Verity Burgmann creates an unnecessary and ahistorical distinction between the politics of class and that of the various identities through which the contemporary working class defines itself. Indeed, her vision of a self-conscious proletariat seems too male and too musty. Racial and gender identities have achieved a privileged status, compared to that of class, but this has less to do with the outlook of the left-wing academy than with the late twentieth-century transformation of law, politics, and social policy, both in the US and other multicultural nations.