[1] The (im)possibility of class identity: Reflections on a case of failed right-wing hegemony Journal: Critical Sociology The Author © [2020]. DOI: 10.1177/0896920520959425 Author: Giorgos Bithymitris, National Centre for Social Research, Greece Abstract This article discusses the dialectics of class identifications in the case of a shipbuilding community of workers in Greece. Unlike other working-class segments that went through the traumas of the recent economic crisis silently, the workers of Perama zone attracted the attention of the public discourse on more than one occasion. The violent far-right activism that encroached on the formerly thriving industrial communities of the wider area have reopened an old discussion about the relationship of the working- class with fascism. Analyzing interview and ethnographic material the article focuses on the discursive processes of class identity formation. Class as an (im)possible identity is examined through the lenses of sociological and psychodynamic distinctions between identity and identification drawing on the broader literature of cultural class analysis. The overarching aim of the study is to explore the opportunities and limitations of the Far-Right appeal when class is at work through affirmation and/or negation. Keywords Class identity, dialectics of identification, Far Right, discourse theory, working-class, Greek crisis, culturalist class analysis Introduction The contribution of the cultural approaches to the renewal of class analysis has been largely acknowledged across a wide spectrum of sociological accounts (Bennett, Crompton et al., 2000; Savage et al., 2009; Reay, 2005; Savage, 2003, 2000). Despite its heterogeneity this stream of social research seems to be well aware of the following paradox: on the one hand the impact of escalating inequalities on people’s lives is getting deeper both within and between countries; on the other hand people seem more and more reluctant to claim class identities (Bottero, 2004; Savage, 2000). An initial response to this paradox is to disentangle the operation of class processes from people’s avowal or refusal of their class identity (Devine and Savage, 2000) simply because refusal or negation can be classed choices as well. Studies in postsocialist Europe showcase how dispossession can be stubbornly present while working-class collectivity is loudly absent or repressed (Eglitis, 2011; Kalb, 2011). The resurgence of far-right politics particularly after the global crisis of 2008, epitomizes this interweaving of material dispossession and disintegrated class identities or what Stacul (2011) has timely described as ‘class without consciousness.’ The argument that identities can be classed even in the absence of the idiom of ‘class’ resonates with the post-structuralist critique against certain reductionist versions of Marxism that have situated class and capital as identifiable ‘things’, rather than as relational and dynamic processes (Green, 2006). The oversimplification of how ‘false