The suppression of the left wing has remapped class struggle onto a conflict of identities designed to maintain economic inequality. The discourses of identity politics, multiculturalism, and affirmative action act to divert attention from issues of poverty, prolong class stratification, and conceal the connection between poverty and bourgeois prosperity. The psychoanalytic concepts of the narcissism of minor differences, the defense mechanism of projection , and doubling and repetition can illuminate an economy of symbolic commodity fetishism that conceals class inequalities. Whereas multiculturalism and affirmative action policies should augment a socialization of the political economy, they serve instead to replace imperative social programs.