It's not too much of an overstatement to say that OWS represents the re-introduction of class into US politics for the first time in 40 years. Forty years ago, US liberals stepped back from the concern for class that emerged from the '60s (= the demand for equality) and substituted concerns for race and gender (= the demand for diversity). I don't want that Great Refusal to be repeated.
Racism of course exists in US society, and it should be opposed. But it's wrong to see the postmodern trinity of oppressions (race, gender, and class) as similar to one another. The first two can in principle (but not easily) be solved by reconciliation; the third (the conflict exploiter/exploited) cannot: one or the other must be liquidated (not the persons, one hopes, but the social role) - i.e., the way the society functions (its political economy) must change.
The class profile of the US has been roughly the same over the past 30 years, even as Neoliberalism has financialized the society and concentrated wealth at an accelerating rate in the elite:
~1% = economic elite (aka ruling class, big bourgeoisie), owners of property, esp. productive property;
~20% = political class (aka liberal class, petty bourgeoisie, graduates of a good college, hence "tertiary bourgeoise"), those who want to be like the elite (see now Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class): it's to them that the highly-developed US propaganda system is directed; and
~80% = working class, and aware of it.
Of course all but the elite are working class in the sense that they must rent themselves to the owners of capital in order to live. But the possession of some capital (especially "human capital") allows the political class to do so on better terms than the working class. They are relatively privileged.
The OWS/99% movement appears when
~(a) members of the political class switch their allegiance from the elite to the working class; and
~(b) members of the working class give up their usual - and usually accurate - assessment that "nothing can be done" (i.e., only individual solutions are possible).
IP dissolves this conjunction by substituting individual demands - the demand for diversity - for the demand for equality. IP can be, consciously or not, an attack on the OWS/99% movement.
Noam Chomsky wrote fifteen years ago, "American society is now remarkably atomized. Political organizations have collapsed. In fact, it seems like even bowling leagues are collapsing. The left has a lot to answer for here. There's been a drift toward very fragmenting tendencies among left groups, toward this sort of identity politics."
--CGE