False Oppositions: Class Struggle, Oppression and the failing of Petty-Bourgeois Politics
Tobias Rosandic
The author is a former industrial worker from Germany, associated with the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD), with over twenty years of experience as a communist activist, currently based in Ireland.
This article intervenes in the current debate on “Class War versus Culture War” within the Irish left, arguing that the opposition itself is a false one rooted in petty-bourgeois modes of thought. Through a critical analysis of the positions associated with László Molnárfi and Nathan Hutchinson, it shows that both detach questions of racism, sexism and LGBTQI oppression from their material roots in class society, albeit in opposing ways. Molnárfi collapses class struggle into a national abstraction that accommodates reactionary consciousness, while Hutchinson treats oppression as an autonomous cultural sphere detached from the principal contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Against both, the article advances a materialist synthesis: struggles against gendered, racialised and sexual oppression are neither moral add-ons nor parallel identity projects, but concrete forms of class struggle arising from the capitalist organisation of production and social reproduction. Precisely because these oppressions are rooted in the fundamental class antagonism, they cannot be abolished on a lasting basis under capitalism. The article concludes that only by integrating these struggles consciously into a proletarian revolutionary strategy can both class emancipation and genuine liberation from oppression be achieved.
I curiously followed the current senate about Classwar contra Culture War, followed by different proposals for a left unity and how this could be possible or not possible.
It is no coincidence that the debate around “Class War versus Culture War” has intensified at a moment when right-wing and openly fascist forces are gaining ground in Ireland and internationally. To reduce these developments to cultural misunderstandings, rhetorical mistakes, or problems of “optics” is to fundamentally misrecognise their material basis and the character of the present phase of class struggle.
What presents itself as a necessary strategic clarification is in fact a symptom of political disorientation. Instead of proceeding from a materialist analysis of class consciousness and class struggle, the debate remains at the level of surface phenomena. The supposed opposition between “Class War” and “Culture War” obscures the real conflict at stake: a confrontation between two petty-bourgeois approaches, both incapable of grasping the actual dynamics of class struggle and therefore objectively contributing to its political weakening.
I hesitated to intervene in this debate, not least because I have lived in Ireland for only two years and believe it is necessary to earn trust through practice rather than rhetoric. However, as a former industrial worker with over twenty years of experience as a communist activist in the automotive industry, I cannot ignore the political implications of this discussion.
My impression is that much of what currently passes for the Left in Ireland operates in a political vacuum shaped largely by student politics and petty-bourgeois perspectives, with limited grounding in the lived realities of the working class. The analyses put forward by figures such as Molnárfi and Hutchinson must be understood in this context. While they arrive at different conclusions, both are fundamentally misguided.
Molnárfi’s intervention cannot be reduced to a tactical error or an unfortunate emphasis. It expresses a specific class standpoint. What is presented as “class-only politics” in defence of the working class is in reality the projection of a petty-bourgeois worldview onto the class itself. At its worst, it amounts to a romanticisation of the working class from an external, petty-bourgeois perspective, something workers have no reason to welcome.
The roots of this lie in the contradictory class position of the petty bourgeoisie under capitalism. Suspended between bourgeoisie and proletariat, lacking secure control over the means of production yet striving to distance itself from wage labour, its material existence is marked by instability, social anxiety, and the constant threat of proletarianisation. This objective condition gives rise to a characteristic mode of thought[1]: impatience, voluntarism, and the elevation of subjective posture or tactical cleverness above the objective laws of social development. Strategy and collective organisation are displaced by immediacy, episodic activism, and individual positioning.
When elements of the petty bourgeoisie enter working-class organisations, these impulses do not disappear. They are displaced. Career ambition is transferred from professional life into political life. The aspiration becomes symbolic leadership: to speak in the name of the working class, to posture as the “authentic” radical voice, or to stand above the movement as its theorist. The working class is no longer treated as a collective subject to be developed through struggle, but as an audience to be represented, instructed, or accommodated.
Molnárfi’s politics reflects this logic precisely. He treats the working class not as a concrete, internally divided social force whose consciousness must be patiently developed through ideological struggle and organisation, he treats us as an abstract mass whose existing attitudes are to be affirmed. In doing so, he conflates bourgeois ideology present within the working class with the class itself, treating racism, sexism, and anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes as if they were authentic expressions of working-class consciousness detached from material conditions and class struggle.
A materialist analysis proceeds from the opposite premise. The working class is not alienated from revolutionary politics because of rhetoric or “optics”, but because ruling-class ideology is systematically reproduced across every level of social life, fragmenting consciousness and embedding divisions. This ideological domination cannot be overcome by accommodation. To accommodate racism, sexism, or chauvinism in the name of “reaching the masses” is a capitulation to bourgeois ideology. It abandons the decisive task of the present phase of class struggle: the conscious, organised fight for proletarian class consciousness against class-alien ideas within the working class itself.
These developments must be situated within the broader crisis of the imperialist world system. As bourgeois democracy increasingly fails to stabilise capitalist rule, sections of the bourgeoisie shift toward authoritarian and openly fascist solutions. Ideological warfare plays a central role in this process. Through their control over media platforms and cultural institutions, reactionary forces inject class-alien modes of thinking into the working class in order to fragment solidarity and neutralise resistance.
It is precisely in this context that Molnárfi’s position must be judged. In November, he published an article that demonstrates how petty-bourgeois thinking, when followed consistently, leads to the abandonment of any communist basis. With this intervention, he objectively places himself outside the ranks of communism. In that text, the Right and openly fascist forces are no longer analysed as class-based instruments of bourgeois rule, but are instead presented as potential allies in a national struggle for sovereignty. By abstracting the Right from its class character, Molnárfi replaces class antagonism with a cross-class national alliance and abandons the materialist analysis of reaction and fascism altogether.
This shift entails the rejection of a central Marxist premise: that the bourgeoisie in one’s own country is the principal enemy of the working class, and that national subordination is always mediated through class domination. Once class relations are displaced by categories of national sovereignty, the working class ceases to exist as an independent political subject. This is not an accident, but the logical outcome of a petty-bourgeois mode of thought incapable of grasping social contradictions as class contradictions.
Hutchinson presents his text as a dismantling of Molnárfi’s position. In reality, he completes it. This is the trap.
It is precisely because Molnárfi’s position is so openly wrong that Hutchinson appears convincing. Molnárfi’s crude opportunism lowers the theoretical bar to such an extent that Hutchinson can pass as offering a correction, while in fact proceeding from the same false premise. Both treat what manifests itself in the political culture of the working class as an expression of the class’s own subjectivity, rather than as the result of an ongoing ideological offensive by the ruling class.
From this shared starting point, their conclusions diverge only superficially. Molnárfi draws the openly reactionary conclusion that racism, sexism, and chauvinism must be accommodated in order to “reach the masses.” Hutchinson draws the opposite, but structurally identical conclusion: that the class itself must be ideologically opposed, corrected, or re-educated through progressive rhetoric or even abandoned completely. One adapts to reaction; the other counterposes moral pedagogy. Both sever bourgeois ideology from its material roots in class society.
Once this step is taken, the working class ceases to exist as a political subject to be organised and becomes either an audience to be flattered or a problem to be managed. In this sense, Molnárfi should indeed thank Hutchinson for stabilising his framework.
The antagonism between them is therefore superficial. At a deeper level, they represent two complementary expressions of petty-bourgeois opportunism.
Institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries cannot be understood as cultural aberrations or moral failures detached from class society. They were integral components of the capitalist organisation of social reproduction, enforcing discipline, unpaid labour, and sexual control in the service of bourgeois rule. The oppression of women is not external to class struggle[2], but one of the concrete forms through which class domination reproduces itself.
The same applies to the oppression of LGBTQI people. From a materialist perspective, queerphobia is neither a cultural deviation nor an autonomous identity conflict, it’s a product of class society rooted in the capitalist organisation of family relations, social reproduction, and ideological discipline. It functions as a weapon to stabilise bourgeois rule by enforcing normative gender relations and fragmenting the working class.
These struggles are not external to class struggle, nor do they compete with it. They are concrete forms of class struggle fought on the terrain of ideology and social relations. Detached from the principal contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat, they degenerate into moral politics and cultural management. But integrated into a proletarian revolutionary strategy, they become schools of class consciousness that forge unity through struggle and expose the mechanisms of bourgeois domination.
The political impasse represented by Molnárfi and Hutchinson cannot be resolved by choosing between them. It must be overcome through a materialist synthesis that negates both positions while preserving what is correct in each.
Molnárfi is right to insist on the centrality of class struggle, but wrong to abstract it from the concrete forms of oppression through which bourgeois rule is reproduced. Hutchinson is right to insist on the reality and urgency of these oppressions, but wrong to detach them from the material totality of class antagonism.
A materialist synthesis recognises that struggles against racism, sexism, and queerphobia arise directly from the fundamental antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. Precisely because they are rooted in this antagonism, they cannot be abolished on a lasting basis under capitalism. Partial victories remain fragile and reversible.
This does not justify postponement. These struggles must be fought consciously and uncompromisingly as integral fronts of the class war. But their subordination to the principal contradiction between bourgeoisie and proletariat is a material necessity.
It is precisely at this point that petty-bourgeois politics repeatedly fail. Due to their contradictory class position, petty-bourgeois strata are not the main enemies of the bourgeoisie. Their social existence is defined by the constant pressure of downward mobility and the fear of proletarianisation. As a result, their politics gravitates toward fragmenting the class struggle into multiple competing contradictions, rather than recognising the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat as decisive.
Only the proletariat stands in an irreconcilable contradiction to capital[3] and is therefore the only consistently revolutionary class. Precisely because struggles against racism, sexism and queerphobia arise from this fundamental antagonism, they can only be resolved on a lasting basis through proletarian revolution. And only by waging them consciously as moments of the revolutionary class struggle can the working class develop the capacity to carry out that task.
Every struggle for liberation that is detached from the overthrow of bourgeois rule is condemned to reversal; and every revolution that ignores these struggles abandons its own social foundation.
- Stefan Engel, The Struggle over the Mode of Thinking in the Workers’ Movement (Gelsenkirchen: Neuer Weg Verlag, 1997) ↑
- Monika Gärtner- Engel, New Perspectives for the Liberation of Women (Gelsenkirchen: Neuer Weg Verlag, 2014). ↑
- Stefan Engel, The Crisis of Bourgeois Social Sciences, Religion and Culture (Gelsenkirchen: Neuer Weg Verlag, 2024). ↑