Barbara Foley’s reply to my post on intersectionality
My dear friend, comrade, and Science & Society colleage, Barbara Foley, wrote a short but very thoughtful reply to my post on intersectionality. Here it is reproduced in full:
I appreciate Julio Huato’s impulse not to accede to the “multiple oppressions” approach to modes of social inequality that undergird the prevalent analyses of intersectionality. Clearly Huato is a Marxist, making the case for Marxism as a meta-theory for formulating the ways in which the different forms of inequality prevailing in the world today are founded in the exploitation of the many by the few. I am in sympathy with the premises underlying this project.
I need more clarity, however, about a few of his assertions. First, he appears to accede to the notion that men, by virtue of their presumed position of power in the nuclear family, actually “exploit” the labor of women and children in the household. While Engels wrote words to the effect that he is the ruler, and she is the proletariat, this is a highly problematic statement, both theoretically and historically. Along similar lines, I don’t quite understand Huato’s statement that whites (mostly working-class, presumably) can be said to be “effective owners of wealth” and thus in a position of “exploiting” their nonwhite working-class counterparts; this says little about the situation of working-class whites who — no matter what their attitudes may or may not be toward people of different “races” — own little more than the clothes they wear and the cars they drive. Exhaustive empirical and theoretical work by Marxist feminist and Marxist critical race scholars demonstrates that identities, however suffused these may be in what some Marxists have traditionally called “false consciousness” (a term that cannot readily be jettisoned, in my view), do not readily correspond with objective historical circumstances. Huato’s conflation of the terms “class” and “group” does not help to clarify matters.
The problems accompanying the above formulations lead to my principal question to Huato — namely, can one simply conflate oppression, division, or dispossession with exploitation? This is not a verbal quibble. Exploitation, for Marxists, signifies the expropriation of the surplus value yielded up by the purchase and use of labor power. Oppression, division and dispossession — often based upon gender/sexuality, “race”/ethnicity, nation, religion, etc — are crucial to the procedures of exploitation (indeed, the capitalists would not be able to get away with their exploitation of the entire working class without these intensely “discriminatory” and “divisive” ideologies/practices); but these procedures are by no means identical with exploitation. “Division” — as a political strategy — is not the same thing as the division of labor historically giving rise to different race- and gender-coded demographics. “Dispossession” takes different forms in different historical movements, with different agents acting out different roles.
While I heartily agree with Huato that, finally, it all comes down to class, Marxists need to steer clear of the charge of class reductionism. Huato’s designation of various cognate terms — oppression, division, dispossession — with exploitation blurs distinctions that need to be borne in mind if we are to grasp the highly mediated totality in which the hegemony of class-based power has a stranglehold over most of the world’s people.
