On the morning of February 18, 2014, faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago walked out of their classrooms for the first strike in the school’s history. A reporter from WBEZ found Walter Benn Michaels (b. 1948) on the picket line. Michaels took a break from marching and looked up at University Hall, the 28-story brutalist tower that dominates the campus east of the Dan Ryan Expressway. He gave the reporter a lesson in the building’s sociology. The top floors belong to senior administration. “You got people up there making a lot of money,” he said. The English department, which Michaels then chaired, sits on the 20th floor, where some tenured professors, himself included, earn good salaries. One floor down, on the 19th, sit the non-tenure-track English instructors, most with doctorates, most teaching full loads, many earning around $30,000 a year.
The scene compresses his whole career into one elevator shaft. A famous professor stands in the cold and points at a building where the distance between comfort and precarity measures one floor. He does not talk about the racial composition of the 19th floor or the 20th. He talks about money. For four decades, in literary theory, in American literary history, in political polemic, and in the criticism of photography, Michaels has made the same argument: what people earn, own, believe, and intend counts. Who they are does not.
The argument has family roots, though Michaels resists the inheritance model of identity even when applied to himself. In a 2014 interview with Jeffrey J. Williams published in symploke, he told the story. His great-grandfather came to Chicago and landed within ten blocks of Hull House. He worked as a match boy, then in a sweatshop. He organized the sweatshop and led his first strike at seventeen. He rose in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and, by Michaels’s account, served as its president. His son, Michaels’s grandfather, became a union lawyer and spent his career as chief counsel for the ILGWU. Michaels tells the story and then refuses its obvious moral. He says he does not believe he inherited his politics from his grandfather and great-grandfather. A man whose life work attacks the idea that identity comes down through blood cannot claim his socialism as a birthright. He has to claim it as a belief.
The belief took time. As an undergraduate in the late 1960s, Michaels spent about four months at the University of Michigan, where Students for a Democratic Society still ran strong, and drifted along its edges. He later described his politics of that era as the standard student-left package, civil rights and anti-war, and described his deeper motive as the refusal to do anything that parents or authorities wanted. He moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, took his B.A. in 1970, stayed for graduate school, and took his Ph.D. in 1975. In a 2017 interview in Amerikastudien he looked back on the turn from activism to criticism and insisted the two never separated: “I was always interested in capitalism.”
His teaching career traces the map of American literary studies at its most ambitious. Johns Hopkins hired him in 1974. Berkeley took him in 1977 and kept him a decade. He returned to Hopkins in 1987 and stayed until 2001, when Fish (b. 1938), then dean of liberal arts and sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and in the middle of a hiring spree that startled the profession, recruited him to a public university that educates the children of immigrants, home-care aides, and warehouse workers. Michaels chaired the UIC English department from 2001 to 2007 and again from 2013. He is now professor emeritus. His fields, as the department lists them, run from nineteenth and twentieth century American literature through critical theory to the visual arts.
At Berkeley in the late 1970s and 1980s he worked in the atmosphere that produced the New Historicism, alongside Stephen Greenblatt (b. 1943). The older scholarship had treated literary works either as monuments of art or as mirrors of their times. The new scholarship treated texts as participants in the systems they described. Michaels pushed the insight harder than most. In his hands, literature did not mirror capitalism and did not protest it from outside. It shared capitalism’s conceptual structure. A novel could denounce the market while breathing the market’s air.
Before the historical work came the theoretical bomb. In the summer 1982 issue of Critical Inquiry, Michaels and Steven Knapp (b. 1951) published “Against Theory,” an essay designed to end a debate rather than join one. The academic theory boom of the 1970s had promised that a general account of meaning would ground interpretation, that critics who understood what meaning was would read better than critics who did not. Knapp and Michaels answered that no such account could exist because meaning and intention are one thing, not two. A text means what its author meant. There is nothing left over for theory to discover.
Their famous illustration works like a short story. A man walks along a beach and comes upon marks in the wet sand that form a stanza of Wordsworth. He wonders who wrote it. Then a wave recedes and leaves a second stanza below the first. Now he must choose between explanations. Either some agent, however strange, means something by these marks, or the ocean produced them by chance. If the sea wrote them, they are not words at all. They look like language the way a cloud looks like a horse. The lesson: you cannot first identify something as language and then ask what it means. To see it as language at all is already to see it as intended.
The essay made careers of anger. Critical Inquiry filled with responses, and the exchange was collected in 1985 as Against Theory: Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism, with replies from figures including Fish and Richard Rorty (1931-2007). The essay entered The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, the profession’s canon of what must be argued about. Knapp went on to administration and eventually the presidency of George Washington University. Michaels went on repeating the argument, in new territory, for the next forty years.
The repetition has a logic. If meaning is not what the author intended, it becomes what the reader experiences. If politics is not about what people believe and what they own, it becomes about who they are. Michaels came to see the drift from intention to experience in the seminar room and the drift from class to identity in national politics as one drift. His whole later career unpacks that equation.
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism appeared from the University of California Press in 1987 and made him, in the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s later phrase, one of the most influential Americanists of his generation. The book reads the fiction of Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945), Frank Norris (1870-1902), Stephen Crane (1871-1900), and Henry James (1843-1916) against the money debates of the Gilded Age, when Americans fought over whether value lived in gold itself or in what paper promised. Michaels refuses the standard picture of naturalism as a literature of protest against the market. He shows a literature obsessed with the same question the market asked: what makes anything, a dollar, a body, a contract, a novel, worth what it claims to be worth? The scandal of the book was its refusal to give literature the moral high ground. Dreiser does not stand outside capitalism judging it. Dreiser and the gold bugs share a problem.
Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (1995) moved the argument to race and made him a marked man on the academic left. The book studies the 1920s, the decade of the Johnson-Reed immigration act, the second Klan, and high American modernism, and argues that nativism and modernism met around one question: what makes an American? The answer the decade produced, Michaels argues, was cultural identity, and cultural identity did not replace racial thinking. It renovated it. Culture became a polite name for race. Pluralism asked who people were instead of what they believed, and in doing so preserved the logic it claimed to bury. Michaels pressed the point past the 1920s: the idea of cultural identity remains, in his words, an extension of racial identity, historically and logically. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield answered in a 1994 article that his equation of cultural identity with racial essentialism lent credibility to a perspective that served historically White interests and dodged a reckoning with racism as a structuring force in American life. The charge, in one form or another, has followed him since. He has answered, in one form or another, since. In a 2011 interview he said he had been called a racist for twenty years, starting with the first article that went into Our America, which argued there is no such thing as race, the social construction included.
The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004) tied the theory to the politics. The book argues that three things happened together after 1967. Literary theory, following Roland Barthes (1915-1980), killed the author and enthroned the reader. Liberal ideology, culminating in Francis Fukuyama (b. 1952) and the end of history, declared the argument over economic systems finished. And inequality in the neoliberal economies exploded while the language for naming it withered. Michaels connects the three. Once economic structure counts as settled, politics has nowhere to go but recognition, representation, and the management of difference. And difference asks less of everyone. If two people disagree about ideology, one might be wrong, and settling the question requires argument and sometimes defeat. If two people differ in culture, nobody is wrong, and the only duty is respect. Michaels calls the substitution of the second for the first the perfect moral alibi of the age.
Then he took the argument to the general public and found out what the general public does to people who make it. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality appeared from Metropolitan Books in the fall of 2006, a year after Hurricane Katrina had put poor Black New Orleans on every screen in America. Michaels wrote against the lesson the country drew. Racism played a role in New Orleans, he granted, but in a society without racial discrimination the poor would still have drowned, and in a society without poor people nobody would have. His argument about the universities cut closest to his own life. Elite colleges had learned to get the demographics right while the student bodies grew richer. Rich kids now come in the appropriate colors, he wrote, and the poor stay home. Diversity, on his account, is the opposite of a radical demand. It is what justice looks like when you have agreed in advance that nobody’s money will move. A society whose rich are proportionally Black, White, Latino, Asian, gay, and straight remains a society of rich and poor. He called that outcome a better-looking oligarchy, not a better country.
The reception split with a violence publishers dream about. The Economist found a touch of genius in it. The Washington Post found it impossible to disagree with. The New Yorker called it cogent. Slate called it wildly implausible and assigned it to the shock and awe school of political argument. The Nation ran both admiration and the charge of seething, amnesiac resentment. The book made Michaels the most quotable class-first polemicist in America and made class reductionist his permanent epithet. The criticism has a fair core. Michaels writes as though racism and exploitation can be cleanly pulled apart, and in American history they mostly cannot. Wages, neighborhoods, schools, and police have been organized by race, and a politics that waits for pure class categories might wait forever. His answer concedes the entanglement and holds the line on the remedy: anti-discrimination, even perfected, would leave the class structure standing, and the institutions promoting diversity know it, which is why they promote it. In The Nation he put the strategic point at maximum bluntness, writing that as a political strategy, exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best a waste of time. Doug Henwood, an ally, observed that Michaels aims to provoke and may drive off the people who most need to hear him. Asked about that in Jacobin in 2011, Michaels did not soften. “I try to put things as sharply as I can,” he said.
The Jacobin interview, published under the title “Let Them Eat Diversity,” introduced his distinction between right neoliberalism and left neoliberalism, two management teams for the same economy. Right neoliberals want competitive markets and traditional values. Left neoliberals want competitive markets and respect for difference. Both accept that the rich will pull away from the poor; they fight over the demographic composition of the winners. Human resources departments, he noted, will guarantee that your culture is respected whether or not your standard of living is. The interview circulated for years and taught a generation of young leftists, many gathered around Jacobin itself, to read the diversity regime as capital’s conscience rather than its critic.
Around the same time his politics moved from the page to the bargaining table. UIC’s faculty, tenure-track and non-tenure-track together in one wall-to-wall unit, won union certification through the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and Michaels served at the start as lead negotiator. He liked to tell what happened when the two sides looked for easy articles to sign first, the standard practice for building momentum in a first contract. The two easiest were anti-discrimination and diversity. Management loved them. The university sells diversity from top to bottom, he observed; it is one of the school’s calling cards. The fight came over money, over the instructors near the poverty line, over raises that had not arrived in years. When the contract stalled, the faculty walked, and Michaels ended up on the picket line under University Hall explaining the floors to a reporter, then telling him that students in his American literature classes learn something about the value of literature they carry for life, and that this is part of what a university is. He and his colleague Lennard Davis (b. 1949) wrote in Jacobin that week that professors had finally learned they were workers, that the distinction between professionals and labor had become pure ideology, and that UIC’s mission was educating working-class students, not the children of the upper-middle class. He had spent thirty years arguing that class beats culture. Now he was doing the argument instead of writing it. He told Williams that millions of people figured this out before he did, and that most of them had the advantage of not being professors.
The late work turned to pictures. The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015) asks how art can show class without converting it into a spectacle for elite pity. Michaels reads photographers including Jeff Wall (b. 1946) and Viktoria Binschtok (b. 1972) and defends the autonomy of the artwork, its formal structure, its madeness, against the demand that it deliver an emotional experience. A photograph that works by provoking compassion lets the viewer feel good about feeling bad and mistake the feeling for politics. A photograph with rigorous form shows the structure of a problem and refuses the viewer that comfort. The book extends the oldest argument. As intention against experience in 1982, so form against empathy in 2015. The work means what its maker meant. Your feelings about it are your business.
He built a platform for this criticism as a founding editor of nonsite.org, the online journal that has carried his later essays on photography, intention, Marx, and the diversity regime, and that gathered around itself the small school of critics, Todd Cronan, Charles Palermo, Lisa Siraganian, and others, who hold the intentionalist line. And he found his most durable ally in the political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. (b. 1947), the sharpest Black critic of antiracist politics in the American academy. Their joint collection, No Politics but Class Politics (Eris, 2023), gathers two decades of essays arguing that racial disparity discourse asks the wrong question. The disparity framework treats a society as just when each group holds its proportional share of the poverty; Reed and Michaels want less poverty, held by no one. Their demand is not a representative elite. It is the end of an economy that requires an elite of this size and a bottom of this depth.
The consistency is the achievement and the limit. Michaels has run one argument through six books, two disciplines, a union contract, and a thousand controversies: intention over experience, belief over being, class over culture, form over feeling, equality over diversity. Conservatives quote him and he is not one of them; he calls himself a socialist and wants more redistribution than any Republican and most Democrats could survive proposing. Liberals denounce him and cannot quite dismiss him, because he identified early how cheaply their institutions could purchase virtue. What he saw from the picket line at UIC he had already written in 2006 and theorized in 1982. The building has many kinds of people on every floor. The floors are the problem.
Notes
The picket line scene, University Hall floors, “You got people up there making a lot of money,” the $30,000 figure, and the closing quote about the value of literature come from Chip Mitchell, “UIC Faculty Claim Higher Cause”, WBEZ, February 2014.
The great-grandfather material, including the match boy near Hull House, the sweatshop strike at seventeen, the ILGWU presidency, the grandfather as ILGWU chief counsel, the lead negotiator role, the anti-discrimination and diversity articles anecdote, and “millions of people figured this out before I did,” comes from Jeffrey J. Williams, “The Political Education of Walter Benn Michaels”, symploke 22 (2014). Note: the ILGWU presidency claim is Michaels‘s own account in this interview.
Michigan, SDS, four months, refusing authority, and “I was always interested in capitalism” come from Marlon Lieber’s interview with Walter Benn Michaels, Amerikastudien 62.4 (2017).
“I try to put things as sharply as I can,” Henwood’s criticism, left vs. right neoliberalism, HR respecting your culture but not your standard of living, and “called a racist for twenty years” come from “Let Them Eat Diversity”, Jacobin, January 2011.
Review blurbs from The Economist, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Slate, and The Nation come from the publisher’s page for The Trouble with Diversity.
The Katrina argument and “rich kids in the appropriate colors” come from the introduction to The Trouble with Diversity, adapted in “The Trouble with Diversity”, The American Prospect, August 2006.
“Exposing racism is wrongheaded and at best a waste of time” comes from his The Nation essay, quoted here: “Walter Benn Michaels on The Trouble with Diversity“. I softened “an utter waste” to “a waste” to stay in paraphrase.
The Davis and Michaels strike essay material, including “professionals are workers,” working-class students, and the Michigan enrollment comparison, comes from “Faculty on Strike”, Jacobin, February 2014, and “UIC Faculty Strikes”, In These Times.
The Gordon and Newfield critique comes from “White Philosophies,” Critical Inquiry 21 (1994), summarized at Alchetron.
Career dates, department head from 2001 to 2007 and again from 2013, and fields come from the UIC profile and the symploke interview.
If John J. Mearsheimer’s anthropology is right, it presents a devastating structural critique of Michaels’s Marxist-aligned political vision while explaining the exact social logic behind the identitarianism he loathes.
Michaels rejects the particularism of defending group interests based on race, culture, or identity. He advocates for a universal working-class politics grounded in the shared material reality of economic exploitation. In his view, class is economically constructed rather than socially constructed; a worker’s position in capitalism is an objective relation to capital, regardless of how he feels or what his cultural background is.
However, Mearsheimer’s framework suggests that a political movement cannot be sustained purely by an objective economic relationship. If humans are tribal at their core and require an enormous value infusion from their surrounding society to formulate a moral code, they will always prioritize cultural, religious, or national allegiances over abstract class solidarity. Man is a social primate that forms inside-the-group bonds based on shared sentiments, language, and upbringing. Michaels wants workers to see past their cultural differences to unite against exploitation, but Mearsheimer’s anthropology implies that the human animal is biologically hardwired to view the world through the lens of the immediate cultural tribe, rendering universal class solidarity an unsustainable psychological project.
Michaels treats the modern fixation on diversity and identity as a top-down ideological diversion—a clever trick used by the professional-managerial class to defend economic inequality by shifting the conversation to discrimination.
Mearsheimer’s logic suggests a much deeper, bottom-up cause. The obsession with identity is not an artificial construct engineered by neoliberalism; it is the natural, inevitable expression of human tribalism returning with a vengeance. If liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings by treating them as atomistic actors, people will naturally push back by seeking out tight-knit groups that shape their identities. What Michaels calls “identity politics” is simply the human animal doing what it has always done: organizing into exclusive tribes, enforcing group taboos, and seeking status for its members. Neoliberalism did not invent identity politics; it merely commodified man’s innate tribal drive.
Michaels frequently notes that battles over identity are fought in the realm of affect—how we see, feel about, and respond to others. He points out that you cannot eliminate exploitation by altering people’s feelings, because exploitation is a structural feature of capitalism, not a product of prejudice.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains why the political left eagerly abandoned Michaels’s structural class analysis in favor of affective identity politics. If reason is the least important way we determine our preferences, and if innate sentiments carry the most weight, then an institutional politics based on emotion, recognition, and cultural belonging will always hold vastly more psychological power over human beings than an intellectual critique of capital extraction. The human tribe is ruled by sentiment and socialization, not by economic formulas. By demanding a politics stripped of tribal affect and focused purely on the material structure of exploitation, Michaels is asking the human animal to act against its fundamental nature.
To David Pinsof, Michaels is a classic example of the intellectual trapped in the misunderstanding myth. Michaels diagnoses a grand structural illusion: the left has simply mistaken cultural recognition for economic justice. He treats the elite obsession with diversity as a category mistake, a conceptual blunder that can be unmasked and corrected through clear-eyed analysis. If only people could see through the identity smoke screen and realize that capitalism is exploiting them, the workers might unite against the true engine of their misery.
Pinsof offers a colder alternative. The institutional elites championing diversity, and the corporations implementing bias training, do not suffer from a conceptual error or a lack of ideological clarity. They understand their incentives.
From this perspective, the diversity framework is not a mistake; it is a savvy strategy used in zero-sum competition over status and resources. Elite institutions do not push diversity because they are confused about economic inequality. They push it because it allows them to maintain their wealth and justify their authority under a moralistic pretext. Managing diversity creates high-status roles for the credentialed class and shields them from a real challenge to their material privileges.
Michaels frames his critique as an effort to restore a serious politics of economic redistribution by stripping away false consciousness. Pinsof invites an examination of the actual motives behind this academic stance. Positioned as a prominent professor at a major research university, writing polemics that dunk on fellow academics for being superficial is an excellent device for capturing status within the intellectual hierarchy. It signals a level of uncompromising systemic insight that ordinary people do not have time to formulate.
The political gridlock does not persist because people have bad beliefs about culture or misunderstand the nature of class. It persists because human coalitions have deeply conflicting motives over wealth, power, and dominance. The elite obsession with identity is not an accidental misunderstanding; it is a highly functional instrument designed to manage the social marketplace. The only misunderstanding in class-first critique is the belief that elite political strategies are just an intellectual oversight.
