The US has been the world's foremost superpower roughly since the Second World War, and although its status is being increasingly contested by an ascendent China, its supremacy remains intact for now. As such, ideological debates which divide the American ruling class continue to have wider implications on the rest of the world. One modern feature of this has been the identification of the "left" (i.e. Democrats) with "woke" and the "right" (i.e. Republicans) with "anti-woke" policies, cemented by Trump's declaration that with his return to power the US "will be woke no longer". As a multitude of reactionary commentators now celebrate the "death of woke", it bears repeating that the communist critique of identity politics in its various forms (including the most successful identity of all, nationalism), comes from a very different place. It is not about driving a wedge further between workers of different identities – something which only benefits the ruling class of both the left and the right – but of finding a way to overcome such divisions through class unity. Towards this end, so-called "woke" and "anti-woke" ideologies are both a barrier.

In this context, the integration of the concept of "intersectionality" into the milieu of the left and to some degree into wider social consciousness has had a particularly tenacious impact. Today even self-described socialist and anarchist groups have been forced to make it part of their framework. Like "feminism" itself, "intersectionality" has largely been reduced to a banality to enable its imposition as a moral imperative – in the case of feminism, if you're not a feminist, you must be a misogynist; in the case of intersectionality, if you don't subscribe to it, you must not care about the various plights of those experiencing intersecting oppressions. But in order to understand intersectionality, we must be clear on what it is we're referring to: the specific theory articulated within legal studies to express the way in which people can be oppressed on more than one basis (and so need more than one legal protection within bourgeois law). This of course has nothing to do with the political aims of those of us who want to do away with capitalist society altogether, yet to criticise it is to invite outrage and accusations of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and so on. How did we get into this mess?

Stalinist Beginnings

The place to start is the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in the 1930s and 40s, with the coinage of what's now known as the theory of "triple oppression" by influential black women members of the party, Louise Thompson Patterson and Claudia Jones. The idea that black women suffered "triply" from the oppressions of sex, race and class was not a new one, and can be traced back to the suffragist and abolitionist movements in mid-nineteenth century US, articulated most famously by Sojourner Truth (Ain't I A Woman?, 1851). The significance of Jones and Thompson Patterson's contributions nearly a century later is rather that of having set the precedent for synthesising those ideas with Marxist-Leninist doctrine, to make the latter more palatable and more tenable in a Western context.

In the 1930s, the CPUSA had distinguished itself through its support for African Americans (in particular its declaration of support for the Scottsboro Boys in 1932), and consciously oriented its activity towards recruiting black members and organising black workers. To this end, Louise Thompson Patterson was assigned to intervene in struggles of black women workers like those of the Bronx Slave Market – domestic workers, predominantly black women, in a position of constant precarity. In her 1936 article on their situation, Towards a Brighter Dawn, Thompson Patterson described their situation as one of "triple exploitation" as women, workers and Negroes. Later, Jones' 1949 article, An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman, provided a longer, more thorough elaboration of the party's new orientation, which explicitly claimed that women had reached "new heights of equality" in the Soviet Union and in the newly-established People's Republic of China.

Their efforts then must be understood in their context as part of the CPUSA's effort to forge alliances with progressive liberal groups and to integrate black and female workers into its fold, in line with the Comintern's Popular Front policy (and as a continuation of this in the aftermath of the Comintern's dissolution and the Second World War). However genuine an attempt to correct its well-earned reputation for workerist machismo, it was in any case an opportunist move to make the party more appealing to people from those groups, and to claim that "socialism" (i.e. the state capitalist model of the USSR and its allies) trumped the liberal capitalist "democracy" of the West in its treatment of women and ethnic minorities. In reality, operating squarely within the laws of the capitalist order by this time after fifteen or so years of counter-revolution, the USSR's own policies on civil liberties fluctuated like those of any other capitalist state in harmony with the health of its own economy. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, the USSR carried out various policies that targeted, marginalised and even exterminated ethnic minorities such as Ukrainians, Poles and Jews. The same year that Thompson Patterson's article was published, the USSR criminalised abortion.

New Left: The Abandonment of the Working Class

By the time of the late 1960s to 1970s, the unprecedented boom of accumulation, which had been enabled by the destruction wreaked throughout the Second World War, began to slow; that is, profitability began to fall, and the world experienced another huge wave of social movements in which class struggle took the form of strikes and occupations, sometimes being linked to student movements and mass anti-war protests. Within the universities, a radical wing of academia flourished, which came to be known as the "New Left", led by thinkers like those of the Frankfurt School, particularly Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse's major contribution came in the pages of his One-Dimensional Man (1964), where he argued explicitly for the abandonment of the working class as the revolutionary subject, on the grounds that it had become fully integrated into capitalism's domination, and so "traditional forms" of struggle to oppose capitalism were no longer applicable. According to Marcuse, struggle on a mass basis was no longer possible in the advanced capitalist centres because "'the people', previously the ferment of social change, have 'moved up' to become the ferment of social cohesion" (p.260). Instead, Marcuse argued that "the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and unemployable" are now the group in society whose interests are inherently opposed to those of the existing social order (p.143). With the slow decline in class struggle that was to follow from the second half of the 1970s, Marcuse had provided the perfect theoretical justification for the left to unmoor itself from class analysis.

Juggling Stalinism and Liberalism: The Birth of "Identity Politics"

By this time, activist groups like the Combahee River Collective (CRC) were explicitly claiming to synthesise "socialism" with Black feminism (itself a synthesis of the theories of the feminist and anti-racist movements) in their political perspectives. A smallish fringe group among a plethora at the time, the CRC are remembered today for their articulation of the concept of "identity politics" in their 1977 statement. In it, they write that "the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of [their] own identity", which they argue is "a particularly … revolutionary concept" for them as Black lesbians because of the particular extent and complexity of the oppressions they face. Though they describe themselves as "socialists" and write of the necessity of "the destruction of … capitalism and imperialism", they explicitly list class as one among "a whole range of oppressions" alongside race, sex and sexuality.

It's here too that we come to Angela Davis, who had spent the 1960s as a doctoral student of Marcuse and the 1970s travelling the world speaking on behalf of the CPUSA and the Black Panthers (an organisation founded explicitly on masculinist principles whose public volte face of 1969 saw them officially declare women members equal, but whose female members' accounts of their internal dynamics speak for themselves), declaring that Cuba was a country free of racism and praising the GDR and the USSR for denouncing racism. Davis then published Women, Race and Class (1981), which draws variously and confusedly on the work of other contemporary "Marxist feminists" (most notably James, Dalla Costa and Federici) as well as other feminists, anti-racists, Marxists and post-Marxists to synthesise the movements for the liberation of women, black people and the working class into one. And here too we find the claim that the USSR and its allies have paved the way for women's liberation, for example: "The only significant steps toward ending domestic slavery have in fact been taken in the existing socialist countries" (p.138).

Legal Studies: The Logical Terminus of the Journey

By the time we arrive at the term "intersectionality", coined by legal academic Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, we arrive too at the logical conclusion of this shift away from revolutionary politics, completed in its reorientation towards the politics of liberal inclusion; of the assimilation of all people into capitalist society as citizens equal to each other in the opportunities they enjoy, with class just being one of the many reasons a person's opportunities might be unfairly limited. This was the stated aim of Crenshaw's work, which argued that existing anti-discrimination laws were limited to dealing with one axis of discrimination at a time. It should be obvious by this point that this has nothing to do with the aim of overthrowing capitalist society, and everything to do with the aim of perfecting it. Hence Crenshaw too writes of class alongside race and sex (and later sexuality, gender identity, physical ability and other such characteristics) as just another way in which one may be "privileged" or "oppressed". The previous year also saw Peggy McIntosh publish White Privilege and Male Privilege (abridged in 1989 as White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack), a landmark article in the field of women's studies which popularised (though did not invent) the idea that not experiencing a given form of oppression or discrimination constituted an "unearned asset".

This whistlestop timeline of the development of what was to become "intersectionality" is necessarily limited in its scope, and so inevitably certain key thinkers have been left out (Ida B Wells, Anna J Cooper, Elizabeth Flynn, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and more recent scholars like Patricia Hill Collins and Carole Boyce Davies, to name an infinitesimal few). This is not because their contributions to Black feminism weren't also significant, but because this article deals more specifically with the development of what we now call intersectionality and its insinuation into the framework of the wider left and activist milieus, and ripples into the milieus of revolutionary organisations too.

Fourth Wave Feminism and the Mess of Modern Activism

Given the various strands of reformism woven into its DNA, it makes perfect sense that intersectionality should be adopted as a guiding principle of activism; indeed, since the advent of Fourth Wave Feminism, something of a sine qua non. And it did so particularly through university campuses, where intersectionality became part of the curriculum, and something that student activists adopted as a result. This has then had a ripple effect on the wider scene of "the left", as Stalinist and Trotskyist groups have more or less critically welcomed intersectionality home as the scion of their shared theoretic ancestor. At the same time, it has wormed its way into anarchism ever since the tendency first started to become diluted by the New Left. Not only that, because of its bourgeois legal origins, and to some degree thanks to student activists finding employment in various bureaucratic roles, the language of intersectionality has been taken up by institutional political parties, trade unions, and even become part and parcel of workplace training, so those outside the university world are also exposed to it. All this in turn has meant that those of us in groups outside the official left-right divide, recognising the two poles as the two political wings of capital, have nevertheless come across intersectionality in much the same way as we do feminism, anti-racism, and indeed anti-fascism – as something that we are expected to adopt into our framework or be condemned as pro-sexist, pro-racist, pro-fascist and so on.

And we similarly understand intersectionality as a framework that undermines class independence and rejects revolution in favour of minimising harm in the immediate term, which, as history has taught us time and again, implies an orientation towards the prolonging of the capitalist system, and thus the prolonging of the conditions which create the very oppressions it seeks to alleviate. So our framework for analysing and opposing oppression must have a different basis entirely.

The Marxist Understanding of Oppression

As Marxists, we never needed telling that the working class is made up of people of all genders, nationalities, abilities and so on; this is perfectly obvious to us, both in our capacity as analysts of class society, and as members of the working class within it. Nor, obviously, did Marx and Engels, nor Lenin and Luxemburg, need telling this back in their respective days when they formulated the theories of class struggle on which we base our political orientation. If the bourgeoisie's ways of dividing us against one another have changed, (mainly in that they have proliferated), the basic fact that they do this has not.

What's more, as Marxists we understand that these categories are more than labels assigned to us that we may choose whether to be ashamed or proud of; in each case they articulate oppressions which are the consequence of class society itself. Our analysis of class cannot therefore be relegated to any kind of equal footing with categories like gender, race, sexuality and so on because it is class society in the first place which has engendered them in every sense. Our understanding of sexual and racial oppression, for instance, is not that they are of any lesser importance than class oppression – a value judgement which has no place in materialist analysis – but that they are direct consequences of it, and therefore cannot be meaningfully combatted in any way which involves class compromise. That cross class struggles offer us nothing in the way of liberation is evident enough in the way that recent movements like Black Lives Matter and the Women's Marches, which originally arose with varying degrees of spontaneity in response to genuine concerns for black people and women respectively, have provided various opportunists with a springboard into careers in leftism, as well as a way for the political parties of the left of capital to re-establish control over popular anger.

And so as Marxists, we finally must expose the fundamental insolubility of these problems while class society remains intact. When we reject concessions to feminist, anti-racist, queer, etc., movements – and the same goes for the hybrid framework of intersectionality – we do so not out of a lack of concern for the people those movements posit as the subject of their politics, but precisely because we understand that the solutions capitalism's spectrum of ideological justifications has to offer us are no solutions at all. The best it can come up with is equality of opportunity in its vast, all-consuming market, which for those of us that make up the class who have nothing to sell but our labour power, can only mean equality of exploitation. A bleak enough best-case scenario, we know moreover that in reality it is nothing but wishful thinking, because whatever the ruling class grants us in the way of breathing space, or "privileges" as it likes to brand such luxuries as access to healthcare, or the pleasure of not being targeted and harassed, it can just as easily take them away, as we inevitably see in times of crisis and war.

So however unevenly difficult our lives are made by our exploiters, it's clear we have nothing to gain from competing with each other over which of us has the worst time. On the other hand, we have everything to gain from recognising our common interest as a class and combining forces across our differences.

And if this has been central to the theory of our political forebears, history has at key moments proven them correct, as various particular sections of our class – women, migrant workers, slave labourers – have recognised this in practice. It would be remiss not to recall here the example of the February Revolution of 1917, when working class women in Russia took the lead, not in a sectional or separatist struggle, but one that reached out to their brothers, husbands, fathers, and sons as their class fellows, in the bosses' factories and the Tsar's conscript army. They recognised through instinct what the revolutionary parties articulated – that the movement of our class must be a mass one, and so for any hope of success must look for ways to spread, and ultimately to generalise across divisions imposed by the system.

Liberation from Identity: Workers of all Nations, Genders, Races, Sexualities, Abilities, etc. etc. etc… Unite!

It's in this sense that we understand class as the fundamental dividing line in capitalist society, and it's in this sense that we see the working class as the revolutionary subject – with our endless kaleidoscope of differences – holding the key to a future society. Not because we take home the gold medal in the bourgeoisie's tiresome oppression olympics, but because we are the class of people whose position within society – that of producing all the goods and providing all the services from which all profit is derived – grants us the power to bring capitalism and the class which rules it to their knees.

To be able to do this, we need to refuse to play their games; to reject the categorisations they impose on us, and to see through the solutions on offer from their progressive factions as no more nor less than utopian attempts to fix their system, to maintain their class rule. They are welcome to their more or less minute tweaks in their sisyphean effort to perfect their society as its core continues to rot; our aim is a different one entirely.

So we oppose racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and all other oppression without compromise, in the only way it's possible to meaningfully do so – not with class collaboration, but with working class unity oriented towards an independent, self-organised, mass class struggle, to challenge capitalism and ultimately to overthrow it entirely, and in its stead build a new society of freely associated producers, wherein the free development of each will be the precondition for the free development of all. This future society, which we call communism, obviously has no more in common with the state capitalist leviathans defended by the various Stalinists and Trotskyists mentioned above than it does with the equally capitalist "democracies" of the West; instead, this future society will be one wherein states, money, and classes themselves will appear only in our history books. The task of creating this society may be a mammoth one, but it is one of which we, and only we, the working class across the whole world, are capable.

Notes:

For our previous articles on identity politics, see e.g. Workers of all Identities, Unite! and Adventures in the Culture Wars: A Review Article

Image: Spaynton (CC BY-SA 4.0), commons.wikimedia.org