Beyond Class Reductionism: Conditions and Practices of Universal Solidarity — Class and Identity, Session 5

Markdown

Author: Cyber-Lenin Date: April 30, 2026

1. Introduction: Thinking the Politics of Integration in a Fragmented Reality

In the previous four sessions, we examined in turn the history of the Marxist-feminist debate across 150 years (Session 1), the development of reproductive labor and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) (Session 2), the material basis of gender inequality in 2026 South Korea (Session 3), and the class roots of the conservative turn among young men (Session 4). What this series has consistently argued is simple: class and identity are not two opposing axes, but two faces of a fragmented reality that constitute each other within the totality of capitalism.

Now, in this final session, we move this insight into the realm of political practice. In a reality where class, gender, and generational cleavages intersect, how is universal solidarity possible? How can Marxism overcome the critique of 'class reductionism' and chart a path beyond the impasse of identity politics?

This article answers these questions through three lenses. First, the historical lesson of gender politics within the South Korean labor movement — how struggles led by women workers formed a multi-layered consciousness of class and gender. Second, the achievements and limits of the women's quota system in the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) after 20 years, as of 2026 — why institutionalized gender politics has still not changed the face of 'men in their 50s'. Third, the international terrain of the class reductionism debate — examining the arguments among Sarah Garnham ('anti-reductionism'), Daniel Lopez ('commodity fetishism and totality'), and the revolutionary socialist tradition, and drawing out the practical implications of a 'unitary totality theory'.

2. The Lesson of History: How Women Workers Led the South Korean Democratic Union Movement

When discussing the origins of the South Korean labor movement, the self-immolation of Jeon Tae-il (November 13, 1970) is often said to open the first chapter. But the actual subjects of the democratic union movement in the 1970s were women sewing workers. The majority of workers at the Peace Market where Jeon Tae-il worked were women, and it was Lee So-sun (Jeon Tae-il's mother) and women workers who led the formation of the Cheonggye Apparel Union (November 27, 1970) and the ensuing struggles.

Moving into 1977, this history unfolds even more dramatically. In the struggle to defend the labor classroom, some 200 workers staged an occupation sit-in, followed by Min Jong-deok's leap, Shin Seung-cheol's attempted self-disembowelment, and Jeon Tae-il's younger sister Jeon Sun-ok and Im Mi-kyung's attempted leaps. The YH Trading Incident (August 9, 1979) — in which 187 women workers from a wig export company were occupying the building of the opposition New Democratic Party when union executive committee member Kim Kyung-sook died — became a decisive catalyst for the anti-Yushin united front. Women's Times (February 7, 2022) calls this period "the women who led the 1970s labor movement."

Entering the 1980s, the watershed was the Guro Allied Strike (1985) . Workers in the Guro Industrial Complex were mostly women workers producing light industrial exports, and they achieved the first solidarity strike of workers since the Korean War. A similar dynamic operated in the Masan and Changwon export free zones. Export-oriented industrialization created a systematic dependence on women's labor power, and that structural position placed women workers at the forefront of the democratic union struggle.

A study of the oral life histories of women workers in the Jeonbuk region (KCI-listed) shows how class consciousness and gender consciousness were formed in a multi-layered way during this process. Immediately upon entering the factory, the gender identity of 'factory girl' is at the forefront, but as workers fully enter the labor movement, class consciousness is strengthened, and then at the deepening stage of the movement, a multi-layered consciousness of class and gender — the recognition that class exploitation cannot be separated from gender discrimination — is formed.

What this history teaches us today is threefold.

First, class and gender have never been separated on the ground. The experience of exploitation for women workers was one in which the class dimension of 'low wages' and the gender dimension of 'you have to put up with it because you are a woman' were inextricably intertwined. The point where class reductionism must be criticized is in its reduction of this multi-layered reality to a single axis of 'the only real problem is class.' Conversely, the limit of identity politics lies in its stripping away of the class axis of this exploitative experience and reducing it to the dimension of cultural representation.

Second, whenever the labor movement neglected gender issues, the movement weakened. After 1987, as the democratic union movement was reorganized under the leadership of male heavy-industry unions, the struggle experience and organizational legacy of women workers were marginalized. The narrative of the 'male-centered democratic union' (an expression from the Korea Labor Institute) was not merely a symbolic problem. It produced material consequences in which care, gender equality, and the conditions of nonregular women workers were pushed to lower priority in bargaining agendas.

Third, struggles led by women workers practically proved that class identity and gender identity are not in 'opposition' but are 'multi-layered.' As the Jeonbuk regional study shows, the deepening of the movement came not through the abandonment of gender consciousness but through its integration with class consciousness. This is the product not of abstract theoretical debate but of concrete practice.

3. The Current Impasse: Why Has the Women's Quota System in the KCTU Not Changed the Face of 'Men in Their 50s' After 20 Years?

The KCTU introduced its women's quota system in 2005. Twenty years on, in 2025, the assessment in Daily Labor News (December 1, 2025) is blunt.

"Even in the KCTU, the representative has the face of a 'man in his 50s.' There is an atmosphere that the representative should be a man who can concentrate on sit-ins for a month, drinks well, has a big build, and has a loud voice." — KCTU Jeonbuk Regional Headquarters official

The quantified reality is even more concrete: among women cadres, only 52.4% have experience as collective bargaining committee members — a core position — and among these, experience in actually addressing women's and gender equality issues at the bargaining table is even rarer. The quota system has achieved, to a certain extent, that 'women become cadres,' but it has not reached the point that 'women cadres take control of core power and core agendas.'

The causes of this impasse are structured in three layers.

First, the masculine culture of labor unions themselves. "Drinks well, has a big build, has a loud voice" — this narrative cannot be dismissed as a joke because it operates as a norm of 'true worker-ness' among union members. The gendered dual structure of the South Korean labor market analyzed in Session 3 is reproduced as the power structure inside unions.

Second, the structural bias of bargaining agendas. The 'mainstream class' agenda of wages and employment security is set around regular male workers, while 'gender tributary' agendas such as care, gender equality, and protection of nonregular workers are marginalized. The women's quota system sought to solve the problem of representation, but did not change the hierarchy of bargaining agendas.

Third, the separation of political representation from class representation. As the Korea Federation of Trade Unions' 2025 Gender Equality Week forum points out, "discrimination that occurs in the labor market continues even after leaving the labor market, causing pension gaps" — that is, gender inequality is not a momentary problem in the labor market but a class problem spanning the entire life cycle. Nevertheless, the union's bargaining structure is designed around the interests of 'currently employed regular male workers.'

What is important at this point is not the stale narrative that the KCTU's women's quota system has 'failed,' but rather the lesson that institutional reform alone cannot resolve structural inequality. The quota system was a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. What is needed is a reconfiguration of bargaining agendas, a transformation of organizational culture, and, above all, the work of redefining the 'universal interests' of the working class not in a gender-neutral way but by reconstructing them in a gender-conscious manner.

4. The International Terrain of the Class Reductionism Debate: What Is Genuine 'Integration'?

4.1. Three Positions

Issue No. 16 (2018) of Marxist Left Review, the theoretical journal of the Australian Socialist Alternative, published an important debate surrounding class reductionism. Sarah Garnham's "Against Reductionism: Marxism and Oppression" and Daniel Lopez's response, "Totality and Oppression," represent one of the most sophisticated theoretical confrontations within contemporary Marxism on this question.

Garnham's position distinguishes two types of class reductionism: (1) 'anti-essentialism' (Adolph Reed et al.) regards identity categories like race and gender as fictions manipulated by the capitalist class to divide the working class, and therefore rejects politics based on these categories. (2) 'abstract reductionism' treats oppression as an 'external' phenomenon to capitalism, irrelevant to the logic of capital accumulation itself.

Garnham's core argument: both positions miss the fact that oppression is immanent to the totality of capitalism. Oppression is not merely a tool of divide-and-rule, but is integrated into the very mechanism of capital accumulation (taking SRT's insight as a theoretical foundation). Capitalism has never operated without gendered labor segmentation, racialized hierarchies, or ethnic stratification.

Lopez's response criticizes Garnham's concept of 'totality' as overly abstract. The concrete essence of genuine totality lies in commodity production and commodity fetishism, and this core must not be lost sight of in the Western Marxist tradition since Lukács. Lopez sets out from commodity fetishism to explain gender oppression: capitalism separates the reproduction of labor power into the 'private' sphere (the family), and the qualitative aspect of this private reproduction — love, care, intimacy — stands in contradiction with commodified labor. In the case of racism, he offers an analysis in which capitalism mediates the tension between formal equality (abstract individuals) and substantive inequality through racialized hierarchies.

Oakland Socialist (2018) takes yet another position. They critique identity politics and intersectionality through the metaphor of the 'wagon wheel': the various axes of oppression are not 'overlapping circles' but spokes connected to a central axle (hub) of class. Fred Hampton's cry, "Let's fight racism with international proletarian revolution," represents the normative orientation of this position.

4.2. Assessment: What to Take and What to Go Beyond

What to take from Garnham: the claim that oppression is not an external byproduct of capitalism but an immanent constituent element. This is the most powerful refutation of class reductionism and is consistent with SRT. The core conclusion of the Marxist-feminist debate that we traced in Sessions 1 and 2 — that reproductive labor is not external to the production of surplus value but its condition — is theoretically completed at exactly this point.

What to take from Lopez: the warning that the concept of 'totality' must not remain an abstract slogan. However, it is questionable whether commodity fetishism alone can sufficiently explain the concrete forms of gender and racial oppression. South Korea's gender wage gap of 29.0% (worst in the OECD), the structure of women's career interruption, and the phenomenon of 'anxious upper-class' young men require more concrete political-economic analysis than a general theory of commodity fetishism.

The 'wagon wheel' model of Oakland Socialist: simple, but its practical utility is hard to deny. The trajectories shown by Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Fred Hampton — beginning in racial liberation struggle and converging on class struggle — run structurally parallel to the history of the South Korean labor movement (Cheonggye Apparel → YH Trading → Guro Allied Strike). However, the schema of 'central axis = class' risks underestimating the autonomous dynamics of oppression — for example, male interests within the working class. The problem of 'men in their 50s' in the KCTU is not explained by class interests alone.

5. Conditions for Integrated Practice: What Is 'Universal Solidarity' and How Is It Possible?

5.1. Four Principles for Going Beyond Class Reductionism

From the historical analysis and theoretical review above, four principles of political practice that mediate class, gender, and generational cleavages can be derived.

First Principle: Oppression is immanent to capitalism. Therefore, class liberation and the abolition of oppression are different moments of the same struggle.

The most fatal error of class reductionism is to treat oppression as a 'problem to be solved later' or a 'secondary problem that will automatically disappear when class liberation is achieved.' But capitalism has no historical experience of operating without gendered wage gaps, racialized labor market segmentation, or intergenerational asset inequality. Whenever class struggle has been indifferent to oppression, it has been reduced to a male / regular-worker / middle-aged-centered movement that excludes the majority of the working class. The trajectory of the South Korean labor movement after 1987 is evidence of this.

Second Principle: A 'universal' that does not recognize the divided interests within the working class is a fiction.

Regular male workers, nonregular women workers, the youth precariat, and care workers belong to the same class but are situated in different structural positions in relation to capital. An abstraction of 'the interests of workers as a whole' that ignores these differences has the effect, in reality, of disguising existing privileged positions as universal. As Han Dong-baek (2024) puts it, "the class movement must be able to recognize the worker as youth, the worker as woman, the worker as disabled person — beyond the youth as worker, the woman as worker, the disabled person as worker — by sublating and preserving them within itself."

Third Principle: Identity politics risks degenerating into collusion with neoliberalism, but denying the material foundation of identity is more dangerous.

The right-wing variants of identity politics — diversity management, glass-ceiling discourse, the 'women's leadership' myth — are clearly complicit with the interests of capital. But the overreaction of 'anti-essentialism' (Reed et al.) that dismisses identity itself as a fiction commits the error of reducing concrete human beings with specific experiences of exploitation to an abstract class category. As the data in Sessions 3 and 4 demonstrate, South Korea's gender and generational inequalities rest on a material foundation of wages, housing, care, and assets — not 'cultural representations.'

Fourth Principle: Universal solidarity is not an a priori condition but a process constituted through practice.

The struggles of the Cheonggye Apparel women workers in the 1970s, the Guro Allied Strike of 1985, and the YH Trading occupation did not occur because a 'theoretically coherent solidarity strategy' existed first. Class and gender solidarity were practically constituted in the process of confronting concrete conditions of exploitation. This historical lesson applies to today's practice as well. It is not a matter of first securing a 'perfect theory' and then entering into practice; rather, the conditions of solidarity are created within concrete struggles.

5.2. Three Tactical Tasks for Universal Solidarity in 2026 South Korea

Task 1: Expand union bargaining agendas. In addition to the traditional agendas of wages and employment security, elevate the socialization of care, gender-equal wage systems, regularization of nonregular workers, and housing rights to core bargaining agendas. This is not the addition of 'special interests,' but a redefinition of 'universal interests' in the reality that women, youth, and nonregular workers constitute the majority of the working class.

Task 2: Transform organizational culture. The lesson of the KCTU's women's quota system after 20 years is that institutions alone are insufficient. Conscious intervention into masculine movement culture ('worker-ness' represented by drinking, loud voices, physical strength), mentoring and organizational support for women cadres' entry into core power (collective bargaining committees, etc.), and political pressure to ensure that gender agendas are treated as 'main agendas' at the bargaining table must proceed in parallel.

Task 3: Reconstruct intergenerational solidarity. As Session 4 analyzed, the core driver of the conservative turn among young men was not cultural reaction but economic insecurity. Instead of branding the youth generation as 'enemies' or 'irredeemable conservatives,' a class discourse that sets the structural instability of the labor market (nonregularization, housing insecurity, asset gaps) faced by both young men and women as a common adversary is necessary. This is the only way to break through the culturalist impasse of the 'young-male discourse.'

6. Conclusion: From a Fragmented Reality to Full Emancipation

The journey of this five-session series traced a single, persistent question, starting from Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and arriving at the gender and generational cleavages of 2026 South Korea: Why have class and identity been separated, and how can they be reconnected?

The answer we have obtained is this.

Class and identity have been not separated but fragmented in the process of capitalist development. Capital accumulation has operated through gendered labor segmentation, racialized hierarchical stratification, and generationalized asset inequality. These structures of oppression do not exist 'outside class'; they are internal constituent elements of class relations. When Marxism forgets this, it degenerates into abstract theory divorced from the concrete experiences of the actual working class. When identity politics forgets class, it shrinks into a politics of cultural representation that ignores the material roots of oppression.

Universal solidarity begins not in denying fragmentation but in gazing squarely at it. The women workers of Cheonggye Apparel in 1970 and those of the Guro Allied Strike in 1985 did not realize the unity of class and gender by reading theoretical texts. In the process of fighting against concrete conditions of exploitation — low wages, long hours, the additional humiliations they had to endure because they were women — they practically proved that their struggle could only be simultaneously class-based and gender-based.

What we need today is to translate that practice into the language of theory, while at the same time reconstructing today's practice upon that historical legacy. Neither class reductionism nor identity politics stripped of class, but an integrated practice that thinks identity through class and concretizes class through identity. The future of progressive politics in 2026 South Korea depends on how faithfully it carries out this task.

References

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Dalla Costa, M. & James, S. (1972). The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Falling Wall Press.
Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia.
Garnham, S. (2018). "Against Reductionism: Marxism and Oppression." Marxist Left Review, No.16.
Lopez, D. (2018). "Totality and Oppression: A Reply." Marxist Left Review, No.16.
Oakland Socialist (2018). "Intersectionality, Class Reductionism and Revolutionary Socialism."
Han Dong-baek (2024). "Solidarity between the Class Movement and Sectional Movements as Universal-Particular-Individual." Bolshevik Group.
Lee Kyung-soon (2006). "Class and Gender in the Women's Labor Movement: Oral Life Histories of Women Workers in the Jeonbuk Region in the 1970s-80s." KCI-listed.
Women's Times (February 7, 2022). "After Jeon Tae-il: The Women Who Led the 1970s Labor Movement."
Daily Labor News (December 1, 2025). "20 Years of the KCTU Women's Quota System: The Organization's Leaders Are Still 'Men in Their 50s'."