Intersectionality and Marxism

Submitted by AWL on 22 December, 2021 - 5:44 Author: Ellen Trent
bell hooks

bell hooks, 1952-2021


This article is from our 2016 pamphlet Why Socialist Feminism?, which you can buy here.


“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit!”?

The concept of “intersectionality” has played an important role in the revival of feminist ideas and activity since the late 2000s. Many feminists today define themselves as “intersectional feminists” – meaning that they attempt to make space for the voices and issues of those who are marginalised in the movement; or as a way of indicating how different oppressions inter-relate to create individual women’s experiences. However, sometimes, especially in UK student feminist politics, intersectionality has come to have negative baggage and has been closely tied with privilege theory, “call out culture” and identity politics. The concept needs to be described in all its different contexts before it can be critiqued.

Intersectionality is used by many anti-capitalist feminists who may see themselves as Marxists or class-struggle anarchists. For example, anti-capitalist feminist collective Feminist Fightback uses an intersectional critique; the framework might help in, for example, describing a pro-choice politics as more than just “abortion rights” but a wider, more inclusive category of “reproductive freedoms”. Framing the issue solely in terms of access to abortion ignores the multiplicity of factors affecting a woman’s right to choose, and the differing historical experience of black and white women around sexuality and reproduction.

But many of the critiques, on both sides, involve misunderstanding and caricaturing. Marxism has been criticised as a theory of “old, white men” that cannot understand or address the issues of oppressed groups, while some “Marxists” have offered crude and dismissive critiques of intersectionality.

What exactly is intersectionality? A buzzword? A theory? A concept? An analytical tool? A living practice? Where does it come from and how has it been used? And does have anything to offer socialist feminists?

Origins

Black American feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term “intersectionality” in a series of articles between 1989 and 1991. In studying services for black women facing violence and domestic abuse Crenshaw considered that an approach that considered gender or race fails to fully understand either, because they shape each other.

Crenshaw (‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of colour’, 1993) defined intersectionality in three ways:

1. Structural intersectionality – the experience of oppression at the intersections between the different dimensions of our identity (eg our identity as a woman, a black person, a person with a disability and so on). She describes it as analogous to traffic at an intersection or crossroads:

“Discrimination, like traffic through intersection, may flow in one direction and it may flow in another. If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cards travelling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a black woman Is harmed because she is an intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination. But it is not always easy to reconstruct an accident: sometimes the ski marks and the injuries simply indicate that they occurred simultaneously, frustrating efforts to determine which driver caused them” (Crenshaw, ‘Demarginalising the intersections of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics’, 1989, p63).

2. Political intersectionality – organisations fighting for black rights, or women’s rights and so on face conflicting aims, so some groups experience marginalisation within a political group. They experience the intersection between the original experience of identity / oppression and this marginalisation.

3. Representational intersectionality the ways in which images of women of colour reflect prevalent narratives of race and gender; and, in turn, that critiques of racist and sexist representations marginalise women of colour.

Crenshaw was writing in the context of the retreat of the second-wave and women’s liberation movement of the 1970s, and the emergence of a third-wave where heavily influenced by academia and post-modernism. Similarly, in Britain, second-wave feminism, linked to the mass recruitment of women into wage labour, declined with the defeats of the workers’ movement in the 1980s. However, Crenshaw was building on and theorising second-wave discussions, in particular, of black feminists in the 60s and 70s in the US.

Second-wave and black feminism

Second-wave feminism considered the relationship between race and gender oppression in more depth in the context of the civil rights and black rights movements.

In 1977 the Boston-based black, lesbian feminist Combahee River Collective advanced the concept of “simultaneity”:

“We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experience simultaneously.” (The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977)

They wanted to expose the fact that the white, heterosexual, middle-class woman’s perspective that they believed dominated the feminist movement didn’t represent the totality of that movement.

The Combahee River Collective favoured organising separately for black women’s liberation as they felt they identified a need to “develop a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men”. (1977)

bell hooks’ Ain’t I a Woman? was published in 1981 but written in the early 1970s. Named after the famous speech given in 1851 to the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention by escaped slave and anti-slavery, women’s rights activists Sojourner Truth, Ain’t I a Woman? examines the impact of racism and sexism on black women and on liberation movements.

hooks sees racism and sexism as forces which converge, resulting in black women having the lowest status in American society. She argues that black women are never recognised as distinct from the larger groups of black people (usually referring to black men’s experiences) or women (usually referring to white women’s experiences). This creates a “double bind” for black women – neither struggle speaks to their needs and issues. In contrast, she argues for a “holistic analysis of woman’s status in society that would take into consideration the varied aspects of our experience… the complexity of woman’s experience” (bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism).

hooks offers a structural understanding of oppression and a more optimistic “intersectionality”. She doesn’t see the marginalisation of the oppressed in political groups as inevitable. She looks backs to periods of history when this was different, for example, the quality between black men and women struggling for liberation during slavery, during the civil war which ended it and for much of the post-war Reconstruction era; or women like Sojourner Truth, Anna Cooper or Mary Church Terrell, who were active anti-slavery and feminist fighters, pushing to make space for the variety of women’s experiences in both movements.

So what’s the “problem” with intersectionality?

“Intersectional Marxism”

Some feminists today (eg in the UK student movement) charge Marxism with being “pale, stale and male”. Even more serious intersectional theorists put forward a crude understanding of Marxism as “economic determinist” and “class reductionist”. For example, Patricia Hill Collins interprets Marxists as saying:

“If only people of colour could see their true class interests… class solidarity would eliminate racism and sexism” (Collins, Black Feminist Thought, Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment).

Some of this hostility is fair and born of experience of some Marxist groups which have either sidelined liberation struggles or used them opportunistically (the Militant Tendency, the forerunner of the Socialist Party, for example). Unfortunately, traditions of Marxist theory have been distorted by and badly represented by the Stalinist ideology of the Soviet Union. That remains influential in the way some part of the left do not deal with class formation as something shaped by cultural and historical circumstances (including racism, sexism, nationalism and so on). But intersectional feminists and theorists ignore (or do not know about) the work that anti-Stalinist Marxists have done to understand oppression and integrate this into socialist ideas. Not all Marxists ignore struggles for liberation or treat them as diversions from class struggle. Workers’ Liberty stands in, and tries to develop, a tradition of Marxists who see the fight for equality and liberation as an inseparable part of our socialism.

Lenin described socialist revolutions as “festivals of the oppressed and the exploited”. For socialists, class struggle is not simply a way of gaining better wages or working conditions – our goal is radical human liberation, involving not only the abolition of classes but the destructions of all forms of exploitation and oppression. Moreover, Lenin and the Russian Bolsheviks saw understanding and challenging oppression as essential in their conception of socialist politics and a socialist movement:

“The Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects…” (Lenin, What Is To Be Done?)

And there is a rich history of Marxists throwing themselves into liberation struggles, and into building solidarity between workers’ struggles and the battles of the oppressed. From the working-class women’s movement in East London in which Sylvia Pankhurst played a crucial role; to the influence of Leon Trotsky, with his background in the Russian Marxist movement, in educating American revolutionary socialists about the importance of championing and building the black liberation struggle; to the role of socialists in the 1984-5 miners’ strike which showed that class struggle is intersectional. In the course of that strike tradition gender roles and relations within mining communities were shaken up and changed; gay and black solidarity groups were able to challenge homophobia and racism.

Intersectionality and identity politics

The intersectionality theorists we have looked at so far were not uncritical of identity politics. We could define identity politics as a politics of justice based on a narrow definition of identity: a narrowly defined set of characteristics of an oppressed group (when in reality we are all made up of many different and fluid identities) and where there is something “essentially” worth about this set of characteristics.

Crenshaw suggests that the problem with identity politics is that through an essentialist understanding of identity it ignores differences within groups. Hooks goes further – she emphasises the importance of studying and learning from history, saying “to experience the pain of race hatred or to witness that pain is not to understand its origin, evolution, or impact on world history” (AIAW). In other words, all experience needs interpretation.

Yet the concept of identity remains key to intersectionality. For example, for the Combahee River Collective:

“This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that our most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our identity, as opposed to working to end’s somebody else’s oppression” (The Combahee River Collective Statement).

Crenshaw maintains that occupying our identities is a “critical resistance strategy” and sees struggles taking place as “identity groups”. She sees intersectionality as making a new identity politics possible by highlight that the identity of the group is often based on the identities of a few, and resolving conflicts within groups, and that will allow us to struggle as a collective (eg women and men of colour fighting together, or LGBT and heterosexual people of colour fighting together).

Marxists are not hostile to identity in political struggle - it’s central to human experience of the world, therefore it has to play a part in shaping our analysis of it. We recognise that people are drawn to political activism by their personal experiences and identity. We also believe that is important for oppressed group to be able to organise autonomously. So what’s wrong with a politics based on identity?

“The personal is political” was one of the main slogans of the women’s liberation movement. But this meant making “personal” problems into issues for collective action; telling women that their problems were not just a matter of personal inadequacies, but part of a social oppression directed against all women; and enlarging socialist ideas with a wider humanism. Experience was important, but not end point for understanding the world. We have a complement our experience with study of history and the systematic, structural causes of oppression as well as discussion with others.

A key problem with a politics based simply on identity is its relationship to “difference”. Perhaps ironically, identity politics fails to recognise diversity of experience and ideas and creates difference and division where they don’t really exist.

Even an intersectional approach that recognises the variety of identities in a given group and seeks unity in struggle fails to address the problem that not all people who identity in a way think the same way, want to struggle in the same way, or are right about what is best for that group of people. There are plenty of women who have experienced the world at the “intersections of oppression” but have taken an individualist or even right-wing approach to tackling that. Their experience has not led them to believe society can be radically transformed.

On the other hand, identity politics remains a politics of difference, focusing on the differences between groups. Even when not essentialist, identity politics sees our identities as fixed and static. It ignores that we are complex and multi-sided and capable of being much more than our existing identities. Our identity, and our experience of it, is not organised in discrete categories which are more or less importance at different points or “intersections”.

Part of what makes our experience of oppression and discrimination depressing and aggravating is that the discrimination puts us in a box and treats us accordingly – it denies our identity as a whole and complex human being. To challenge oppression it is important that we see ourselves as more than the sum of those parts, as human beings. A humanistic approach is vital for feminism, which has to appeal against the “natural” order of women’s subordination; to appeal against sexist dehumanisation of women; and to appeal to a principle of treating every human being equally.

Recognising each other as human beings as well as members of particular groups allows for the recognition that we have shared interests as well as self/group interests and through this for the generation of solidarity. Our struggles must be shaped by this if we are to cerate a world where identity can both be transcended and set free. Solidarity stands in opposition to the dog-eat-dog principles of capitalist and class society – it points the way to, and makes possible, a more equal, fair and human world.

The further problem with intersectionality, for the most part, though not always, is not that it ignores class but that class is seen as another ideology of oppression. Intersectionality gives “capitalism” and “class” looser definitions: capitalism as social, cultural, political and economic relations, and class as a cultural construct., defined through the lens of identity and experience.

Intersectionality, identity and class

A class analysis is crucial to understanding the roots and development of oppression. It helps us understand that, although often embodied in individual relations, oppression is born of structures within society. By analysing the economic and social roots of oppression in history and society we can see that it is not natural or absolute – this is important in realising that we can challenge and change it too.

For Marxists, definition of class in terms of privilege, culture, income, etc, are far from irrelevant – they can help explain real and important divisions within the working class as we understand it. But they are not adequate.

Our definition is not a matter of preference, but of looking at the world around us and explaining its dynamics. Class is a matter of the social relationships which drive capitalism – the mechanisms through the ruling minority pump wealth out of the majority who do the work. This is what we mean by “exploitation”, as distinct from “oppression”. Under capitalism, the majority of the population, in order to live, must sell their labour power (ability to work) to an individual or institution in possession of means of producing wealth (material goods, services, etc, in the form of commodities), in exchange for a wage. In most cases, and certainly across the working class, wages are less than the value of commodities produced; this is where surplus value and capitalist profit comes from. This relationship of exploitation creates or constitutes both capital and the working class.

Capitalists care about the divisions of ethnicity, gender, culture, nation, etc, among workers because, on the one hand, they provide the basis for extra exploitation of some groups, and, on the other, they undermine working-class solidarity and resistance. However, despite this there remains a real basis for solidarity – the common experience of capitalist exploitation.

A Marxist definition of class shows how socialism is more than just a good, or utopian, idea. Class exploitation is not necessarily worse or more fundamental than other oppressions; but because the class structure is bound up with nature, technology and how society’s wealth is produced, it is a powerful force in shaping oppression. The wage-labour system of exploitation endows capital with enormous wealth and enormous power – including far greater self-consciousness and self-confidence than its class victim. But it also puts workers in a position to organise, struggle and develop their consciousness so that they can begin to act as a class fighting for themselves. More than that, such movements, at a high enough pitch, can develop a dynamic which points beyond the limits of capitalism, to a new society based on solidarity.

Overthrowing class exploitation is a necessary building block, but not enough in itself, to abolish oppression. Socialism will not immediately end all oppression, but the roots of oppression lie in class society – by overthrowing class society and cutting the roots oppression we can crate the conditions for liberation. In a society based on democracy and solidarity it will be possible to work to end all forms oppression and exploitation.

So understanding class in a Marxist sense shows not just that the world can be changed, but how to change it. That is why Marxist politics is fundamentally “about” the working class, in all its incredible diversity.

Privilege theory

Privilege theory originated among American academics in the same era as intersectionality, and it popular now in UK student politics and academia. There is a big overlap but it is not the same thing as intersectionality. However, many privilege theorists use intersectionality to explain how people can be “privileged” in some areas and face oppression in others.

Privilege theory holds that oppression is created and recreated through other people having unearned advantages, or privileges – for example, men are privileged in not experiencing sexism, white people are privileged in not experiencing racism and so on.

Peggy McIntosh famously described privilege as an “invisible knapsack”:

“I have come to see why white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that I can count on cashing in each day, but about which I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, assurances, tools, maps, guides, codebooks, passports, visas, clothes, compass, emergency gear and blank checks” (McIntosh, 'White Privilege and Male Privilege').

If intersectionality is an understanding of the way that oppression intersect, privilege is an understanding of what causes those oppressions.

“The conditions I have described here work to systematically overempower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance, gives permission to control, because of one’s race or sex.” (McIntosh, 'White Privilege and Male Privilege')

Again, although we recognise that oppression lives in inter-personal relationships, privilege theory ignores or sets aside the structural roots of oppression. In expressing the unconscious nature of privilege, it is pessimistic about the possibility of overcoming it. The best that can be hoped for is increased self-awareness and the mitigation, or “checking”, of privilege on an individual basis.

Privilege theory sees society like a “see-saw” and offers a levelling out solution – “you’re up there because I’m down there… so, you need to come down so I can go up” (“check your privilege”). In contrast, through fighting for a radical transformation of society in which the people who produce the wealth, the working class, take power and use society’s wealth for the good of all, socialist feminism offers a levelling up of all the oppressed and exploited in society.

Conclusions

Intersectionality means different things to different people. It has broadened scope since its inception as a way to challenge the marginalisation of black women. Sometimes it is the partner of privilege theory, whereas amongst other feminist it is just one tool of analysis in a broader toolbox.

We shouldn’t discard the “rational kernel within the mystical shell” and should be mindful of the context of intersectionality’s popularity.

Despite the rise of dramatic social movements across the globe, labour organisations, aimed at fighting for the working class, remain a marginal force. Marxist arguments about the central role of the working class in forcing change remain obscure to many activists.

Intersectionality, though it has, as we have seen, been around for a long time, became popular in the context of the 2010 upsurge of student and workers’ struggles both in the UK and internationally, with the inspirational Arab Spring. The layer of activists brought into struggle were then disappointed and disillusioned after 2011 as many international struggles took a reactionary turn and workers’ fights in the UK were sold out by the trade union bureaucracy. It is not surprising that people look to more “winnable” and achievable changes such as improved individual inter-personal relationships.

Importantly, intersectionality also emerged in response to prejudice and ignorance in movements, and a failure of socialist organisations to tackle this (and their worst reinforcing the oppression). Undoubtedly, the continued mishandling and minimising of sexism and violence against women in the left and labour movement, brought into sharper focus more recently, have played a role in turning young feminists “off” Marxism” and “on” to intersectionality.

Intersectionality is not entirely wrong, but it is incomplete. It fails to push at the contradiction between particular experiences and identities and the universal and structural. Oppression isn’t just created by individuals’ locations by the inter-relationships between people, and between people and the systems in society.

A focus on identity as the lens of struggle, combined with an alternative, identity-based concept of class, means that the possibility of abolishing, or even seriously fighting, the problems disappears. Struggle takes the form of equality among groups at best, or simply striving for changes in inter-personal relationships at worst. The fight for significant and transformative change is side-lined, along with the idea of how this could be possible – ideas, solidarity and struggle.

Socialist feminism and Marxism already hold the possibility of a full, “intersectional” analysis and movement. The ideas of intersectionality add little to socialist feminism, and the label now carries significant baggage. But thinking about intersectionality theory may be useful in reminding us that Marxism has not always lived up to tis full potential and, through this, helping us to be clear about what kind of Marxism and movement we are fighting for.


• bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (see here)
• Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of colour’ (here)
The Combahee River Collective Statement (here)
• Janine Booth, ‘Festival of the oppressed’, in Workers’ Liberty’s We Stand for Workers’ Liberty (here)

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