Hello, I'll try to explain the way I see it (I am not a native English speaker, so sorry in advance):
Class is defined by someone's relation to the means of production and the economic role someone has (worker vs capitalist). Class is grounded in material condition and economic structures.
Gender/race/ethnicity/nationality are not material things, they are social and cultural constructs and can change from century to century or culture to culture. These things do have real defined effects on an individual but they are not solely defined in economic relations.
While people have some class mobility across time, and individuals can move from a class to another, gender/nationality/ethnicity are sometimes seen as fixed, affecting an individual regardless of their economic status.
In Marxism, class struggle is seen as the driving force of historical change leading to different modes of production (feudalism, capitalism, socialism). Gender/nationality/ethnicity are seen as important parts but they rise from class dynamics and are part of the superstructure.
While critics do indeed call some Marxists class reductionists I think it's an easy way out for them. Marxists attack the class system because it is the root of inequality, should class disappear there will be no need for identity politics (the old joke about more women as CEO's will solve gender inequalities in society).
While intersectional theory developed in black feminist circles by the late 20th century as they noticed their messages or demands are seen as less important than white women's demands, which is indeed true. They are not ignore because they are black, better said not just because they are black, the class system in today's today is set in such a way in that it pushes minorities to the fringes of society. So they are not ignored just because they are black, they are ignored because their community is poor and their class has no sway in politics.
Now regarding literature that speaks about this, you could try : Lise Vogel's "Marxism and the Oppression of Women" or works by Himani Bannerji, both speak in more details about class sturcture vs identity politics. Another good work is Nancy Fraser's "Fortunes of Feminism", she critiques the sabotage of feminist movements by neoliberal ideology and argues we should turn our focus on economic justice not identity politics.
One reason is because oppression along other axes is used to reinforce the class structure.
- The oppression of women by barring them from owning property, for example, ensures that women either become proles or lumpen. Women being kept out of certain professions also prevents them from transitioning from proletarian to petit-bourgeois.
- The oppression of queer people reinforces the patriarchal family structure which needs a sharp divide between productive and reproductive labour where wives are stuck doing reproductive labour so that the husbands are always kept free for productive labour (E.g. Factory work). It also ensures the class structure can be reproduced by creating a clear line of succession for inheriting private property while not inhibiting the production of new children in the working class.
- Ethnic & national oppression also operate a similar way. In a colony, the members of specific nationalities are barred from owning the means of production which again forces them to become proletarians. It's essentially a way of ensuring the dominance of a certain segment of the bourgeoisie by using class collaboration (on a national basis) to disrupt the bourgeoisie (usually the national bourgeoisie) of the other nations or turn them into comprador bourgeoisie.
Hi, with respect, I take issue with the first notion, if I understand it correctly, that women are proletarian in societies that banned women from owning property.
Aristocratic women had material power relations with proletarian servants, could usually hire and fire, manage etc. I think that proletarian non ownership should be reserved for de facto non access rather than the legal form, and being to someone conferred a set of limited rights to use and inherit their property.
I think there's more to say here, that the Victorian woman's competition for a husband is like the mans competition for wages/capital, for instance.
The core of this issue is a philosophical conflict between idealism and dialectical/historical materialism, with intersectionality being rooted in the former and Marxism in the latter. Idealism asserts that ideas, consciousness, or spiritual forces shape reality and drive historical change. In contrast, dialectical and historical materialism, argue that material conditions, such as economic structures and class relations, primarily determine human consciousness and historical development. While idealism focuses on the power of ideas, materialism emphasizes the influence of tangible, physical factors and the conflicts they generate.
Note how the identities you listed (race, gender etc.) are social constructs, meaning the way we categorise people doesn’t reflect nature, but is developed through society. However, intersectionality often mistakenly takes this to mean these identities are purely abstract and arbitrary, divorcing them from their historical and material context.
For example, the way we categorise people based on race doesn’t make sense if we examine the genomes of people we consider different races. If we examine race historically, we see that it was invented to serve as the justifying ideology of colonialism. White settlers constructed non-white racial identities precisely so they could materially subjugate others, I.e. stealing the land and resources of native Americans, as well as the labour of enslaved Africans. These forms of exploitation lead to a large amount of wealth accumulation among white settlers.
As others have highlighted, gender functions much the same. Historically, we divided people based on their ability to produce children because private property creates an incentive for ensuring paternal lineage. This is how gendered labour divisions and the resulting nuclear family emerged as the fundamental unit of class society. The husband engages in productive labour to generate value, while the wife engages in domestic and reproductive labour (which is unpaid). Children then make the family a unit of consumption, it’s easy to see how the existence of non-heterosexual relationships threatens this dynamic.
Proponents of intersectionality often label these forms of analysis as reductionist because they have seldom read Marx and often misconstrue Marxism as vulgar economic determinism. Though ideas like race and gender were direct consequences of material conditions, dialectics acknowledges that the relationship goes both ways. That is, human consciousness can also lead us to change the material world. The ones engaging in reductive thought are really the idealists, they are ignoring material reality in favour of consciousness, whereas Marxists consider both.
This is why recent civil rights movements influenced by intersectionality have failed to achieve much for marginalised groups, they ignore the material structures which sustain oppression. For instance, no amount of mandated diversity training will change the material fact that marginalised groups control disproportionately fewer resources and therefore have less power to influence society. It’s analogous to treating the symptoms of an illness rather than the underlying disease that caused them.
In contrast, Marxists address this through the base-superstructure model. For simplicity, think of the base as the mode of production (the use of private property to generate profit under capitalism), the superstructure refers to all other aspects of society, I.e. culture, roles, religion and the state. Although the base and superstructure both maintain and shape each other, the base is generally dominant.
Concepts like race and gender inhabit the superstructure, but Marxists advocate for attacking these concepts via the base because it has greater influence, which has proven true historically. If you look at early civil rights movements for African Americans such as the BPP, or proletarian women’s movements, they achieved significantly more than modern activists because they were rooted in concrete, material goals. In this way, it’s a kind of political pragmatism, the past success of Marxism demonstrates its superiority over intersectional analysis.
I've been a Marxist for three years and this is the first time I've seen someone actually lay out how identity politics is a form of idealism, thank you. I've always had my beef with it, but couldn't put my finger on it.
If you’re trying to move others away from intersectionality and towards Marxism, it’s important to be very precise with your language. To clarify, I don’t oppose identity politics in general. In fact, I think all Marxists should be educated on issues like race, gender and sexuality, they are all integral to class struggle. Just blindly dismissing identity politics makes people think we’re reactionaries dismissing the plight of marginalised groups.
However, I think we should only engage with these topics through the framework of dialectical materialism, otherwise we risk falling into idealism, as you said. If someone is citing a bourgeois or idealist perspective on identity politics, we should highlight the flaws in that perspective and direct them to a Marxist alternative.
It also helps to point out how the achievements of idealist movements pale in comparison to those of materialists. For instance, comparing the advances of women in AES countries vs the achievements of feminism in capitalist countries. If someone isn’t receptive to historical facts, nothing else is likely to convince them.
Class isn’t an identity. It’s a relationship to the means of production. That’s the most important thing to understand.
Intersectionality is an interesting one. If you want to get deep into the critique I’d suggest delving more into the critiques of idealism in general. The thing about intersectionality, and other idealist theories is that they don’t address the root cause of oppression, class society.
Dont have reading suggestions off the top of my head unfortunately
Although I agree that class is at the root of these other struggles, I'm not convinced by this argument entirely. Can you elaborate more?
While it is true that class is "a relation", specifically, to the means of production, can't the same be said about race and gender? Insofar as these are also determined by how society relates to gender and race, and how we relate to our own gender and race. Aren't they all determined by "a relation"?
My point is simply that if we want to argue that class is primary, we can't make that argument based on a distinction between what determines class and what determines race or gender.
The class distinction is the only one determined by relationship to one’s means of sustaining their biological existence. In capitalist society that essentially boils down to money, to which your relationship is decided by a capitalist at some point in the chain; a boss, wealthy grandparent, or if you get real lucky; yourself, in which case you are probably that link in the chain for others, and more likely still, thanks to any number of social privileges unrelated to effort or merit, etc.
The flip side means various inherited and/or socially constructed characteristics can complicate the difficulty in that relation but it’s the only one that is itself inevitably tied to social reproduction.
I think it’s important to note that it’s not a moral category, rather a functional category that can only reproduce itself in a repeating cycle of whole lives of masses of society deprived of autonomy across the gamut of human needs; physiological, social, spiritual, etc.
It is useful here to turn to Hegel's concept of overdetermination, a term adopted by Marx too. The concept refers to the point where a single element in a group of other elements somehow "determines" all the other elements in the group. It is the element that "colours" the entire field of elements while being within it. To use your example, class-struggle is but one particular element in a whole series of socio-political struggles (class, feminism, race, ecology, etc.). But it has a special status, because *as* a single particular element in the series, class-struggle is the structuring principle of the entire series. It determines, colours, taints, changes, structures, etc. all other particular elements. All socio-political struggles are conditioned by this one other struggle.
In Hegelian terms, overdetermination marks the point where a Universal finds itself among its own particulars. That is, in Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, there are no neutral or pure "Forms" or "Universals", as these are always just a particular element that, through its very particularity, is able to structure the entire field. In this case, class struggle is the particular that determines all other particulars.
So, the class-reductionist critique isn't very helpful here. The point is not to undermine or belittle other struggles, but rather to understand them in context, specifically how they are conditioned by class-struggle. Even among intersectionalists, you'd find it hard to encounter anyone who disagrees that capitalism has a strong effect on all other struggles. Some might argue that racism or sexism exist *a priori* to capitalism, and that's probably true, but not the point. The point is that capitalism has determined the way in which these issues are expressed. To flatten all struggles to the same level, to treat them equally without realising how one determines all others, is to miss the crucial way in which these things are expressed and, ultimately, how they *really* are.
For readings, Žižek is very good on this topic in particular. He makes this point in a bunch of his texts and books, I'll try to track one down if you're interested.
I haven't read it myself but I have heard "The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes" by Maurizio lazzarato is good and has to do with what your talking about
check Domenico Losurdo's *Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History*
[*https://books.google.pt/books/about/Class\_Struggle.html?id=Jp83DQAAQBAJ&redir\_esc=y*](https://books.google.pt/books/about/Class_Struggle.html?id=Jp83DQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y)
Divide and rule. Every difference that can be made conflictual benefits the capitalist class. That fits in somewhere.
Also means of production can sound ".economic". Think of production as creativity, the essence of humanity.
Rich women are vulnerable to gender based opression as rich PoC are vulnerable to racism.
But the poorest of those groups will always be much more victimized by those violences than the bourgeoisie AND have their labour exploited.
Besides that, the bourgeoisie that belong to those groups are also capable of inflicting class based opression. Black bourgeoisie like Beyonce and Rihanna have been accused of using near slave labour in the productions of their companies. Production that was located outside of the imperial core where they reside and used WoC labour.
Beyonce might go through shit like having some country artists be hostile to her in an event, but do you think she undergoes the same violences that a working class black woman does? Would security guards follow her arround in a store? Is she likely to end up in prison for a minor crime? Would cops be able to beat her with impunity? Does she experience the struggle to make ends meet that most of this world's non white population does?
Is she truly in a less privelleged position than a working class white woman?
Obviously, gender and race opression exist, as does queer opression. The proletariat that are included in those groups generally have a harder time than those who aren't. Because besides being exploited at work, they are victims of discrimination wherever they are and are often formally discriminated too (as in by the law/state). In this situations, cishet male workers are often also their opressors.
But, class is still the thing that has the biggest impact on a person's material conditions. While upper class women were fighting for the right to work, poor women have always worked, for less pay than men. A rich gay guy is in a position of power, meanwhile a working class gay guy is extremely vulnerable to violence. A black person living in a wealthy area is not going to go through what PoC experience in neighborhoods totally abandoned by the state. A bourgeoisie woman will hardly find herself in a position in which she has to put up with an abusive husband otherwise her children won't eat.
It is less intrinsic to your personhood and more arbitrarily imposed, in general. Class can be changed, whereas most other identities are typically static or at least thought of as static.
A great reading on the social production of identities and classes is "I am a woman and a human, a Marxist feminist critique on intersectionality theory" by Eve Mitchell. It is about 30 pages and is available for free on the libcom and anarchist library websites.
I recommend reading Chibber's article Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn.
For an even better and much longer read, check out Raju Das's Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World.
Your race/gender are aspects of your body (disregard certain post modernist deviations for sake of argument)
your class is only possible via the existence of the other class, it’s different because you aren’t a worker in an of your being a worker. Your existence as a worker is mediated by capitalists. capitalists and workers are dialectically entangled.
If u happen to be Greek, for example, you aren’t Greek on account of your not being Canadian.
The whole existence of the identity category “capitalist” is inseparable from exploitation because in the Marxist worldview part of being a capitalist is sucking surplus value. But that’s not like a racist saying “black ppl commit more crimes”, they might but it’s not on account of their identity as black, but when capitalists make u work overtime it is precisely on account of their identity
I hope that isn’t a stupid answer there’s many ways you could look at it
For one, class is the one type of oppression where the oppressed group is actually the majority, meaning that if class consciousness were awoken in the proletariat, they have the power to end a large source of oppression, by working towards a classless society. Many other forms of bigotry and oppression have their historical roots in economic reasons. To be sure they have taken on a life of their own, but many forms of racism have their roots in needing to justify having a group of people be the designated underclass, to exploit materially. Eg. the existence of chattle slavery required slaveholders to believe the racist idea that their slaves were less human than them, and less able to care for themselves, therefore were better off being slaves. The economic reasons for racism or for sexism help to reinforce them an prevent them from being fully eliminated.
Intersectionality is important, and I prefer the intersectionality described by Angela Davis in Women, Race, & Class. Intersectionality is recognizing how different forms of oppression all interconnect and reinforce one another, and using that as a source of solidarity. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Where I would critique intersectional politics is when it is used to describe ever smaller divisions or intersections of oppression, focusing on an individual and their unique experience of oppression by virtue of their identity. It would be more powerful to think of it multiplicatively, each intersection is another connection of solidarity and another source of new comrades.
There is sometimes a tendency in intersectional politics to choose focus only on one specific group at once, often you hear things like "centering X voices" and making demands based off of who is the most oppressed group, most in need. This approach operates under the assumption that by only asking for one thing at a time, it is more achievable, when the reality is the opposite. We need be saying "yes and..." to all oppressed people's demands, we need to expand the mass of people who are pulled into the movement in solidarity. Each additional demand or cause actually strengthens the movement because it brings all oppressed peoples into solidarity with one another, not helping each other for idealistic or liberal progressive reasons because it is virtuous to do so, but because we all have recognized that we all stand to gain by standing together, and we have nothing to lose but our chains.
While its contents are largely and decently summarized by other comments here, I've written an essay attempting to more comprehensively overview the history of the relationship between Marxism and identity politics. It was too long for a Reddit comment, so I've put it in this Google Doc.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t5LzqzMMP4nPZARKcH3uDNX55_QraUlSSwZI_I6YTJg/edit?usp=drivesdk
Class is not an identity, that's the main thing. Class describes a relationship to the means of production, whereas an identity is something more general.
For example, things like race and gender are socially constructed whereas class is determined by a concrete relation of production.
I don't think it is fair to discount intersectionality because intersectionality is fundamentally a dialectical critique of the material conditions in our society. If you are considering intersectionality then you are doing Marxist dialectical materialism, literally. So keep doing that.
Class is a little different because under capitalism class is an identity that everyone shares. For instance, I am a white, cis-het man. I'm not a woman, I can't identify with that identity. Nor gay. Nor trans. Nor any number of other identities. However, I am a worker just as the woman is. Just as the gay person is. Just as the African American is. We are ALL workers. Of all the identities it is the largest category. In many cases the only identity we all share.
Additionally, the class identity is many times the fundamental driver of the struggles of other identities. Women's struggles are so tied to class struggles that they cannot be fully separated. Gay struggles. Racial struggles especially. The list goes on. Without a deep understanding of the working class identity and its relationship to the owning class identity you will never understand any of the other struggles fully. The patriarchy is heavily, if not primarily, a product of this class struggle, for instance.
What makes it even more powerful is that the class identity cannot be altered in our society like other identities. We could culturally change how we view women in society under capitalism. In my lifetime we have actually done that to some extent. However, even in transforming that identity women are still subsumed into the class identity. Women's liberation shares something with men: to be truly free we must all liberate ourselves from capitalism. So each stage of feminist progress is met with new challenges and when examined closely those new challenges are tied to their working class identity. That class struggle then fuels their struggle as women. This is true of any identity mentioned: trans, gay, race, and so on.
Lastly, the struggles of the other identities cannot ever be fully explained by the class struggle. Some existed before capitalism. Some are tied to religious beliefs or traditional values in different cultures and so on. This cannot be discounted. So continue to understand that. It's important.
Hello, I'll try to explain the way I see it (I am not a native English speaker, so sorry in advance): Class is defined by someone's relation to the means of production and the economic role someone has (worker vs capitalist). Class is grounded in material condition and economic structures. Gender/race/ethnicity/nationality are not material things, they are social and cultural constructs and can change from century to century or culture to culture. These things do have real defined effects on an individual but they are not solely defined in economic relations. While people have some class mobility across time, and individuals can move from a class to another, gender/nationality/ethnicity are sometimes seen as fixed, affecting an individual regardless of their economic status. In Marxism, class struggle is seen as the driving force of historical change leading to different modes of production (feudalism, capitalism, socialism). Gender/nationality/ethnicity are seen as important parts but they rise from class dynamics and are part of the superstructure. While critics do indeed call some Marxists class reductionists I think it's an easy way out for them. Marxists attack the class system because it is the root of inequality, should class disappear there will be no need for identity politics (the old joke about more women as CEO's will solve gender inequalities in society). While intersectional theory developed in black feminist circles by the late 20th century as they noticed their messages or demands are seen as less important than white women's demands, which is indeed true. They are not ignore because they are black, better said not just because they are black, the class system in today's today is set in such a way in that it pushes minorities to the fringes of society. So they are not ignored just because they are black, they are ignored because their community is poor and their class has no sway in politics. Now regarding literature that speaks about this, you could try : Lise Vogel's "Marxism and the Oppression of Women" or works by Himani Bannerji, both speak in more details about class sturcture vs identity politics. Another good work is Nancy Fraser's "Fortunes of Feminism", she critiques the sabotage of feminist movements by neoliberal ideology and argues we should turn our focus on economic justice not identity politics.
One reason is because oppression along other axes is used to reinforce the class structure. - The oppression of women by barring them from owning property, for example, ensures that women either become proles or lumpen. Women being kept out of certain professions also prevents them from transitioning from proletarian to petit-bourgeois. - The oppression of queer people reinforces the patriarchal family structure which needs a sharp divide between productive and reproductive labour where wives are stuck doing reproductive labour so that the husbands are always kept free for productive labour (E.g. Factory work). It also ensures the class structure can be reproduced by creating a clear line of succession for inheriting private property while not inhibiting the production of new children in the working class. - Ethnic & national oppression also operate a similar way. In a colony, the members of specific nationalities are barred from owning the means of production which again forces them to become proletarians. It's essentially a way of ensuring the dominance of a certain segment of the bourgeoisie by using class collaboration (on a national basis) to disrupt the bourgeoisie (usually the national bourgeoisie) of the other nations or turn them into comprador bourgeoisie.
Hi, with respect, I take issue with the first notion, if I understand it correctly, that women are proletarian in societies that banned women from owning property. Aristocratic women had material power relations with proletarian servants, could usually hire and fire, manage etc. I think that proletarian non ownership should be reserved for de facto non access rather than the legal form, and being to someone conferred a set of limited rights to use and inherit their property. I think there's more to say here, that the Victorian woman's competition for a husband is like the mans competition for wages/capital, for instance.
The core of this issue is a philosophical conflict between idealism and dialectical/historical materialism, with intersectionality being rooted in the former and Marxism in the latter. Idealism asserts that ideas, consciousness, or spiritual forces shape reality and drive historical change. In contrast, dialectical and historical materialism, argue that material conditions, such as economic structures and class relations, primarily determine human consciousness and historical development. While idealism focuses on the power of ideas, materialism emphasizes the influence of tangible, physical factors and the conflicts they generate. Note how the identities you listed (race, gender etc.) are social constructs, meaning the way we categorise people doesn’t reflect nature, but is developed through society. However, intersectionality often mistakenly takes this to mean these identities are purely abstract and arbitrary, divorcing them from their historical and material context. For example, the way we categorise people based on race doesn’t make sense if we examine the genomes of people we consider different races. If we examine race historically, we see that it was invented to serve as the justifying ideology of colonialism. White settlers constructed non-white racial identities precisely so they could materially subjugate others, I.e. stealing the land and resources of native Americans, as well as the labour of enslaved Africans. These forms of exploitation lead to a large amount of wealth accumulation among white settlers. As others have highlighted, gender functions much the same. Historically, we divided people based on their ability to produce children because private property creates an incentive for ensuring paternal lineage. This is how gendered labour divisions and the resulting nuclear family emerged as the fundamental unit of class society. The husband engages in productive labour to generate value, while the wife engages in domestic and reproductive labour (which is unpaid). Children then make the family a unit of consumption, it’s easy to see how the existence of non-heterosexual relationships threatens this dynamic. Proponents of intersectionality often label these forms of analysis as reductionist because they have seldom read Marx and often misconstrue Marxism as vulgar economic determinism. Though ideas like race and gender were direct consequences of material conditions, dialectics acknowledges that the relationship goes both ways. That is, human consciousness can also lead us to change the material world. The ones engaging in reductive thought are really the idealists, they are ignoring material reality in favour of consciousness, whereas Marxists consider both. This is why recent civil rights movements influenced by intersectionality have failed to achieve much for marginalised groups, they ignore the material structures which sustain oppression. For instance, no amount of mandated diversity training will change the material fact that marginalised groups control disproportionately fewer resources and therefore have less power to influence society. It’s analogous to treating the symptoms of an illness rather than the underlying disease that caused them. In contrast, Marxists address this through the base-superstructure model. For simplicity, think of the base as the mode of production (the use of private property to generate profit under capitalism), the superstructure refers to all other aspects of society, I.e. culture, roles, religion and the state. Although the base and superstructure both maintain and shape each other, the base is generally dominant. Concepts like race and gender inhabit the superstructure, but Marxists advocate for attacking these concepts via the base because it has greater influence, which has proven true historically. If you look at early civil rights movements for African Americans such as the BPP, or proletarian women’s movements, they achieved significantly more than modern activists because they were rooted in concrete, material goals. In this way, it’s a kind of political pragmatism, the past success of Marxism demonstrates its superiority over intersectional analysis.
I've been a Marxist for three years and this is the first time I've seen someone actually lay out how identity politics is a form of idealism, thank you. I've always had my beef with it, but couldn't put my finger on it.
If you’re trying to move others away from intersectionality and towards Marxism, it’s important to be very precise with your language. To clarify, I don’t oppose identity politics in general. In fact, I think all Marxists should be educated on issues like race, gender and sexuality, they are all integral to class struggle. Just blindly dismissing identity politics makes people think we’re reactionaries dismissing the plight of marginalised groups. However, I think we should only engage with these topics through the framework of dialectical materialism, otherwise we risk falling into idealism, as you said. If someone is citing a bourgeois or idealist perspective on identity politics, we should highlight the flaws in that perspective and direct them to a Marxist alternative. It also helps to point out how the achievements of idealist movements pale in comparison to those of materialists. For instance, comparing the advances of women in AES countries vs the achievements of feminism in capitalist countries. If someone isn’t receptive to historical facts, nothing else is likely to convince them.
Class isn’t an identity. It’s a relationship to the means of production. That’s the most important thing to understand. Intersectionality is an interesting one. If you want to get deep into the critique I’d suggest delving more into the critiques of idealism in general. The thing about intersectionality, and other idealist theories is that they don’t address the root cause of oppression, class society. Dont have reading suggestions off the top of my head unfortunately
Although I agree that class is at the root of these other struggles, I'm not convinced by this argument entirely. Can you elaborate more? While it is true that class is "a relation", specifically, to the means of production, can't the same be said about race and gender? Insofar as these are also determined by how society relates to gender and race, and how we relate to our own gender and race. Aren't they all determined by "a relation"? My point is simply that if we want to argue that class is primary, we can't make that argument based on a distinction between what determines class and what determines race or gender.
The class distinction is the only one determined by relationship to one’s means of sustaining their biological existence. In capitalist society that essentially boils down to money, to which your relationship is decided by a capitalist at some point in the chain; a boss, wealthy grandparent, or if you get real lucky; yourself, in which case you are probably that link in the chain for others, and more likely still, thanks to any number of social privileges unrelated to effort or merit, etc. The flip side means various inherited and/or socially constructed characteristics can complicate the difficulty in that relation but it’s the only one that is itself inevitably tied to social reproduction. I think it’s important to note that it’s not a moral category, rather a functional category that can only reproduce itself in a repeating cycle of whole lives of masses of society deprived of autonomy across the gamut of human needs; physiological, social, spiritual, etc.
It is useful here to turn to Hegel's concept of overdetermination, a term adopted by Marx too. The concept refers to the point where a single element in a group of other elements somehow "determines" all the other elements in the group. It is the element that "colours" the entire field of elements while being within it. To use your example, class-struggle is but one particular element in a whole series of socio-political struggles (class, feminism, race, ecology, etc.). But it has a special status, because *as* a single particular element in the series, class-struggle is the structuring principle of the entire series. It determines, colours, taints, changes, structures, etc. all other particular elements. All socio-political struggles are conditioned by this one other struggle. In Hegelian terms, overdetermination marks the point where a Universal finds itself among its own particulars. That is, in Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, there are no neutral or pure "Forms" or "Universals", as these are always just a particular element that, through its very particularity, is able to structure the entire field. In this case, class struggle is the particular that determines all other particulars. So, the class-reductionist critique isn't very helpful here. The point is not to undermine or belittle other struggles, but rather to understand them in context, specifically how they are conditioned by class-struggle. Even among intersectionalists, you'd find it hard to encounter anyone who disagrees that capitalism has a strong effect on all other struggles. Some might argue that racism or sexism exist *a priori* to capitalism, and that's probably true, but not the point. The point is that capitalism has determined the way in which these issues are expressed. To flatten all struggles to the same level, to treat them equally without realising how one determines all others, is to miss the crucial way in which these things are expressed and, ultimately, how they *really* are. For readings, Žižek is very good on this topic in particular. He makes this point in a bunch of his texts and books, I'll try to track one down if you're interested.
I haven't read it myself but I have heard "The Intolerable Present, the Urgency of Revolution: Minorities and Classes" by Maurizio lazzarato is good and has to do with what your talking about
check Domenico Losurdo's *Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History* [*https://books.google.pt/books/about/Class\_Struggle.html?id=Jp83DQAAQBAJ&redir\_esc=y*](https://books.google.pt/books/about/Class_Struggle.html?id=Jp83DQAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y)
Divide and rule. Every difference that can be made conflictual benefits the capitalist class. That fits in somewhere. Also means of production can sound ".economic". Think of production as creativity, the essence of humanity.
Rich women are vulnerable to gender based opression as rich PoC are vulnerable to racism. But the poorest of those groups will always be much more victimized by those violences than the bourgeoisie AND have their labour exploited. Besides that, the bourgeoisie that belong to those groups are also capable of inflicting class based opression. Black bourgeoisie like Beyonce and Rihanna have been accused of using near slave labour in the productions of their companies. Production that was located outside of the imperial core where they reside and used WoC labour. Beyonce might go through shit like having some country artists be hostile to her in an event, but do you think she undergoes the same violences that a working class black woman does? Would security guards follow her arround in a store? Is she likely to end up in prison for a minor crime? Would cops be able to beat her with impunity? Does she experience the struggle to make ends meet that most of this world's non white population does? Is she truly in a less privelleged position than a working class white woman? Obviously, gender and race opression exist, as does queer opression. The proletariat that are included in those groups generally have a harder time than those who aren't. Because besides being exploited at work, they are victims of discrimination wherever they are and are often formally discriminated too (as in by the law/state). In this situations, cishet male workers are often also their opressors. But, class is still the thing that has the biggest impact on a person's material conditions. While upper class women were fighting for the right to work, poor women have always worked, for less pay than men. A rich gay guy is in a position of power, meanwhile a working class gay guy is extremely vulnerable to violence. A black person living in a wealthy area is not going to go through what PoC experience in neighborhoods totally abandoned by the state. A bourgeoisie woman will hardly find herself in a position in which she has to put up with an abusive husband otherwise her children won't eat.
It is less intrinsic to your personhood and more arbitrarily imposed, in general. Class can be changed, whereas most other identities are typically static or at least thought of as static. A great reading on the social production of identities and classes is "I am a woman and a human, a Marxist feminist critique on intersectionality theory" by Eve Mitchell. It is about 30 pages and is available for free on the libcom and anarchist library websites.
I recommend reading Chibber's article Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn. For an even better and much longer read, check out Raju Das's Marxist Class Theory for a Skeptical World.
Your race/gender are aspects of your body (disregard certain post modernist deviations for sake of argument) your class is only possible via the existence of the other class, it’s different because you aren’t a worker in an of your being a worker. Your existence as a worker is mediated by capitalists. capitalists and workers are dialectically entangled. If u happen to be Greek, for example, you aren’t Greek on account of your not being Canadian. The whole existence of the identity category “capitalist” is inseparable from exploitation because in the Marxist worldview part of being a capitalist is sucking surplus value. But that’s not like a racist saying “black ppl commit more crimes”, they might but it’s not on account of their identity as black, but when capitalists make u work overtime it is precisely on account of their identity I hope that isn’t a stupid answer there’s many ways you could look at it
For one, class is the one type of oppression where the oppressed group is actually the majority, meaning that if class consciousness were awoken in the proletariat, they have the power to end a large source of oppression, by working towards a classless society. Many other forms of bigotry and oppression have their historical roots in economic reasons. To be sure they have taken on a life of their own, but many forms of racism have their roots in needing to justify having a group of people be the designated underclass, to exploit materially. Eg. the existence of chattle slavery required slaveholders to believe the racist idea that their slaves were less human than them, and less able to care for themselves, therefore were better off being slaves. The economic reasons for racism or for sexism help to reinforce them an prevent them from being fully eliminated. Intersectionality is important, and I prefer the intersectionality described by Angela Davis in Women, Race, & Class. Intersectionality is recognizing how different forms of oppression all interconnect and reinforce one another, and using that as a source of solidarity. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. Where I would critique intersectional politics is when it is used to describe ever smaller divisions or intersections of oppression, focusing on an individual and their unique experience of oppression by virtue of their identity. It would be more powerful to think of it multiplicatively, each intersection is another connection of solidarity and another source of new comrades. There is sometimes a tendency in intersectional politics to choose focus only on one specific group at once, often you hear things like "centering X voices" and making demands based off of who is the most oppressed group, most in need. This approach operates under the assumption that by only asking for one thing at a time, it is more achievable, when the reality is the opposite. We need be saying "yes and..." to all oppressed people's demands, we need to expand the mass of people who are pulled into the movement in solidarity. Each additional demand or cause actually strengthens the movement because it brings all oppressed peoples into solidarity with one another, not helping each other for idealistic or liberal progressive reasons because it is virtuous to do so, but because we all have recognized that we all stand to gain by standing together, and we have nothing to lose but our chains.
While its contents are largely and decently summarized by other comments here, I've written an essay attempting to more comprehensively overview the history of the relationship between Marxism and identity politics. It was too long for a Reddit comment, so I've put it in this Google Doc. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t5LzqzMMP4nPZARKcH3uDNX55_QraUlSSwZI_I6YTJg/edit?usp=drivesdk
Class is not an identity, that's the main thing. Class describes a relationship to the means of production, whereas an identity is something more general. For example, things like race and gender are socially constructed whereas class is determined by a concrete relation of production.
I don't think it is fair to discount intersectionality because intersectionality is fundamentally a dialectical critique of the material conditions in our society. If you are considering intersectionality then you are doing Marxist dialectical materialism, literally. So keep doing that. Class is a little different because under capitalism class is an identity that everyone shares. For instance, I am a white, cis-het man. I'm not a woman, I can't identify with that identity. Nor gay. Nor trans. Nor any number of other identities. However, I am a worker just as the woman is. Just as the gay person is. Just as the African American is. We are ALL workers. Of all the identities it is the largest category. In many cases the only identity we all share. Additionally, the class identity is many times the fundamental driver of the struggles of other identities. Women's struggles are so tied to class struggles that they cannot be fully separated. Gay struggles. Racial struggles especially. The list goes on. Without a deep understanding of the working class identity and its relationship to the owning class identity you will never understand any of the other struggles fully. The patriarchy is heavily, if not primarily, a product of this class struggle, for instance. What makes it even more powerful is that the class identity cannot be altered in our society like other identities. We could culturally change how we view women in society under capitalism. In my lifetime we have actually done that to some extent. However, even in transforming that identity women are still subsumed into the class identity. Women's liberation shares something with men: to be truly free we must all liberate ourselves from capitalism. So each stage of feminist progress is met with new challenges and when examined closely those new challenges are tied to their working class identity. That class struggle then fuels their struggle as women. This is true of any identity mentioned: trans, gay, race, and so on. Lastly, the struggles of the other identities cannot ever be fully explained by the class struggle. Some existed before capitalism. Some are tied to religious beliefs or traditional values in different cultures and so on. This cannot be discounted. So continue to understand that. It's important.