On intersectionality and identity politics: A Marxist view

In examining all forms of social division and oppression today, I claim that a solid starting point is the thesis of historical materialism that social structures are, deep down, vehicles for the material reproduction of humans, and that such material reproduction tends to shape them.

If one conceives of material wealth in the broadest sense, as the sum total of what humans deem useful or helpful in recurrently producing themselves as human beings (regardless of the site of production, a household or some other production site, and whether or not products appear as commodities), then determining who owns the wealth — i.e. who manages it, who decides on it, who benefits from its use, transfer, or effective allocation and distribution —will be the basis of any and every type of division or fragmentation of society into advantaged and disadvantaged groups or classes.

A patriarchal social structure by which the man in the family or in the household appropriates wealth (broadly conceived) at the expense of women and children; be it by appropriating their bodies directly, their active time, and/or the results of their active time — i.e. by exploiting them — is a direct class cleavage.

A racist social hierarchy means that, for instance, whites are effective owners of wealth (broadly conceived) and blacks are not — or not to any comparable extent. Thus, what it is euphemistically called “discrimination” is always and everywhere material dispossession or class exploitation. When Fred Trump refuses to rent an apartment to a black family— that is directly and immediately a form of wealth dispossession or exploitation, and therefore a class cleavage. Etc.

Therefore, class defined generically and abstractly, as Marxists define it, i.e. in terms of effective ownership over wealth (or “productive forces”) cannot be deemed co-terminus or mutually exclusive with sexual, gender, racial, ethnic, and any other material or cultural differences among groups of people. On the contrary, these social distinctions can only be complementary or mutually reinforcing of the analytical category of class as they provide it with more specific, concrete historical content.

In any particular society, class is constituted concretely as a “synthesis” of several class cleavages. These cleavages coexist and combine — collide with or reinforce one another — in complex ways to historically constitute class, to produce the phenomenon of class as experienced by the individuals in such society. Thus, in the totality of the class formation, each class cleavage gain its place and specific weight. In a particular historical period, a particular set of social relations defining a particular class cleavage may become so pervasive as to re-purpose and subordinate all other class cleavages to its dominant “logic” or “law of motion.”

This is why class — at least in the general and totalizing terms in which Marxists have chosen to define it — is more basic, fundamental, and comprehensive that particular class cleavages. This in no way minimizes, downplays, or obscures the particular forms of exploitation and division which, in practice in a particular social setting, may be more intense, more important, and more dominant. The dominance of a particular form of exploitation cannot be established at the abstract level. It has to be substantiated empirically, historically. What the general category of class, as defined by Marxists, does is help us understand these particular divisions at their deepest level.

At this (deepest) level of analysis, each and every one of these social differences is a particular form of class division. This, by itself, cannot resolve practical political dilemmas. Again, what is required now is to duly specify the particular social forms of this exploitation or dispossession of one group of people by another, and their precise location and weight in the totality of the social formation. Relevant questions are how these forms originated and unfolded in history, what is their specific weight in the overall fragmentation of the class in a given situation, how people — individually and collectively — experience these forms in their consciousness (i.e. as “identities”), etc.

The oppressed gender, nation, ethnic group, etc. are, to the extent in which they are dispossessed on the basis of that particular difference, thereby members of the global working class in the broad terms conceptualized by Marxists. If this entire human mass is not conscious and organized as a global working class in motion to build socialism, then they are just a class in itself, not yet a class for itself. However, what the Marxist analysis does, is to highlight the latent but fundamental grounds for unity across these social differences. Therefore, such class unity is equivalent to the abolition of these particular forms of exploitation!

In the prototypical case of capitalist production examined by Marx in Capital, an admittedly abstract case, the basis for the class distinction highlighted is the economic and legal ownership over means of production. A small group of people has the economic and legal ownership over productive wealth and the other group (a majority of society) does not. Under certain social conditions (not automatically), this leads to the forced commodification of the labor power of the non-owners, who acquiesce under duress to direct subservience in production under the owner’s command; the legal contract framing the relation is voluntarily entered into and transacted in the labor market. Exploitation then takes a specific economic form, as the directly coercive, non- or extra-economic forms of exploitation are ruled out ex hypothesi.

Now, this “chemically pure” case is just one case. However, though only one of many forms of exploitation in today’s world, there is concrete historical evidence that it is primus inter pares among them all. The specifically economic exploitation case is a crucial one in grasping the dynamics of social change in global modern history up to our present times, because the social structure does formed (a web of capitalist production relations) has exhibited overwhelming dominance over all social life in empirically verifiable ways.

Much more can be said about the historical basis that accounts for capital’s dominance in our social life and the extent to which it has entered into partial conflict, or combined and/or reinforced particular preexisting and coexisting class cleavages (e.g. the role of American slavery in the industrialization of capitalist Europe), but that exceeds the scope of this post.

The specific capitalistic economic form of exploitation (or, perhaps better said, modern class exploitation regarded as a totality, turbo-charged by its economic component: capitalist exploitation proper) has proved to be the most virulent, destructive of all social structures historically tried by humans — to the point of endangering our very survival as a species. Therefore, understanding this particular monster is a significant step in grasping exploitation in its various forms, and in getting rid of them.

In the 19th century, when Marx wrote Capital, only a tiny (but very aggressive) minority of the human race in a few points in the world was directly engulfed in the capitalist economic whirlwind. Most humans in the world were self subsistence producers or small commodity producers. Most humans were directly involved in a host of exploitative social structures.

The coercive dispossession of some groups by others was based and justified on differences such as age, sex, gender, race, ethnic origin, nationality, etc. But even back then, the economic capitalist juggernaut was already exercising dominance over human life in the planet, though indirectly.

Even in this 21st century, a not insignificant portion of the direct producers of the world are not immediately or directly involved in capitalist production relations. However, it is clear that all existing social structures today have been largely reshaped and repurposed — more or less willingly, more or less reluctantly — by the extraordinary force of capital. Again, capital has shown to be the most aggressive, dissolvent, and virulent social power in human history.

Admittedly, the category of capital is highly abstract. It deliberately abstracts from social differences other than the effective and legal ownership over productive wealth. It ignores or subsumes all those other social differences.

At this level, the analysis answers the question of, “How would a human society function if the direct producers were otherwise undifferentiated or uniform, and their only distinctive trait were their dispossession from society’s productive wealth, with such wealth concentrated in the hands of a small minority of owners?” Clearly, in reality, the direct producers are not a uniform mass. If they were, then their unity would be a virtual slam dunk! (In fact, this points to the role that concrete historically preexisting and coexisting class cleavages play in the reproduction of the capitalist social order. It is of the essence — in that these cleavages regenerate in significant part the fragmentation of the working class on which capitalist production is erected.)

To approach the situation on the ground, to provide practical emancipatory activity with good guidance, one cannot be satisfied with the answer to a question posed under such an heroic assumption. In any practically useful concrete analysis of any particular social and political context, the specification and concrete articulation of the various forms of exploitation is a requisite. To paraphrase Lenin, the concrete analysis of the concrete situation continues to be the living soul of Marxism!

However, and I repeat for emphasis, the focus of Marxists on class is not misplaced. Again, in the terms defined above, racial oppression is a form of class or labor exploitation— though not a direct one as the one via capitalist production or surplus-value production. Gender, ethnic, national, etc. — any other form of group “discrimination” is a specific form of class exploitation, exploitation of labor based on direct or “extra-economic” compulsion.

I must also repeat that there’s no necessary ontological hierarchy among the various sources of class division involved other than the one that can be established on empirical or historical grounds — as a result of a concrete analysis of the concrete situation. Allow me to illustrate this point in terms that may be relatable to younger readers in the United States:

From the personal viewpoint of a black closeted queer married woman from Puerto Rico living in the Bronx, exploited as a worker by the bosses, exploited as a wife by her husband, exploited as a black person by whites, exploited as a Puerto Rican by “regular Americans,” exploited as queer by straights, exploited as a Bronx inhabitant by Manhattanites (who divert the city’s public resources disproportionately to their boro, away from the outer boros), etc., exploitation is experienced as a totality.

The point of the Marxist analysis of this experience is to help this person to make a fuller sense of the social contextual totality underpinning her experience — the conditions of her reproduction — so that she is best equipped to undertake the actions, in combination with other kin spirits, that may be required to abolish the conditions of her (total) exploitation. It is not meant to put down any aspect of her actual, concrete condition. She is who she is in the social context. Once organized in the mind, the totality of these determinations becomes a political force!

The important argument for Marxists to make, I believe, is that this analysis of her experience, connecting her to the common experience of many other people, women or men, black or not, queer or not, Puerto Rican or not, from the Bronx or from anywhere else in the world, is most fruitful in terms of guiding her most effective political engagement.

To highlight this, consider the alternative. Suppose (however unlikely this may be) that our closeted queer Puerto Rican black woman from the Bronx, on the basis of her experience, under the influence of the dominant ideologies around, decides to devote her limited free time and energy to actively support those political formations that want to break the corporate “glass ceiling” and push for a larger representation of women actors in Hollywood and the TV networks, etc. because she feels that her condition as a woman trumps the other aspects of her condition (and “identity,” to the extent she is conscious of it).

So, she decides that her commonalities with (1) other Puerto Ricans exploited by U.S. imperialism, (2) other black people exploited by the structures of white supremacy, (3) others from the outer boros exploited by Manhattanites, (4) other wage workers the world over exploited by capital, and — therefore — their shared interest with all the exploited workers of the world (waged or not), that these commonalities matter little and she has no time or energy left for them. Will she thereby take the most direct route to abolishing the fundamental conditions of her exploited condition? If Marxists are correct in their emphasis, then the question begs the answer.

In sum, from the viewpoint of Marxism, I argue that the path to working class unity goes right through the fight against all forms of class exploitation. Socialists informed by Marxism need to exhibit the most committed and determined support and solidarity with the most exposed and vulnerable sectors of the global working class, those crushed under various forms of exploitation, placing their needs and priorities front and center of their effort to help the class unite, promoting thereby the broader and longer term needs of the class. Class unity demands it.

To be fair, this viewpoint is not novel in the history of Marxist socialism. This is not the place to discuss its history, but suffice it to say that, as a result of the 1905 revolution in Russia, a country where modern capitalist relations had only involved a small minority of the direct producers, none other than Karl Kautsky perceived and celebrated a shift of the “center of gravity” of the revolutionary international socialist struggle to Russia. In 1914, and most decisively after the 1917 October revolution, Lenin relocated most forcefully this “center of gravity” further towards the East, declaring that “The socialist revolution will not be solely, or chiefly, a struggle of the revolutionary proletarians of each country against their bourgeoisie — no — it will be a struggle of all the imperialist-oppressed colonies and countries, of all dependent countries, against international imperialism.” (See Lenin, CW, vol. 30, pp. 159–162.)

If, as Marx and Engels claimed, the liberation of the direct producers was to be attained by the direct producers themselves, then a historical reassessment of this type was necessary to recalibrate the struggle for socialism. Prioritizing the needs and interests of that massive segment of the global working class in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that was only indirectly exploited by capital, or directly exploited by it but still in an incomplete and primitive fashion, and in tandem with a host of other coercive extra-economic forms of exploitation, was viewed by Lenin and many other radicals as a sine qua non precondition of revolutionary socialism — i.e. as a sine qua non precondition for the effective unity of the workers of the world.

This is to reinforce the point that the Marxist analytical emphasis on class demands that one emphasizes in practice the struggle against the specific forms of exploitation that stand in the way of class unity. Lasting class unity is unthinkable without prioritizing — again, without placing front and center of the struggle — the needs and the development of those at the bottom of the (global) social pyramid.

This is the sense in which the abolition of class requires as sine qua non the abolition of all of these particular, historical forms of exploitation. It is not the material or cultural individual or sectoral diversity that is in question, diversity whose richness is a source of human wealth and power, but the social divisions and hierarchies erected on it. This is the sense in which the proletariat — broadly conceived — is a universal class of humans whose liberation requires overall human liberation.

It is in the struggle to constitute the global workers of the world as a coherent, conscious, militant, and humanly-universal social class that these particular forms of exploitation are to be combated and dissolved. That is, if we are going to have a shot at building a better human civilization.