From Labor to Identity: How the Left Forgot Women and Class

In a previous article, I tried to trace a shift: from redistribution to recognition, from material change to symbolic affirmation. The Left today—much of it, at least—doesn’t talk about class anymore. It talks about voices. Stories. Trauma. You’re legitimate if you suffer. You exist if you’re seen. The more you’ve been silenced, the louder your claim.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/from-labor-to-recognition-when-the-left-stopped-changing-society/  

It’s a politics that rewards pain. And it’s not necessarily wrong—until pain becomes the only language allowed.

Among the strangest consequences of this shift is the fusion—more imagined than explained—between transfeminism and the Palestinian cause. Two struggles that don’t share ground, or goals, or even a shared grammar. And yet they keep turning up together. As if resistance had become an aesthetic. And if the aesthetics match, the politics must follow. But do they?

A strange kind of solidarity

Let’s be honest: solidarity isn’t what it used to be. Once it meant standing with others—knowing what they were fighting for, why, and at what cost. Now it often means showing up. Reposting. Merging causes that have never met. And calling it unity.

Take the marches. You’ll see trans flags and Palestinian keffiyehs held up by the same hands. Slogans like “No Pride in Genocide” or “From Stonewall to Gaza.” They’re striking, yes. They work. They perform solidarity. But do they actually connect the realities they claim to link?

In Gaza, being queer can get you killed. In the West Bank, silence is survival. These aren’t metaphors—they’re facts. And yet in Western cities, where liberation is staged more than won, queerness and the Palestinian cause are fused into a single figure: the silenced, defiant victim. One body, many claims. And rarely any contradiction.

Eva Illouz called it “emotional capitalism”—the way our feelings became the currency of public life. Maybe this is its activist version. Solidarity not built on shared interests, but on shared affect. The point isn’t whether it holds up under scrutiny. The point is that it feels right.

And the women? Gone. Again.

They don’t make headlines. They rarely get mentioned. In many of these symbolic coalitions, women—real women, material women, not abstract identities—just vanish.

And I’m not talking about metaphorical disappearance. I mean erased from language, from focus, from the very categories that once gave shape to feminist struggle. Kathleen Stock called it an “epistemic erasure” (Material Girls, 2021). Sheila Jeffreys went further: what we’re seeing, she argued, isn’t inclusion—it’s displacement. When “woman” becomes a self-declared category, the political ground beneath feminism collapses.

Add to this the silence around women’s rights in Palestinian territories. Patriarchal violence, forced marriage, gender segregation—none of this features in the current grammar of solidarity. Because it complicates the script. Because it doesn’t fit the image.

Say it out loud, and you’re a problem. You’re too white. Too Western. Too focused on the wrong kind of oppression. So better to stay quiet. Let the women go missing, again.

From labor to pain

This is the new economy of legitimacy. You don’t speak because you act—you speak because you hurt. And you’re heard only if your pain is legible.

Suffering has replaced labor as the axis of political identity. But here’s the problem: labor connects. It produces. It builds coalitions. Pain, on its own, isolates. It fragments. It turns politics into testimony.

And this Left—let’s be honest—is very good at testimony. At visibility. At language. But less good at strategy, at material change, at power. Mark Lilla warned about this years ago. When identity replaces ideology, you get expression without transformation.

There’s no shortage of solidarity. But it’s often ritual. You use the right terms, wear the right signs, chant the right lines. And you’re in. Ask a question—just one—and you’re out.

Conclusion: Can we still say “we”?

The alliance between transfeminism and the Palestinian cause didn’t come from shared struggle. It came from a shared place in the symbolic order: that of the injured subject. It’s compelling. It’s emotionally effective. But is it politically honest?

Feminism—at least the one I belong to—has never been just about recognition. It’s about analysis. About power. About what women endure, and why. And that means looking at structure. At labor. At patriarchy not as discourse, but as concrete, organized violence.

We can stand with others, yes. But only if we’re allowed to think. To draw lines. To name contradictions. To speak from a “we” that isn’t just aesthetic.

A feminist, materialist, political “we.” One that doesn’t apologize for asking where the women went. And one that still remembers: society doesn’t change because people are seen. It changes because people organize.

Essential References:
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (2011)
Eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies (2007)
Kathleen Stock, Material Girls (2021)
Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts (2014)
Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal (2017)
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites (1995)
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005)