From inequality to difference: a severe case of displacement?

When considering the shifts in left thinking over the past fifteen years, it is hard to avoid some notion of displacement: the cultural displacing the material; identity politics displacing class; the politics of constitutional reform displacing the economics of equality. Difference, in particular, seems to have displaced inequality as the central concern of political and social theory. We ask ourselves how we can achieve equality while still recognizing difference, rather than how we can eliminate inequality. This rephrasing of the questions can be traced to a variety of sources, but one undoubted element is the shift from exclusively class analyses of inequality to alternatives that consider class on a continuum with inequalities of gender, ethnicity or race.