“You’re not working class”: how narratives of authentic marginality foreclose class solidarities in community organising in contemporary England

Drawing on 18 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2021 and 2023 with members of four community groups in Newham (East London) and Newcastle, this article explores how forms of liberal identity politics via claims to “authentic marginality” can hinder community organising. My findings show that within liberal and left spaces of community organising injunctions to centre “the most marginalised” reflect a tendency to homogenise the working class and flatten its necessary complexity. In this way, claims to authenticity obscure the differentiated realities of working-class life and foreclose solidarities that might emerge across difference. By illuminating how authenticity claims are reproduced as well as resisted in everyday organising, the article calls for a politics of solidarity grounded in a concrete appraisal of differentiated conditions rather than fixed and absolute identities.