Twenty-first century capitalism is a horror show. The genocide in Palestine demonstrates the degree of suffering and destruction our rulers are willing to inflict to advance the interests of the Western imperialist bloc. The climate crisis is accelerating, and those with the power to do something about it are instead green-lighting the expansion of the fossil fuel industry and tightening up national borders.
Almost everywhere, states are responding to a more chaotic world situation and mounting opposition to their agenda, with more authoritarianism, more repression, more austerity and more scapegoating of vulnerable populations.
Our side needs a political framework that can integrate and account for all these horrors and that can equip activists with a strategy for consistently and effectively challenging the system responsible for them. Intersectionality can appear to provide exactly this framework, but when put to the test, it offers limited insight into the logic of oppression and no explanation or critique of the system it exists within.
Today, the “intersectional” label is used as shorthand for a political position or outlook that is attuned to multiple forms of oppression and that is sensitive to the ways these oppressions intersect, frequently in a way that amounts to more than the sum of their parts.
The Black feminist Combahee River Collective is often credited with articulating an early form of intersectional politics. In their famous 1977 statement, they called for a new movement based around their experiences as Black women: “a politics that was anti-racist, unlike those of white women, and anti-sexist, unlike those of Black and white men”.
Insofar as they were arguing that movements should oppose all forms of oppression and not tolerate bigotry in their ranks, their point was and continues to be valid. In the United States in particular, there were real problems in the 1960s and ’70s with sections of the New Left failing to oppose satisfactorily various forms of oppression, particularly that of women.
But intersectionality today has very little to do with debates in social movements, historic or current. The term itself was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her 1989 essay “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics”.
The essay deals with the failure of anti-discrimination law to account for the specific oppression faced by Black women, using as a case study a legal dispute involving a group of Black women workers who attempted to sue General Motors for unfair dismissal. Within the limits of the US legal system, these women could not successfully establish management had discriminated on the basis of sex, because some white women remained employed, nor on the basis of race, because Black men kept their jobs. It was the combination of the two that caused their disadvantage, but legally, multi-factor discrimination of this sort was not taken into account.
Crenshaw argues that the law must make space for the specific intersection of oppressions faced by groups that do not fit into a single axis. This is reasonable, but it is fundamentally an argument about how the legal system could operate better. Her thesis does not call into question the basic right of factory owners to discard workers at will, or to exploit them in the first place. It is not a theory of liberation, and it does not offer a critique of the social system that creates oppression.
Despite these relative conservative origins, the concept of intersectionality has since adopted a more subversive identity. Its current appeal is not due to its legalistic insights, but because it’s a way of disavowing conservative forms of single-issue campaigning, and signalling a commitment to a more radical and inclusive politics. But on this it can’t deliver: simply noting different forms of oppression doesn’t get us very far.
Intersectionality offers no explanation for why oppression exists or what ties different forms together. It offers no strategy for liberation and nor does it particularly purport to. It is a way of signalling good intentions with pretensions to being a sophisticated political theory. But to liberate the oppressed, we need a lot more than that.
An article published in June last year by Australian feminist news site Women’s Agenda demonstrates exactly this point. Titled “Antoinette Lattouf’s case is a wake-up call for workplace intersectionality”, the article analysed the ABC’s unlawful sacking of journalist Antoinette Lattouf after she shared a Human Rights Watch post on social media.
Rita Nasr, author of the piece, argued that Lattouf’s sacking was a “real-world example of what happens when intersectionality is not recognised, respected, or embedded in workplace policies and practices”, and that the ABC as an institution is not sufficiently sensitive to the lived experiences of employees from marginalised backgrounds. As a Lebanese woman, Lattouf was victimised by a workplace that wouldn’t let her bring her “whole self” to work.
But this approach can’t account for the fact that many women of colour, as well as people facing still other oppressions besides, remain happily employed at the ABC. Lattouf was singled out not because her “whole self” was not present at work, but because of her refusal to accept the ABC’s line on Palestine—it was a politically motivated sacking intended to prove the ABC’s loyalty to Australian imperialism and make an example of someone who questioned it.
No amount of workplace diversity or institutional intersectionality will change the power to which the ABC answers and which it obeys. And analysing the various intersecting oppressions Lattouf experiences does not help understand the forces at play in her sacking. A world careening towards ever more authoritarianism and conflict demands a more rigorous assessment of the origins of oppression, how it serves the powerful and the strategies needed to end it.
In her 2016 book The Politics of Everybody, US-based writer Holly Lewis critiques what she calls the “vector model of oppression” inherent to intersectionality, by which she means the idea that different forms of oppression are the result of distinct and separate structures, such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity and so on. These vectors jet out from wholly different points of origin and crash into one another in the body of the individual, producing a particular combination of privileges and oppressions unique to every person.
The vector model assumes that the world is made up of fragmented power structures with divergent purposes and no real logic or unified interest linking them together. But this contention doesn’t stack up. As Lewis puts it, “race, gender, religion, and nation are not ‘things that happen to individuals’: they are social relations conditioned by capitalism and conditioned by one another”.
Sexism, racism, homophobia and so on are interrelated structures that have developed alongside each other over hundreds of years, shifting and changing to suit the needs of a minority ruling class. They are not independent of each other, but symbiotic.
For example, the oppression of Black communities in the United States developed in a society defined by the existing subjugation of women. It was (and is) perpetrated in ways conditioned by sexism. There are many examples of this dynamic, from the imposition of the nuclear family on enslaved people as a method of social control, to the use of sexual violence against Black women by the southern white ruling class.
The two oppressions are not totally separate systems, only combining in an observable way through their impact on affected individuals. Rather, they are two aspects of one social system—capitalism. Marxism can illuminate the ways in which social inequalities interact because it understands what the system is fundamentally for—not victimising people for the sake of it, but amassing wealth.
Capitalism is defined by the exploitation of the vast majority of people, the working class, to fulfil the capitalists’ unending drive to accumulate capital. It is this drive that shapes all aspects of social life.
The minority class that controls capital requires workers to accept their subordinate position. Oppression is necessary to sustain this unstable regime of production, to pit sections of the working class against one another, to divert anger at the system towards scapegoated populations and to intensify exploitation. This can involve adapting existing oppressions to the needs of capital, like sexism, as well as generating new forms.
Forms of racism linked to the imperialist exploits of the ruling class—such as the anti-German/Japanese racism that saturated domestic politics during the Second World War or the Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism used to drum up support for the “war on terror”—can come and go with the conflicts they help justify. Oppression can also recede when it is no longer useful to the ruling class, as was the case with the anti-Irish racism that plagued the first two centuries of capitalism in Australia. Others, like women’s oppression, which is indispensable to maintaining and reproducing workers to be exploited, are more enduring. Each one rises and falls depending on its relationship to the needs of capital.
The vector model that underpins the concept of intersectionality also fails when considered from a strategic perspective. If forms of oppression operate independently, they logically need each to be challenged and overcome separately. But precisely because each oppressed group is made up of individuals subject to all sorts of other forms of oppression, the potential for them to unite against the discreet oppressive structures is dubious at best. If united action on the part of the oppressed were unlikely, a top-down strategy to combat oppression would therefore be needed, maybe using the existing power structures, terrorism or some other anti-democratic means, which would ultimately keep the system and its inequalities in place.
Marxism overcomes these problems both by being able to establish the common roots of different oppressions, and by recognising that not all oppressed groups have the same power to challenge their lot.
It recognises that the oppression of the working class is different from all other oppressions, not because workers are particularly marginal or suffer more, but because the working class is the only force in society with the capacity to destroy the system and win liberation. This is so because exploitation is a contradictory phenomenon. It is the basis on which the working class are denied any control over their own labour and personal lives; it is the basis on which working-class communities can expect much worse access to housing, schooling and health care than middle-class or wealthy people. But at the same time, the absolutely essential nature of workers’ labour means that when that labour is withdrawn, the capitalists are stripped of their profits and their control over society.
Workers cannot liberate themselves as individuals; only by breaking down the divisions that keep the class fragmented can workers build up the kind of collective power capable of taking on the bosses, the state and all the repressive forces of the system. This means taking seriously each and every form of oppression and drawing these fights into a broader battle against the ruling class. Our struggles are bound up with one another. Lenin summed this up when he argued in What is to Be Done? that a revolutionary should strive to be “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”.
Intersectionality can appear to offer a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of oppression. But its central framework is misorienting. It detaches oppression from exploitation and separates each oppression from the others. It cannot explain how and why these forms of oppression exist, offers no way to connect them into a unitary framework and provides no convincing strategy for liberation.
Far from flat and reductive, as its detractors often claim, Marxism enables us to grapple with a system that is in constant motion, forever shaping and reshaping every aspect of human existence. It both accounts for the complexity of that system—and its propensity to generate forms of social inequality that appear to, and to some extent have, a life of their own—while also identifying what connects them all: the competitive accumulation of capital through the exploitation of waged labour. It impels us to demand nothing less than total human liberation. And that is the only way consistently to oppose all forms of oppression.
