In September 2025, I published a two-part article, “Challenging Marxism and Identity Politics” (see Scipes, 2025a, b). This article not only challenged these theoretical approaches, but it presented a new theoretical approach called “Polyconflictualism” to replace them.

Because of its length, I could not provide empirical support for my various claims in the initial article as to the theoretical inadequacies of the structural-based approaches to the social order.

This article provides evidence from two older published monographs as well as from a much more recent one that adds to my critique of Marxism and Identity Politics and provides needed empirical evidence from which others can confirm or falsify my initial challenge. In this paper, I identify key components of Polyconflictualism, provide a general discussion of the findings of my first two monographs, and then delve in depth into the findings from my recent book, Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy Building a Progressive Labor Movement (Scipes, 2026b), to further enhance my argument.

The case for surpassing Marxism and Identity Politics with Polyconflictualism is strong and deserves widespread consideration and evaluation.

THE CLAIMS

The most extensive claim made is that neither Marxism nor Identity Politics can explain the explosion of social movements around the world since the mid-1980s (see, among many others, Bevins, 2023; Scipes, 2022, 2023.) The reason is because analysts seeking to provide answers do not understand social reality: they see unity between development of the social structure and the response to it, when I argue each must be seen semi-independently of the other. In other words, analysts confine social change within the social structure and, by doing so, limit possible social change to the limits imposed by the established social order.¹ Yet, but what about those efforts that seek to transcend the established social order, even though the project emerged from within it?

They get into this dilemma because they use a structural model to explain the social order in any particular country. This is a model that is based on conjuring up social categories and claims that every person in a social order can be placed in at least one category. Once placed into a category, and once that category is properly located in its social position in the respective social order, then the claim is that human behavior is determined by its structural location. For example, once a person is categorized as a “worker,” then he/she would act and be acted upon in the same way as any other worker; refining further, a black worker would act and be acted upon in the same way as another black worker; or a female white worker would act and be acted upon in the same way as another female white worker, etc. Accordingly, although incorrectly, it is assumed that people in every category must each behave in the exact same manner as everyone else in the same category; you cannot have differential behaviors from within the same social category; allowing for such would destroy the very concept of category.

The first people who analyzed and developed social categories were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848). Marx and Engels saw each social order based the mode of production, and he posited two “classes” (or better, categories), the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; accordingly, one’s class position determined its relationship to the other. As the classes had opposing interests, over time, Marx and Engels argued that “class struggle” between the two determined future development of each social order.

GENERAL ANALYSIS

Prior to my most recent monograph (Scipes, 2026b), I had produced two monographs: one on the development of the KMU (Kilusang Mayo Uno) Labor Center of the Philippines, (Scipes, 1996), and one on the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO (Scipes, 2010). My research led me to question Marxism and all structural models as satisfactory analytical tools.

In my book on the KMU,² which focused on workers, I found that the “category” of worker was insufficient. I discovered there was more than one labor center in the country³ into which workers and their unions were organized, and while they “struggled” against the bosses to a greater or lesser extent, they also struggled against other labor centers, again to a greater or lesser extent. How could this be? Members of one category were supposed to act in congruence with one another, but here we could see them opposing each other. Obviously, this posed a serious problem theoretically, whether it was recognized or not at the time.

Perhaps the most grievous case illuminated was where one union [affiliated with the Trade Union Congress (TUCP) of the Philippines] was opposing the union affiliated with the KMU for control over the work force of Atlas Mines, the largest copper mining complex in Asia, with about 10,000 workers employed. In 1987, the TUCP affiliate joined with the company, the Philippine Constabulary (similar to the US National Guard when federalized, only controlled at the provincial level), the local government, and a newly formed death squad (no exaggeration!) called KADRE (National Movement for Freedom and Democracy) to break the hold of the KMU-affiliated local that was then-representing Atlas workers. The company allowed KADRE leaders to present anti-KMU seminars inside the company premises, as did the 347^th PC Company within their headquarters, also located on company premises. There were vigilantes (death squad members) working inside the mines.

And the man who was the education director of the TUCP-affiliated union, who was a commentor on the union’s DYLA radio station, located within the union’s compound, and was also one of the leaders of the regional-based People’s Alliance Against Communism, also broadcasted pro-vigilante/anti-KMU propaganda over DYLA. The assault on the KMU affiliate was extensive.

“The physical repression directed toward [the KMU affiliate] was intense—and this was in addition to the psychological pressure. According to documentation provided by members of the [KMU affiliate] Executive Board, between March 21, 1987, and April 16, 1989, ten union members were killed and seven others wounded. These cases are in addition to the eight cases of shots being fired into the union offices or members’ homes, two stabbings, five attempted murders, 12 shootings, 21 death threats, and many forcible arrests.” And I haven’t even mentioned the case of where a man stuck a .38 caliber pistol into the chest of the [KMU-affiliated] union president, pulled the trigger and it misfired; his accomplice followed by placing his gun into the chest of the president, fired, and miraculously, it misfired as well!⁴

Marxism, nor any other structural model of a social order, cannot explain this intra-category violence.

In my subsequent book on the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy, I discovered that labor “leaders”—especially at top levels of the labor center—acted against some workers overseas, but they did not inform, much less ask for affirmation for, this behavior from their own trade union members. In fact, leaders had never reported this behavior to its members in over 100 YEARS in a way that could be verified by independent researchers (Scipes, 2010; also see Schuhrke, 2024, although the latter focuses overwhelmingly on the period between 1947-1991). As illuminated in my book, as well as Schuhrke’s, the leaders of the AFL and then later, the AFL-CIO, had been acting against other workers around the world, helping to overthrow democratically-elected governments in Guatemala (1954), Brazil (1964), Chile (1973) and then watching progressive labor centers in those countries be destroyed; supporting the failed coup attempt in Venezuela in 2002 (which fortunately failed); financing reactionary labor centers that collaborated with a death squad (no exaggeration!) against a progressive trade union (such as in the Philippines in the late 1980s); and supporting dictatorships in Brazil, the Congo, Chile, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan.⁵ These acts and others , all well documented, cannot be explained by Marxism or Identity Politics (as claimed on pp. 130-151; again, see Schuhrke, 2024).

SPECIFIC ANALYSIS

Between these two books, I wrote my PhD dissertation (Scipes, 2003), which was the basis for my latest monograph (Scipes, 2026b). This is labor history with a purpose.⁶ I wanted to specifically address these problems, so my dissertation is a comparative-historical study of unionization in steel and meatpacking in the Chicago area, including Northwest Indiana, between 1933 and 1955, basically the CIO years. By looking at unionization in industries more similar than might be generally recognized, in the same area, at the same time, and drawing from the exact same labor pool—white ethnics from Eastern and Southern Europe, African Americans from the rural South, and some Mexicans (with the same immigration histories, languages, educations, skill levels, cultures, etc.)—and beginning in the exact same formal organization, I was trying to establish that the differences I thought might be there were, in fact, there.

To accomplish this project, I did an in-depth examination of the development of labor organizations in steel and meatpacking in the Chicago area. While meatpacking unionism has been the object of several academic studies (mainly, Halpern, 1997; Horowitz, 1997; Halpern and Horowitz, 1999; Street, 1993), there has been no previous academic study published of unionization in the steel industry in the Chicago/Calumet Region of Northwest Indiana and, accordingly, no comparison of these unionization processes across the two industries.

What I found in examining the two labor organizations—Steel Workers Organizing Committee/United Steel Workers of America and Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee/United Packinghouse Workers of America—is that they each had qualitatively different and opposed conceptualizations of trade unionism, and these could be theoretically delineated. This can be observed when comparing the scope of each form of unionism, and the process by which union leaders related to their members: the steelworkers’ scope was narrow, limited to the workplace and usually only addressing concerns of their most skilled members, with formal leaders dominating decision-making processes, while the meatpackers’ scope was broad, addressing concerns of their members in the workplace, union, and communities in which they lived, and with decision-making processes including all members in a popular democratic approach. After a thorough investigation of the development of each of these two unions across the roughly twenty-year period, I labeled the steelworkers’ conceptualization of unions as “business unionism,” while I called the packinghouse workers’ conceptualization “social justice unionism.”

In addition, I created a 30-point measurement instrument that I could use to support or falsify (undermine) my findings. Using business unionism as my referent, I established beforehand that a union would have to accumulate at least 20 points on the scale to be classified as a social justice union, and that the 20 points had to go beyond just being based on union democracy. When I considered each union in regard to the scale, I found that the steelworkers scored 2 points while the packinghouse workers scored 29; thus, affirming that the packinghouse union met the criteria pre-established for social justice unionism and finding that the differences were qualitative.

If these distinctions I identified were important, then I expected the chosen conceptualization to lead to different union behaviors in regard to the same problem. I focused on how they each addressed the issue of white supremacy and racism,⁷ seeing this as a crucial issue that each union had to address. I examined how each union addressed/didn’t address the issue in three different social fields: the workplace, the union, and the communities in which members lived: in the workplace, I examined the issues of job/occupational segregation; in the union, I looked at efforts to elect or appoint African Americans into positions of leadership, and any general anti-discrimination projects; and in the communities, I looked at efforts to address segregation that excluded African Americans and other peoples of color. In other words, did each union take this issue seriously, and how did they address it?

I found that the steelworkers all-but-ignored this issues, while the packinghouse workers directly confronted them: in 1939, in racist, segregated Chicago, of 14 local packinghouse local unions, 8 had elected African Americans to head them!

Thus, I established that there were two different conceptualizations of trade unionism within the CIO (ultimately, Congress of Industrial Organizations) and that the choice of trade union conceptualization would affect organizational behaviors.

Now, with this understanding established, we now have the tools to understand what happened to the CIO in the post-World War years, from roughly 1947 to 1949/50. Basically, and quickly, the business unions—using “communism” as the dominate theme to attack the social justice unions—turned on them and destroyed nine out of 11 unions, expelling between 750,000 and a million members from the CIO. And by doing so, these business unions destroyed a labor movement—which was trying to advance the interests of all working people—and replaced it with a trade union movement that only looked out for the interests of union members and, oftentimes, only the interests of the most skilled members of the unions. Eventually, the remnants of the CIO re-united with the American Federation of Labor, (AFL) in 1955, from which it had been previously expelled in 1938, to become the AFL-CIO. And while it took a while to become obvious, since 1981 the AFL-CIO has failed even as a trade union movement (Scipes, 2026a).

THEORETICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THESE FINDINGS

The ramification of such a carefully conducted study such as this is that it establishes unequivocally that placement in the social structure does not necessarily determine subsequent behavior. We have to allow for the importance of individual choice in any particular situation. In other words, a white woman who opposes white supremacy and racism does not do that because she is white or female but does so because she consciously decides to challenge these oppressions.

By comparing two different unionization processes in such a precise and systematic manner and finding that the differentiation can lead to qualitatively different organizational behavior—as clearly shown here—we have undermined structural models of the social order that have been used in sociology (and the greater social order) for over 170 years.

It is time to re-examine our approaches to understanding the social order; and if they don’t work—as I argue herein that Marxism and Identity Politics do not—then it’s time to quit using them to guide our thinking and our behaviors.

But what do we have to replace them? Should we keep the old ones or should we discard them?

With the development and advancement of Polyconflictualism (Scipes, 2025b), I argue we have the tools to both bypass the older approaches and to step confidently into the world with the new. Theoretically developed, with this new empirical research, we have strengthened the approach. It deserves the consideration by all activists today.

CONCLUSION

Adding to a previously advanced theoretical explanation of Polyconflictualism, this article has presented empirical evidence that enhances the argument for a rejection of structurally-based models, including Marxism and Identity Politics. It certainly establishes the insufficiency of these early approaches to explain situations discovered while doing research reported in these three elaborate studies.

The advancement of the Polyconflictual approach provides ways to proceed in our task of explaining the proliferation of social movements around the world: by delving into the world of social movements, building particularly on the work of John Fiske (1993) and Alberto Melucci (1989, 1995, 1996) and by not assigning a-priori priority to one social category or another but rather examining the world situation by situation, we can understand how these social movements have emerged and developed, helping us to better understand our world.

It is time to release the earlier approaches so they can go “rest in peace.”

References

Bevins, Vincent. 2023. The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. New York: Public Affairs.

Fiske, John. 1993. Power Works, Power Plays.  London and New York: Verso.

Halpern, Rick. 1997. Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904-54. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Halpern, Rick and Roger Horowitz. 1999. Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Opportunity. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Horowitz, Roger. 1997. “Negro and White: Unite and Fight”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930-90. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels.  1848/1978.  Manifesto of the Communist Party. New York: International Publishers.

Melucci, Alberto.

—  1989.  Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society.  Edited by John Keane and Paul Mier.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

—  1995.  “The Process of Collective Identity” in Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermanns, eds.  Social Movements and Culture.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 41-63.

—  1996.  Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schuhrke, Jeff. 2024. Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. London and New York: Verso.

Scipes, Kim. 

— 1996. Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994. Quezon City, Metro Manila: New Day Publishes. (Available on-line for free and in its entirety at https://www.pnw.edu/personal-faculty-pages/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications, just below the books.)

— 2010. AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? New York: Bloomsbury Books

— 2021. Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States. New York: Bloomsbury Books.

— 2022. “The Only Commonality is Uncommonality: Progressive Protest from the Mid 1980s, Globalization from Below, Environmental Devastation, Climate Change, and Questioning of Industrial Civilization.” Class, Race and Corporate Power: Vol. 10, Issue 1 On-line at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/359786994_The_Only_Commonality_is_Uncommonality_Progressive_Protest_from_the_Mid-1980s_Globalization_from_Below_Environmental_Devastation_Climate_Change_and_Questioning_of_Industrial_Civilization.

— 2023. “Review of Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution by Kim Scipes.” Z Network, November 20. On-line at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/review-of-if-we-burn-the-mass-protest-decade-and-the-missing-revolution/.

— 2025a. “Challenging Marxism as Well as Identity Politics: Part 1.” September 9. On-line at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/challenging-marxism-as-well-as-identity-politics-part-1/.

— 2025b. “Challenging Marxism as Well as Identity Politics: Part II.” September 16. On-line at https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/challenging-marxism-as-well-as-identity-politics-part-1-2/.

— 2026a. “The Continuing Failure of the AFL-CIO Leadership” in G. Nelson Bass III, ed., Labor, Capitalism and Class Power. Leiden and Boston: Brill: 133-157.

— 2026b. Unions, Race, and Popular Democracy: Building a Progressive Labor Movement. ILR imprint, Cornell University Press: Ithaca and New York.

Street, Paul. 1993. “Working in the Yards: A History of Class Relations in Chicago’s Meatpacking Industry, 1866-1960.” Unpublished PhD dissertation, Binghamton University.

1 Sociology’s terminology has been overwhelmingly established by theorists who largely have ignored the issue of power. However, when we approach these collective endeavors from a power-based standpoint, as being done here, we see that the concept “society” obfuscates power relations within this collectivity; a much more accurate terminology, which foregrounds power differences, is “social order,” which recognizes the hierarchical and, therefore, unequal relationships between those in a particular collectivity with power and those without.  From here-on, “social order” will replace “society.”

2 After remaining copies of my book were destroyed in my publisher’s warehouse in Quezon City by a typhoon, I regained complete control of the rights to my book. I subsequently put it on-line for free in its entirety—with the essential help of Susan D. Anderson—and the link to it can be found below the pictures of my books at https://tinyurl.com/Kim-Scipes, so people can read it; this account is from Chapter 5, pp. 116-125.

3 As I explained in Scipes (2021: 74, note 4): “A ‘labor center’ is the organization to which other unions, and/or national federations (depending on the particular country) affiliate, and thus serves as the ‘peak organization’ of those sets of unions and other affiliates. In international labor terminology, the AFL-CIO of the United States is a labor center. In some countries—like the US, Australia, China, Germany, and the UK—there is only one labor center. In others, such as Brazil, France, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, and Sweden—there are two or more.”

4 In a government-supervised election on March 21, 1989, out of 7,393 valid votes among 12 competing unions, the KMU affiliated union won 5,025 votes (68%) while the TUCP affiliate won 292 (Scipes, 1996: 124). The company subsequently closed the mining complex.

5 For more updated resources and accounts of subsequent events, please see the website of LEPAIO, the Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations, at https://aflcio-int.education.

6 By this, I mean it is more than just an account of what happened; I’m signifying this is some labor history that can be used to learn from, to address current and future events.

7 As I explained in an endnote to the preface of my book, “By white supremacy, I mean the system of social relations where the lowliest, no account white person is deemed superior to the most accomplished person of color. I include ‘racism,’ as white people can discriminate against people of color without necessarily considering themselves superior; combined, they illustrate discriminatory attitudes and behaviors by whites by people of color. These attitudes and behaviors are projected by individuals and groups while being ‘legitimized’ by the local culture(s) and are generally enforced by right-wing activists who use the state apparatus, especially at the local level” (Scipes, 2026b: 221, FN #1).

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