Redistribution tackles inequality of class, gender, sexuality, race, and all forms of injustice

I begin with a terminological point. The politics of redistribution, as I shall understand it here, encompasses not only classcentered orientations, such as New Deal liberalism, social democracy, and socialism, but also those forms of feminism and anti-racism that look to socioeconomic transformation or reform as the remedy for gender and racial-ethnic injustice. Thus, it is broader than class politics in the conventional sense. The politics of recognition, likewise, encompasses not only movements aiming to revalue unjustly devalued identities, such as cultural feminism, black cultural nationalism, and gay identity politics but also deconstructive tendencies, such as queer politics, critical “race” politics, and deconstructive feminism, which reject the “essentialism” of traditional identity politics. Thus, it is broader than identity politics in the conventional sense.

With these definitions, I mean to contest one widespread misunderstanding of these matters. It is often assumed that the politics of redistribution is exclusively concerned with injustices of class, whereas the politics of recognition, reductively equated with “identity politics,” is exclusively concerned with injustices of gender, sexuality, and “race.” This view is erroneous and misleading. It treats recognition-oriented currents within the feminist, antiheterosexist, and antiracist movements as the whole story, rendering invisible alternative currents dedicated to righting genderspecific, “race”-specific, and sex-specific forms of economic injustice that traditional class movements ignored. The definitions proposed here, in contrast, take account of such currents by treating redistribution and recognition as dimensions of justice that can cut across all social movements.