Intersectionality’s binding agent

Abstract

In this essay, I explore the structural distinctiveness of class domination as compared with intersecting structures of oppression framed by race, gender, sexuality, or other criteria. Social classes are not simply demographic groupings; they are (actual or potential) agents of history. The dominant class, in a given period, shapes the main contours of social existence in every dimension. Thus, members of all oppressed groups have an interest in unifying with each other—against the dominant class—on a common class basis. I discuss how the current awareness of such a common class interest has been obstructed by state repression, by identity politics, and by the ideology of postmodernism.

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the editors for their encouragement and their critical comments. Special thanks to Johanna Fernández for her meticulous reading of two drafts and her crucial insights. I received valuable suggestions also from David Gilbert, Rebecca Hollender, and Roberta Salper. Final responsibility for all formulations, however, is mine alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The reason for my frequent use of quotation marks around this term will become clear as we proceed. In no sense do I question the reality of racist oppression. What I question is the supposed biological grounding of the concept. Notions of race—as distinct from descriptive terms pertaining to people’s physical features, culture, or nationality—originated in connection with agendas of domination, which required the biologically unfounded belief that some collectivities are superior to others. Discrediting the notion of race is integral to ending racism. For a particularly illuminating account of the genesis of “race” in the USA, see Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1st series, No. 181 (May–June, 1990), pp. 95–118.

² The English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century was notable for its early expressions of feminist demands; see Sheila Rowbotham, Women, Resistance, and Revolution: A History of Women and Revolution in the Modern World (New York: Pantheon, 1972). An extraordinary twentieth-century example is the revolt of “half of China,” described in Chapter 16 of William Hinton, Fanshen: Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage, 1968).

³ On the Irish sub-proletariat, see especially Karl Marx, “[Ireland and the English Working Class],” in Marcello Musto (ed), Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 249.

⁴ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), p. 517.

⁵ Herbert Aptheker, “The Negro Woman,” reprinted in Eric Foner and Manning Marable (eds), Herbert Aptheker on Race and Democracy: A Reader (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 122; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Random House, 1981), p. 53.

⁶ Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977, available online at: <http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html>.

⁷ Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Anti-discrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Anti-racist Politics” [orig. 1989] and Kira Kosnick, “Sexuality and Migration Studies: The Invisible, the Oxymoronic and Heteronormative Othering,” both in Helma Lutz, Maria Teresa Herrera Vivar, and Linda Supik (eds), Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in Gender Studies (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 25–42, 121–135.

⁸ See Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

⁹ Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Aged by Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Ravi Malhotra and Morgan Rowe, Exploring Disability Identity and Disability Rights through Narratives: Finding a Voice of Their Own (New York: Routledge, 2014).

¹⁰ See Kathy Davis, “Intersectionality as Buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” in Lutz et al. (eds), Framing Intersectionality.

¹¹ See Julie L. Nagoshi, Craig T. Nagoshi, and Stephan/that is Brzuzy (eds), Gender and Sexual Identity: Transcending Feminist and Queer Theory (New York: Springer, 2014).

¹² Steve Martinot, “Probing the Epidemic of Police Murders” and “Police Impunity, Human Autonomy, and Jim Crow,” Socialism and Democracy 27:1 (2013), pp. 57–77 and 28:3 (2014), pp. 64–76. The shocking frequency of US police killings (an average of more than 3 per day) is documented with links to press reports at <http://killedbypolice.net/>.

¹³ Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, “Revisiting the Killings of Prisoners by Texas Prison Officials” (July 25, 2014), available online at: <http://rashidmod.com/?p=1082>.

¹⁴ See Linda Gordon, “Anti-Woman Terrorism,” Z Magazine 28:4 (2015) and the documentary films The Invisible War (2012) and The Hunting Ground (2015).

¹⁵ There is vast testimony on this. See, for instance, Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

¹⁶ See, for example, Ange-Marie Hancock, “When Multiplication Doesn’t Equal Quick Addition: Examining Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm,” Perspectives on Politics 5:1 (2007), p. 72. Class is here viewed subjectively and hence treated as “a ‘fuzzy’ concept” associated with individual income levels; major works on the US ruling class by G. William Domhoff (Who Rules America?, 1st ed. 1967; 7th ed. 2015) and on the working class by Michael Zweig (The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 1st ed., 2000) are not taken into account. To her credit, Hancock notes the insufficiency of identity-based approaches, preferring a more integrated understanding. But the extent of such understanding will remain limited if one does not conceptualize class as an operational entity (in contrast to demographically defined collectivities).

¹⁷ Both published in Boston by South End Press, the cooperative publishing enterprise co-founded by Albert. The approach they developed gained a wide following not only through these books but also through the popular radical—and strongly feminist—monthly, Z Magazine (co-founded by Albert with Lydia Sargent in 1989) and its early website zmag.org.

¹⁸ For a comprehensive critique of such one-dimensional views of Marx, see Kevin B. Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). Anderson offers a summary of his findings in “Karl Marx and Intersectionality,” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture 14:1 (2015), available online at: <http://logosjournal.com/2015/anderson-marx/>.

¹⁹ Albert and Hahnel, Unorthodox Marxism, p. 94.

²⁰ On Marx and race, see Anderson, Marx at the Margins, ch. 3; on Marx and gender, Anderson, pp. 197–208, and Heather A. Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Chicago: Haymarket, 2013). Marx, in a passage quoted by Simone de Beauvoir at the end of her 1949 feminist classic The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley [New York: Bantam Books, 1961], p. 689), posited the quality of the relationship of man to woman as key to gauging the level of overall human development.

²¹ Albert and Hahnel, Marxism and Socialist Theory, pp. 70–71.

²² Biologist Stephen Jay Gould observes, in The Mismeasure of Man, revised ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 399, that “genetic variety among Africans alone exceeds the sum total of genetic diversity for everyone else in the rest of the world combined!”—implying that popular generalizations (even favorable ones) about African-descended people, even “apart from their social perniciousness, have no meaning ….”.

²³ This clause comes at the end of Part II of the Communist Manifesto. The universalism of its vision pertains to a communist society. Within class-divided society, in the meantime, the varying collective histories of oppression may generate uniquely creative expressions of resistance, such as the music that has emerged from the African American experience. See Victor Wallis, “Song and Vision in the U.S. Labor Movement,” in Lindsay Michie and Eunice Rojas (eds), Sounds of Resistance: The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism (Los Angeles: ABC-CLIO/Praeger, 2013), pp. 47–64.

²⁴ That the dominant role is a function of class—and not of class–race–gender—is confirmed by continuity of basic priorities even as non-white and non-male agents are assimilated into the political elite.

²⁵ A “larger” process is, quite simply, one that involves a bigger portion of the population and therefore—insofar as it is organized—constitutes a stronger political force.

²⁶ For a fuller argument on this point, see Ralph Miliband, Divided Societies: Class Struggle in Contemporary Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Chapter 4 (“New Social Movements and Class Struggle”). A path-breaking critique of efforts to de-center the role of class is Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986).

²⁷ Marc Lamont Hill and Mumia Abu-Jamal, The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America (Chicago: Third World Press, 2012), p. 5.

²⁸ If anything, supremacist affirmations reflect the opposite of psychological well-being, as explained in Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic essay, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken Books, 1948).

²⁹ See John Bellamy Foster, Naked Imperialism: The U.S. Pursuit of Global Dominance (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2006).

³⁰ See the relevant occupational figures in Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority, America’s Best Kept Secret, 2^nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), pp. 29–36.

³¹ Victor Wallis, “Keeping the Faith: The U.S. Left, 1968–1998,” Monthly Review 50:4 (1998), pp. 31–46.

³² Key moments were the assassination of Chicago BPP leader, Fred Hampton (Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014], pp. 237–246) and, before that, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in which government complicity was later established in court records (William F. Pepper, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King [London: Verso, 2003]). The threat posed by both these leaders (as well as by Malcolm X in his final year) lay precisely in their “intersectional” role—their overstepping the boundaries of a less subversive because purely race-relations-oriented set of demands.

³³ See Lawrence C. Soley, Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia (Boston: South End Press, 1995).

³⁴ This process is perceptively described and analyzed in Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).

³⁵ Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 263.

³⁶ “Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universalizing or ‘totalizing’ discourses … are the hallmark of postmodernist thought.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), p. 9. See also chapter 7 (“The Postmodern Impasse”) in Carl Boggs, The End of Politics: Corporate Power and the Decline of the Public Sphere (New York: Guilford Press, 2000).

³⁷ Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” Social Text #46/47 (1996), pp. 217–252 and “A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies,” Lingua Franca (May/June 1996), available online at: <http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.html>, and the ensuing reply by Social Text and rejoinder by Sokal at <http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html>.

³⁸ See Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government and Social Insecurity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Greg Palast, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012); and Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández (eds), The Roots of Mass Incarceration: Locking up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor, special issue of Socialism and Democracy 28:3 (2014).

³⁹ Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology”; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols., 2^nd ed. (London: Verso, 2012).

⁴⁰ See Mumia Abu-Jamal, “The Perils of Black Political Power,” in Johanna Fernández (ed), Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2015), pp. 237–238; Michaels, The Trouble with Diversity, pp. 85–86.

⁴¹ See, in addition to Fields and Allen, Aníbal Quijano, “Questioning ‘Race’,” trans. Victor Wallis, Socialism and Democracy 21:1 (2007), pp. 45–54.

⁴² In the US, this perception is sharply expressed in the commentaries by Glen Ford, Bruce Dixon, Margaret Kimberley, and others, at <http://blackagendareport.com/>.

⁴³ Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), provides important documentation on both the greater relative power of peasant women in late medieval Europe and the extraordinary repressive measures (witch-hunts) that were applied to force them back into the subordinate status that would come to be regarded as “normal.”

⁴⁴ Quijano, “Questioning ‘Race’.” Assertions of the superiority of one’s own people have of course been put forward since ancient times. What was new in the era of European expansion was, on the one hand, the scale of the subjugations (especially plantation slavery) and, on the other (beginning with the 1493 Papal Bull assigning the Western Hemisphere to Spain and Portugal), making the rankings of peoples a topic of church and state policy and of philosophical discourse—the latter culminating in the pompous speculative anthropology of Hegel’s Philosophy of History.

⁴⁵ An ironic example of this is the impact that US intervention has had in Islamic countries, where, despite its own supposedly more enlightened practices in gender relations, the US presence and impact have arrested a process of secularization, leading to the imposition of more extreme forms of patriarchy.

⁴⁶ Margaret L. Andersen and Patricia Hill Collins, “Why Race, Class, and Gender Matter,” reprinted from the 7th edition (2010) of their Race, Class, and Gender anthology, in David B. Grusky (ed), Social Stratification: Class, Race, and Gender in Sociological Perspective, 4th ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 2014), p. 942. Emphasis in the original.

⁴⁷ He can be viewed making this statement in Lee Lew-Lee’s documentary film, All Power to the People: The Black Panther Party and Beyond (1999).

⁴⁸ See Helen Caldicott, Missile Envy: The Arms Race and Nuclear War, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 1986); Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: U.S. Militarism and Popular Culture (Boulder: Paradigm, 2007).

⁴⁹ The contrary position rests on the essentialist assumption that one’s behavior is rigidly determined by one’s biological endowments. Biology in such matters, however, is no more than “a set of potentialities.” Jeffrey Weeks, “The Social Construction of Sexuality,” in Kathy Peiss (ed), Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 3.

⁵⁰ “Middle class” here refers not to the mythical norm that US politicians love, but to real intermediate strata comprising no more than about thirty-five percent of the total population. Zweig, The Working Class Majority, pp. 18–29.

⁵¹ Robert Hess III, “Coalition Building with Intersectional Identities,” in Julie L. Nagoshi, Craig T. Nagoshi, and Stephan/ie Brzuzy (eds), Gender and Sexual Identity (New York: Springer, 2014), p. 160.

⁵² Ange-Marie Hancock, Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

⁵³ Ibid., 183.

⁵⁴ See Victor Wallis, “The Search for a Mass Ecological Constituency,” International Critical Quarterly 3:4 (2013), pp. 496–509.