From Labor to Recognition: When the Left Stopped Changing Society

Progressive politics has replaced redistribution with identity-based legitimacy. But can suffering alone define justice? This is the first in a series of articles that try to understand when — and why — everything changed: words, alliances, enemies.
There was a time when the left spoke of factories, wages, and rights. Today, it speaks of identity.

Oppression used to be measured: hours worked, low pay, managed unemployment. Now, it’s narrated. If you feel “unrecognized,” you’re oppressed. If you’re “invisible,” same thing. The language has shifted. Where there used to be social conflict, now there is personal injury. Where there was redistribution, now there is recognition. But if justice is measured by how one feels, if everything passes through individual trauma, then there’s not much left to change — just a lot to perform.

From Conflict to Wound

In recent decades, theory has also changed course. A large part of critical thought stopped talking about redistribution and started talking about recognition.
It’s not just a change of words. It’s a shift in structure. In hierarchy. In what counts — and what doesn’t.

The clearest confrontation is perhaps the one between Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth. A 2003 book, Redistribution or Recognition?, places them face to face. Fraser argues: there are two types of injustice. One is economic — money, power, access. The other is cultural  respect, voice, representation. And the two don’t fix each other. You can’t heal an identity wound with a higher paycheck, nor compensate an economic injustice with inclusivity.

Honneth takes a different path. For him, everything — even wage struggles, even poverty — begins with disrespect. At the root, there’s always denial. Humiliation. Devaluation. Recognition, in this view, isn’t just one dimension of justice. It’s the foundation.

He doesn’t say it quite like that, but the message is clear: politics has moved from distribution to disrespect. And that logic — quietly — has become the grammar of many identity-based movements. They no longer ask for justice based on their place in society, but for what they’ve lived. For how they’ve felt.

When “I’m hurting” is enough

The need for recognition is real. Powerful. It moves people — sometimes even entire societies. But when it becomes the only lens through which to read conflict, something breaks. If every story of suffering automatically turns into a claim for justice, then the standard is no longer the fact — but the feeling. Not the harm — but the story of the harm.

At that point, the public sphere stops being a place where interests collide. It becomes a contest. And the winner is whoever makes their wound heard the loudest. Justice, then, is no longer measured in universal terms. It no longer asks who produces what, who has access, who holds power. Only stories of exclusion matter. The stronger they are, the more they count. It’s no longer about what a group contributes. It’s about how convincingly it can present itself as wounded, minor, marginal.

That’s when subjective experience changes status: from story to currency.
Those who suffer — or say they do — gain immediate authority. Political, moral, media-driven. But suffering, even when it’s real, isn’t enough to point the way forward. When everything becomes a struggle for recognition, there’s nothing left to redistribute. And the left — the one that used to change the world — ends up just amplifying the pain.

Pain that speaks — and persuades

Politics today plays out through images, words, and emotion. And within this landscape, recognition has taken on a new form: a rhetoric that performs. Those who speak as wounded subjects are heard. Those who don’t, disappear. Visibility has become synonymous with legitimacy. Disrespect is no longer just an internal feeling — it’s a narrative tool. It helps build a public identity, power a cause, and attract consensus- The language of exclusion, once tied to material conditions — housing, work, access — now moves across bodies. Across identities. Suffering is no longer something to be addressed through policy or rights. It’s something to be represented. To be staged. And it works. Because contemporary communication is built for this: it’s visual, emotional, instant.

The question is no longer “What do you produce?” or “How much do you earn?”, but “Who are you?” and “How have you been hurt?” This shift also rewrites alliances.
The causes that now dominate the public stage — gender rights, queer identities, racial minorities, Palestine — don’t share a political platform.

They share an aesthetic.

They’re united not by a program, but by pain.

And it’s the language of vulnerability that lets radically different experiences be seen as part of the same struggle.

The face of suffering has a name: Palestine

Among all the causes now framed through recognition, one holds a special place. Not because people have deeply reflected on power dynamics in the Middle East — but because of the symbol it has become. Palestine is now the face of the oppressed subject. An icon.

In the global left imagination, it brings together exile, fragility, rage — and a vague but powerful idea of resistance. That’s why you see it alongside other symbolic figures of our time: the woman, the queer person, the racialized minority.

Not because they share real alliances. But because they speak the same language.
The language of disrespect. These are subjects who have been denied something: voice, dignity, presence. That’s the common ground that brings them into the same symbolic space. Not political affinity — but emotional resonance.

A shared grammar: trauma, silencing, wounded identity. In this logic, the complexity of a cause matters less than its narrative proximity to other figures of oppression.

Palestine — more as symbol than reality — fits this perfectly. It becomes the meeting point of a story that doesn’t need context. Only language.

A left without society

Giving voice to the unheard. Listening to experience. Acknowledging lived realities. It’s a step forward from a time when some bodies weren’t even visible in public discourse. But if recognition becomes the only measure of justice, the risk is serious: society gets lost. The real one — made of conditions, roles, and relations. And above all, class disappears. The divide between those who have and those who don’t doesn’t go away. It just gets covered.

Economic relations, work, precarity, systemic inequality — they remain. But fade into the background. Front and center, we now see wounded identities. Reality is no longer changed. It’s interpreted. Exposed. Displayed. This shift gave the left a new way to speak — but it took something away. The ability to hold things together. Because when political legitimacy is based on pain, every wound becomes an island.
Struggles multiply, but they don’t add up. And what once united — wages, rights, public services — now floats, or gets turned into symbols. And loses weight. Maybe we don’t need to choose between redistribution and recognition. But we do need to remember something simple: not everything that hurts is unjust, and not every injustice is solved by telling your story. If the left wants to change things again, it can’t just give voice to pain. It has to build vision, structure, strength. It has to beat the right. And to do that, it needs to admit this: identity politics, when detached from social justice, isn’t progressive. It’s the opposite.

It’s a reactionary logic — one that divides, fragments, and ends up reinforcing the very system it claims to fight. Because when class is lost, and structure is lost, and society is lost, conflict is lost too.

And all that’s left is the stage.