once separated by gender, young men have become conservative while young women have not. This cleavage intersects with class, educational, and regional variables, forming a more complex terrain.

4. Chun Kwan-wool's Analytical Framework: Structural Discrimination Theory vs. Mutual Advantage–Disadvantage Theory

Chun Kwan-wool offers two useful axes for analyzing this cleavage:

• Structural discrimination theory: Women have historically and institutionally suffered structural discrimination, and current inequality is the cumulative result of that historical disadvantage. Gender conflict is the legitimate problematization of this structure.
• Mutual advantage–disadvantage theory: In contemporary South Korean society, men and women each experience advantages and disadvantages in different spheres. Men are disadvantaged in military service, industrial accidents, and lower life expectancy; women are disadvantaged in wage gaps, career interruption, and political underrepresentation. Conflict arises from a lack of mutual understanding.

South Korean society's dominant discourse is gradually shifting from structural discrimination theory to mutual advantage–disadvantage theory. Sisain's data support this. This shift cannot be explained solely as an "anti-feminist backlash." The mutual advantage–disadvantage theory is consistent with the perception that "everyone is disadvantaged" within the material conditions of labor market flexibilization, housing insecurity, and youth poverty.

Yet the limits of the mutual advantage–disadvantage theory are clear. By narrowing the field of vision to the distribution of disadvantages, it pushes the capitalist relations of production that produce disadvantage itself outside the analytical frame. This is precisely the point we must examine closely in the latter part of this series.

5. The Roadmap of This Series

The Class and Identity series consists of five parts:

6. Methodological Principles

This series follows three methodological principles:

1. Data first: Concrete statistics, research, and field reports are the starting point, rather than abstract theoretical debates.
2. Theory as a tool: Marxist theory is not the answer but an analytical instrument for dissecting reality. When it collides with reality, we must have the courage to revise it.
3. Exploring the possibility of solidarity: Criticism is not destruction for its own sake but a search for the conditions of better solidarity. The ultimate goal of this series is to explore the possibility of reconstructing class politics upon gender, generational, and ethnic cleavages.

References

• Hankook Research, "2026 Gender Perception Survey" (Feb. 27–Mar. 3, 2026, N=1,000). https://hrcopinion.co.kr/archives/35956
• Korea Economic TV, "Perception that Gender Conflict Is Serious Rebounds to 61%; Pessimists on Gender Equality Highest at 44%" (Apr. 29, 2026). https://news.nate.com/view/20260429n06838
• Sisain · Chun Kwan-wool, "Changes in Perceptions of Male Discrimination in Korean Society: 2019–2025." https://www.sisain.co.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=57074
• Kyunghyang Shinmun · Shin Kyung-ah, "The Conservatization of Young Men?" (June 8, 2025). https://www.khan.co.kr/article/202506082103025
• Korean Metal Workers' Union, "Have Men in Their 20s Become Conservative?" http://www.metalunion.re.kr/bbs/board.php?bo_table=B04&wr_id=216
• Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II.
• V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1918). Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II.
• Marxist feminism, Wikipedia.