“Liberal” Identity Politics
And Intersectionality
I came across this post on Twitter, where an anarchist contrasts liberal identity politics with intersectionality on the basis that liberal identity politics are essentializing.
And, while I agree with anti-essentialism, and if you add liberal to the front of a phrase I’ll reflexively dislike it, their understanding of intersectionality was strange enough to catch my interest. So, I did a little digging to see what else they had to say about it.
In another tweet they claim that Marx advocated for intersectionality and once again contrasted it with liberal identity politics.
The quote is the beginning of the second section of the Communist Manifesto. In it Marx describes what a communist political party would be like based on his understanding, at the time, of how to achieve communism. In particular, Marx says that the party would represent the entire working class because it would only care about the common interests of the entire working class.
I also found this tweet where they attempt to explain intersectionality to someone who’s not familiar with it. They describe intersectionality as a recognition of the uniqueness of everyone’s oppression, that these oppressions come from the same source, but that one cannot achieve liberation unless all oppressions are dealt with.
I looked to see if I could find them talking about non-liberal identity politics. I found them talking about conservative identity politics, but nothing about actually liberatory identity politics. The closest I could find was them criticizing leftists who come to leftism through identity politics.
It seems that, rather than liberal acting as a differentiator between types of identity politics, where one would assume they would support the non-liberal version, it’s functioning as an epithet. If one supports identity politics, then one is branded a liberal. It serves a similar purpose to adding white or cis before gays before being homophobic. That is, people who aren’t in on the trick will assume you aren’t being bigoted, and will let you get away with trash you should catch flak for.
What did they get wrong?
The idea that all struggles are rooted in class struggle is not intersectionality. It is actually a consequence of Marx’s conception of history known as historical materialism. When our friend was thumbing through the Manifesto to prepare their photo, they passed by the often quoted “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” And as the oppressions of identity were caused by the unfolding of history, it follows that these oppressions are rooted in class struggle.
But if one’s looking to actually understand Marx, frankly the Communist Manifesto isn’t even worth reading. To understand historical materialism specifically, one should read The German Ideology. It describes how, instead of change arising from people realizing better ways to do things, if you look at history, it actually arises from individuals acting in their self-interest. The material conditions of someone are the available ways one can relate to the economy. Acting in self-interest changes the material conditions subtly such that over time big changes happen.
Ideology, that is the apparent justification for things being the way they are, is created post-hoc by those who hold power. Ideology, rather than being a vehicle through which society can be improved, is actually how progress to society is slowed. A classic example is that racism was created by slave owners to justify the keeping of black slaves.
Now, when someone learns about historical materialism for the first time, they have a tendency to over-emphasize how true it really is. This is known as economic determinism. Engels decried this interpretation in a letter that’s short enough you should just read it.
“Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.”
The primary danger of economic determinism is that it is one of the roads that leads one to class reductionism. Indeed that is what our friend is expressing when they quote the Manifesto. Class reductionism is the idea that the best approach to liberation of all types is through only organizing around and focusing on class. Stated another way, class reductionism is the repudiation of identity politics.
Identity Politics
Identity politics as a term was first used by the Combahee River Collective in their eponymous statement describing what they learned over the years. If identity politics means anything, then we can find its meaning here. The collective was organized around an identity: black (lesbian) women.
The collective acted as a place where people of this identity would share their experiences with other people of the same identity. Through this practice, it was taking advantage of standpoint theory, which says that a person oppressed by a certain relation is likely to know more about that relation than a person who isn’t oppressed by it. By organizing around an identity, they essentially gathered a bunch of experts on the specific oppression of that identity. By sharing experiences they provided these experts with access to more than just their own experiences to pull from.
And what better way to use that expertise, than to put it into action? After all, the point is not to interpret the world, but to change it. It’s a natural conclusion that experts who also have an interest in solving a problem would be the most effective at solving it. That groups organized around an identity act to liberate people of that identity is another aspect of identity politics.
To summarize, identity politics is all of the following: organizations for the fighting of identity-based oppression, sharing experiences of people of the relevant identity, and elevating the opinions of people of the relevant identity.
If we return to the tweet that originally caught my interest, we can interpret the essentialism it talks about with respect to identity politics. Essentialist identity politics takes those tendencies of expertise and effectiveness, and essentializes them. An essentialist standpoint theory doesn’t say that the oppression increases your likelihood of knowing more, but makes it a certainty. But this essentialism isn’t an essential part of identity politics, and in fact it’s not even an essential part of liberal identity politics. Just because liberals tend to be wrong, that doesn’t mean they have to be wrong in this specific way.
Back to the Marx quote I claimed was being used to be class reductionist without explaining why. If the party only cares about those interests that are common to all workers, then it can’t address any of the oppressions that are unique to a specific identity. A commitment to antiracism can then be characterized as a “sectarian principle”, because it divides the proletariat into the antiracist and the racist.
Now, this would be a bad interpretation, because it’s a common interest of the workers to have black people stand with them, and as long as racism is prevalent within worker organizations that won’t happen. And didn’t they say that we must “tackle all struggles to bring about a worker’s society”? Yes, but they also said “all struggles are class struggles”.
It seems that when they say “tackle all struggles” they mean through organizing around class. To them, while the worker’s movement must oppose all forms of oppression, it is still fundamentally a worker’s movement. But at the same time, there is no reason to organize outside the worker’s movement, because those oppressions will be addressed by the worker’s movement. This limits the abolition of identity-based oppression to a secondary role.
Rather than being sought for its own sake, it must always be justified through how it contributes to class abolition. This is a justification that could be met, but requiring this justification to be found and understood slows and weakens liberation.
If there are different organizations with different oppressions as their focus, then it’s not necessarily the case that there is sectarianism. These different organizations can share the same goals even as they differ in focus. And while different focuses may imply different means, the shared goals imply that the means will conform to a shared logic.
Intersectionality
What actually is intersectionality? Intersectionality was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw within the context of court cases about discrimination against black women.
Some of these cases denied the discrimination by reducing the discrimination against black women to the simultaneous discrimination against black people and the discrimination against women. If hiring practices didn’t discriminate against black people and didn’t discriminate against women, then the idea that hiring practices discriminated against black women was seen as impossible.
In other cases discrimination was denied by understanding the discrimination against black women as not indicative of discrimination against black people or women. Discrimination against black women was seen as an entirely separate phenomena from racism or sexism.
In reality, the oppression at the intersection of two systems of oppression is neither reducible to nor separate from the oppression of the individual systems. That is, oppression at the intersection is both emergent from and an example of the individual oppressions.
As we each stand at an intersection of identities as unique as we are, it is true that intersectionality says that we all have unique struggles. But this is a consequence of, not central to, intersectionality.
As applied to liberatory politics, intersectionality is most commonly used and best used as an enhancement to identity politics, not a contrast with it. Intersectional identity politics is just the application of identity politics to the intersections of identities.
In some ways the aforementioned Acombahee River Collective statement preempts intersectionality. The collective already was an example of intersectional identity politics, and their stated justification for existing relies on the logic of intersectionality. Crenshaw formalized and detailed a concept that was already intuitively understood by those who it represents.
While we’re on the subject of identity politics and intersectionality, I should clarify how we are to avoid the Oppression Olympics, because a naive intersectional identity politics would result in precisely that, and another misinterpretation of “sectarian principles” would refer to it.
Intersectionality isn’t just a theory of how systems of oppressions interact, it’s also a theory of how non-intersectional understandings of oppression work. In non-intersectional understandings, a group is not understood through the sum of all its members, but through its most privileged members. The experiences of women, for example, are understood as the experiences of white women, not as the experiences of both white and black women. Crenshaw describes an analogy for how this affects non-intersectional liberation.
“Imagine a basement which contains all people who are disadvantaged on the basis of race, sex, class, sexual preference, age and/or physical ability. These people are stacked — feet standing on shoulders — with those on the bottom being disadvantaged by the full array of factors, up to the very top, where the heads of all those disadvantaged by a singular factor brush up against the ceiling. Their ceiling is actually the floor above which only those who are not disadvantaged in any way reside. In efforts to correct some aspects of domination, those above the ceiling admit from the basement only those who can say that “but for” the ceiling, they too would be in the upper room. A hatch is developed through which those placed immediately below can crawl. Yet this hatch is generally available only to those who — due to the singularity of their burden and their otherwise privileged position relative to those below — are in the position to crawl
through. Those who are multiply-burdened are generally left below unless they can somehow pull themselves into the groups that are permitted to squeeze through the hatch.”
Given that, in the absence of some corrective force, a feminist project is doomed to merely represent the interests of white women, as opposed to all women. What are the possible ways we can fix this? We have the strategy of the Combahee River Collective, which is to form an entirely separate project to represent the interests of those at the intersection. We could also have this special interest project attached to the greater project, acting as a tool of collective empowerment within the broader project, similar to how a specifically anarchist organization can be attached to a broader union. Or we could incorporate some social or procedural mechanism in the broader project that elevates the voices of those at an intersection.
A relevant consideration for all of these approaches is that groups that are at intersections are less populated and that there are more groups to represent at deeper levels of intersection. An organization for disabled neurodivergent black trans lesbians may find its recruitment drive ineffective, and this has consequences for the amount of power it can express. Because of this, the Combahee River Collective strategy may be the ideal for the independence it grants, but the less independent strategies are fallbacks for when that strategy isn’t viable.
The most dependent strategy is the one with the potential for the Oppression Olympics. Oppression Olympics occurs when a process for elevating the voices or issues of an identity becomes a distraction from the very project it seeks to enhance. It is an Olympics, because it is a competition to be the most elevated.
The simplest way an Oppression Olympics could arise is from having an essentialist version of standpoint theory. If the more burdened are categorically more knowledgeable than the less burdened, then the most important thing to do would be to engage in elevation.
So, the simplest way to avoid the Oppression Olympics is to avoid essentialism, but to be completely free of it is not that simple. Because it results from a hijacking of a process that is important, we can’t categorically avoid it. We must remain vigilant and keep in mind the balance between elevation and distraction. Being aware of the problem is the defense against it.
Conclusion
Identity politics is important for its own sake. One is not lefter-than-thou for being a class reductionist. Intersectionality is an enhancement to identity politics. And one should learn what words mean before using them so confidently. Hopefully an anarchist and “anti fascist for over 30 years” can see this.