PARTISAN!

Debates over identity and intersectionality take place across the Left cyclically every few months or so. Luca Fraillon analyses the identity impasse.

Every few months those on the socialist left, especially those active in online spaces, are drawn into a toxic and destructive debate over what is loosely termed “identity politics”. Generally, it follows a predictable format:

Person A: “Here is a way that a specific group of people is marginalised”.

Person B: “The root of that marginalisation is class”

Person A/C/D/E: “That’s class reductionist”

Person B/F/G/H: “You’re a liberal”

Person _____: “You’re a tankie”

Result: everyone hates each other, and no genuine debate occurs.

As is evident, two generally sound and not necessarily contradictory propositions – that people of specific social groups experience unique marginalisation, and that such marginalisation has a material basis – very quickly dissolve into name calling, straw manning, and general mudslinging. I want to examine what a genuinely Marxist view of identity is, whether it is really incompatible with ideas such as intersectionality, and a way forward for Marxist intervention in all liberatory struggles.

What is identity?

When talking about identity it is useful to define what is meant by the term, yet this key step is often missed in diatribes on the importance/harm/purpose of identity. An identity in mathematics and identity in sociological terms, though appearing separate upon a cursory pass, derive from the same maxim – the law of identity. The law of identity is as follows:

A=A

In words, all things are self-equal. However, this tells us nothing of substance about what ‘A’ is – to do that, we must contrast it with what it is not, ‘not-A’. Identities are found in opposition, whether in math, philosophy, or as sociological categories.

Hegel importantly notes that identity is both positive and negative. Take, for example, the category of a cake – when we say a chocolate cake is a cake, we hold that there is some aspect of the chocolate cake that is shared as common across all cakes. This is the positive aspect of identity, the “identical self-relation”. However, the same statement also holds a negative, by which it separates cake as a category itself; the chocolate cake cannot be “not-cake”. This is the negative aspect of identity. Both contain the other within them – there can be no ‘sameness’ without ‘difference’, and vice-versa. In short, identities are dialectical.

Social identities

When talking about social identities, these same fundamental principles apply; identities are dialectical. They are also, importantly, material. It is the latter that often serves as a point of contention, and leads to accusations of class reductionism – as such, we must be extremely precise and clear in our explanation of it.

Let’s take ourselves to a time and place where communalism, what Marx might call ‘primitive communism’, was the dominant mode of production. Pick any social identity and think about whether it would have existed in this society. This isn’t asking whether the traits that make up the identity today would have existed, but whether the identity itself would have. Here, even something simple like age falls apart. Despite having been alive for 26 years, telling someone in the early stone age that they are ‘pushing 30’ wouldn’t make much sense. The conditions for numerical age to emerge as an identity, namely the codification of the division of labour, simply don’t exist. However, telling them they’ve been alive for 13 migration cycles of a bird that forms an aspect of their diet would make a lot more sense. This is why some cultures today may count age in winters, or rice harvests, rather than years – the mode of production of their society is what determines identity.

This analysis is what holds the key to understanding social identities today. Let’s use it to examine gender. Gendered identities must arise from the demands of the mode of production of the era. In the era of capitalism, gender serves to uphold the division between productive and reproductive labour – labour which produces capital, and labour which reproduces the conditions necessary for the production of capital. Gendered identities, as all identities, must be oppositional, defined in relation to one another. However, importantly, here arrive the categories of ‘Self’ and ‘Other’, or ‘Subject’ and ‘Object’. Social identities exist such that one is defined negatively and the other positively, despite the fact that both must necessarily hold both negative and positive difference as described by Hegel. While productive labour cannot exist without reproductive labour, it is reproductive labour that is defined by its usefulness to productive labour and not the other way around. As such, women are defined generally by the negative aspect of identity – the ways they are not men – while maleness is accepted as the default ‘Self’ or ‘Subject’. If you’re interested in reading more about this specifically, I would recommend the introduction of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

Class reductionist?

Where does class fit into this? We’ve shown how identity ultimately arises out of production – is this class reductionist? No. Class is not the mode of production. There is a substantial and important difference between saying that “everything comes back to class”, and “everything comes back to material conditions”. Class itself is an identity, and perhaps the most obvious one. The proletariat are defined in relation to the bourgeoisie. We can see that Subject/Object dichotomy at play here – the proletariat are in service of the bourgeoisie, defined negatively by their lack of ownership over the means of production. However, we can also see how asserting the positive aspect of identity – identical self-relation – is essential to transcending this dichotomy; only by identifying commonality as a class is class consciousness and thus revolution possible. And this is the unique feature of class – as class conflict drives changes in the mode of production, only it can create the conditions necessary for substantial shifts in all identities.

Where most liberals and some Marxists fall into a false analysis of Marxist views of identity is in imagining some sort of “identity hierarchy”, where class is at the top and all other identities are subordinate to it. Here, there is no point in caring about the struggles of queer people, women, or people of colour, since they are simply distractions from the larger, more important, class struggle. This is a fundamentally idealist conception of identity. All identities arise from material conditions, the mode of production of any given society. The struggles of queer people, women, and people of colour are thus intimately linked to the struggle against capitalism, and do not exist in opposition to it.

Intersectionality

The term ‘intersectionality’ is sometimes met with eye rolls by those on the socialist left, who see it’s proponents as the epitome of so-called “liberal identity politics”. In the same way that the material basis of identity is too often misunderstood, I argue that intersectionality is misrepresented in some left-wing circles when it is a vital analytical tool for Marxist sociological analysis.

What does intersectionality say? The concept itself is not that complicated. Using the example given by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a black, proletarian woman experiences unique challenges. That’s really all it says. As Marxists, we already know this – a bourgeois woman and a proletarian woman may both be impacted by the patriarchy, though in extremely different ways to extremely different degrees. Having this basic understanding allows us to open up new, interesting, and important cultural analyses. For example, given that black people have been masculinised in cultural hegemony as a result of material systems of domination such as slavery and imperialism, black women experience femininity differently to white women.

Note that the analysis does not lose its material character, it just allows for greater nuance and a more scientific analysis of specific cultural groups. This is the inevitable consequence of decades of advancement in social sciences allowing for greater focus on more specific communities, and not a neoliberal plot to destroy class consciousness. While crude applications of intersectionality reach liberal idealist conclusions, historical materialist applications of it allow for an important Marxist analysis of specific cultural phenomena.

What now?

There are a few important conclusions that emerge from this analysis of identity.

Firstly, identities emerge from specific material conditions. Secondly, class does not exist at the top of a hierarchy of ‘more’ to ‘less’ important identities – all identities are the result of the mode of production of society. Thirdly, the working class is the only group which can change the mode of production of society.

The only possible action to draw from this is that a mass workers party is needed in order to promote the liberation of all groups from systems of oppression and unite the working class in opposition to all forms of oppression. It would be foolish to assume that a revolution would immediately result in the overthrow of all discrimination. Class struggle alone will never overthrow racial, gendered, or sexual oppression, which are so ingrained in the cultural psyche; stop adding fuel to a fire and it will not stop burning.

This is why any communist party must be committed to all struggles for liberation, while recognising that a change in the mode of production is a necessary condition for any liberation. It must, as an act of urgency, revive Marxism as an academic and intellectual tradition. This means a materialist analysis of all forms of oppression and marginalisation, and a commitment to thorough, rigorous, open, and constructive debate. Let’s just leave the name calling at the door.

---

Respond on our letters page: partisanmagazine@proton.me