Whenever working-class and oppressed people begin to engage in struggle against their conditions, as they have done on a massive scale in the last period, what accompanies this is a search for ideas. Fury at injustice leads people to seek to understand the brutality and violence which millions upon millions suffer daily. Experience of struggle leads people to ask which methods might be most effective.
Socialist Alternative (ISA in England, Wales and Scotland)
The last decade saw a sea change in attitudes towards questions of oppression across much of the world. The dominant falsehoods of the 1990s and early 2000s—ideas like post-feminism (the idea that full equality or liberation has already been achieved or is ‘just within grasp’), rainbow capitalism or the liberal lie of a post-racial or ‘colour blind’ society—could not survive the mass upheaval that swept the world in the wake of the 2008 great recession.
Among young people in particular, an urgent and burning desire to challenge injustice has fueled new and massive movements. Burgeoning struggles against sexism, demanding an end to gender-based violence, fighting for reproductive rights, and pushing back against restrictive gender norms have exploded in too many countries to name. In the US, beginning in 2014, a movement against brutal racist state violence coined a new slogan, ‘Black Lives Matter’, which found huge resonance across the country and around much of the world. The subsequent George Floyd rebellion of 2020 saw the largest street demonstrations that have taken place in the history of the US.
Meanwhile, even in countries where significant mass protests around these issues have not been a feature, a heightened awareness of, and conscious desire to challenge oppression has still been a hallmark of the radicalisation that has taken place in the last period.
As socialists, we aim to participate in every struggle of working-class and oppressed people, and to build a revolutionary socialist organisation which reflects the multiracial and multi-gendered working class. Within such movements, we seek to discuss with and learn from the experiences of those who are involved within and beyond our ranks. We put forward a programme which offers an effective way forward, pointing towards what is necessary for these movements to win victories, and to what is ultimately needed to end oppression. We do this on the basis of confidence that the ideas of Marxism are uniquely valuable in understanding both the roots of different forms of oppression and what is necessary to overcome them.
Within the socialist and Marxist movement, there is also a rich history of taking a leading role in the fight for liberation of oppressed groups and for democratic rights. Workers taking power in 1917 in Russia would not have been possible without the Bolsheviks fighting for the right to self-determination for oppressed national groups. There were significant gains for both women and LGBTQ+ people in Russia in the first years following the revolution, which were later rolled back and crushed by the brutal Stalinist regime. These included introducing the legal right to divorce, as well as abortion. In fact, it was the first country in the world to do so.
Conditions determine consciousness
Whenever working-class and oppressed people begin to engage in struggle against their conditions, as they have done on a massive scale in the last period, what accompanies this is a search for ideas. Fury at injustice leads people to seek to understand the brutality and violence which millions upon millions suffer daily. Experience of struggle leads people to ask which methods might be most effective. The big questions loom large: why is society so unequal? What is the root cause of the brutality and violence millions experience daily? Can any of this be changed? If so, how?
Within our society, there are many ideas which, in one way or another, address these subjects. As Marxists, we understand that which ideas gain prominence and win support at a given time is not random. Conditions determine consciousness. Or, to put it another way, the economic, social and political climate in which people live will profoundly influence how they tend to see the world and understand their own position within it. Inevitably, therefore, the ideas which have become widespread and prominent among radicalising layers of young people over the last decade or so reflect a number of specific features of this historical period.
The new epoch in history that the economic crash of 2008 opened up was one of revolution and counter-revolution. From the colossal movements in North Africa and the Middle East, to Occupy and the Indignados (anti-austerity occupations of city squares across Southern Europe), to major workers’ struggles and the emergence of new left formations, this has been a time of great ideological churning.
The starting point for this, however, was the deep-going impact of the collapse of Stalinism. This was a seismic event in world history which ushered in a period of huge ideological triumphalism on the part of the capitalist class. Even though Stalinism was never a genuine socialist alternative, and brutally repressed and oppressed people, it still represented a different social system. Its collapse was used by the capitalist class to claim there could be no alternative to their system. In this context, many previously ‘social democratic’ or former workers’ parties shifted rightwards. In Britain, we could see this process represented in Tony Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party. The disorienting impact this had on the consciousness of working class people — along with the disorganisation of workers, both industrial and political—should not be underestimated.
This was the long-term backdrop to the 2008 crash. It meant that the often explosive and sometimes revolutionary movements which followed it were generally not ones in which the working class, through its own democratic organisations, were able to assume leadership. And while a number of trade union struggles did take place, the rotten role of the right-wing leaders meant they were often sold out and defeated within a relatively short time.
All of this created a context in which a related group of ideas which have origins outside of the socialist and/or workers’ movements, with roots instead mainly in liberal or postmodernist academic thought, were able to gain ground among young people eager to fight back against oppression.
Postmodernism is a very broad category of ideas, initially developed by thinkers who (at least at one time) considered themselves to be Marxists. However, postmodernism represents a rejection of the most central of Marx’s ideas. In particular, postmodernist thinkers deny that it is possible to analyse society starting from what Marxists call the ‘economic base’—i.e. the way the economy works, how production is organised, and the role of different classes within that. As a consequence, they also reject so-called ‘grand narratives’—by which they mean ideas, like Marxism, which point towards the way in which existing forces or societal processes, such as that of the class struggle, will tend to push history in a particular direction.
Identity politics is another broad category of ideas, some of which are more or less distinct from one another. But ideas that could be described, in one way or another, as falling under this broad umbrella all have some key things in common. Chiefly, while they centre around questions of oppression or identity, they lack a foundational, class-based analysis of society. In other words, they rest on what we would call postmodernist assumptions.
Ideas which can be described as forms of identity politics can be more or less radical. Liberal feminism is a form of identity politics which is at one end of the spectrum here — not very radical at all! But the ideas which have gained traction among increasingly politicised layers of young and oppressed people in the last period, while still forms of identity politics, at least at a surface level offer a far more radical critique of society as it exists. They are often held alongside a nascent anti-capitalist or socialist consciousness. Those who support them can be among the most combative layers who are eager to struggle.
Intersectionality, privilege theory and Critical Race Theory are all examples of a more or less closely related group of linked approaches which have gained huge support and currency in the last period. In the minds of some individuals, they often intermingle and overlap, while others can view them as more distinct. But, given the context in which they have risen to prominence — the complex conditions which have given rise to this new consciousness around questions of oppression — these are inevitably ideas which reflect many different and some contradictory processes.
On the one hand, ideas such as intersectionality represent radicalisation, especially when they are expressed by a layer of people who are pushed into struggle against different forms of oppression. They reflect a rejection of bourgeois or liberal feminism, which tends to limit itself to formal or legal ‘equality’ or other changes within the current system such as ‘feminising the elite’, while ignoring the limits of this for the vast majority of working class women. This form of ‘girlboss’ feminism also singularly fails to take up the needs of women of colour and those who face other forms of oppression. Part of the attractiveness of ‘intersectionality’ as an idea is the way in which it calls out this form of feminism as potentially offering a veneer of inclusiveness, behind which brutal oppression can hide in plain sight.
What is ‘intersectionality’?
One organisation, the ‘Centre for Intersectional Justice’, defines intersectional theory as “describ[ing] the ways in which systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects”. Meanwhile, the definition provided by Wikipedia (often the first Google entry provided for the search term) is that it is an “analytical framework for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, weight, and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing.”
The set of ideas typically referred to under this name include one concept with which Marxists would wholeheartedly agree. Different oppressions do indeed ‘intersect’. The experience a Black woman has of oppression, for example, cannot be properly understood if blackness and womanhood are treated as separate or exclusive categories. Black women experience both sexism and racism in ways which are often particular and all the more acute — something qualitatively different, not merely cumulative. In fact, this was a concept first explained and elaborated not by liberal academics, but by socialist fighters.
Many of those who would identify themselves as intersectionalists would do so out of rejection of exclusion or marginalisation of trans or non-binary people, as well as people of colour, from the feminist struggle. This is something we as Marxists and socialist feminists also fully reject. However, when intersectionality is used as an overall analytical framework for understanding society (such as in the way the Wikipedia definition summarises), there are some key differences too.
Intersectionality is a framework that analyses oppression primarily from a subjective viewpoint. In this sense, it has a different starting point to that of Marxists. Marxists have a different analysis — a societal, material and historic view of the roots of oppression and how it can be most effectively fought and ended.
As our starting point, we seek to understand and analyse the material basis for oppression. This includes the ways in which it is manifested, how its maintenance benefits the ruling class and why it is important for them to perpetuate it. For example, people of colour in Britain are more likely to face poor and overcrowded housing, job insecurity and food poverty. To change this material reality, we need to link the fight to shift and challenge attitudes with the struggles for material and economic gains, such as the fight for genuinely affordable housing and a £20-an-hour minimum wage. We emphasise the huge potential power held by the multi-racial, multi-gendered working class, whose collective action and ability to withdraw labour can bring society to a halt.
The systemic roots of oppression
The central problem with using intersectionality as an overall framework, in which subjective experience is made primary, is that it fails to properly understand or explain the systemic roots of different forms of oppression. It consequently fails to point towards what is necessary to lay the basis for ending them: the overthrow of the foundationally oppressive capitalist system and its replacement with a socialist society built on solidarity.
Many intersectional thinkers talk about different ‘systems of oppression’. Some also use anti-capitalist language. But capitalism is not properly understood to be the system which ultimately underpins all forms of oppression. For example, bell hooks, who was a prominent advocate of intersectionality, describes in her work various interlocking systems of oppression. She lists these as “white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and imperialism”. Capitalism is hereby included as being one among a list of different, equally oppressive systems. But its actual role in being at the root of racism or sexism, or as the very basis for imperialist domination, is obscured.
This is mirrored in the way that class is treated by many prominent intersectional thinkers. Often, the word ‘classism’ appears among lists of different forms of oppression—of a piece with sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia and so on. For such thinkers, class is generally understood as being qualitatively equivalent to other forms of (what Marxists would call) special oppression.
This approach makes sense when, rather than seeking to analyse society starting with material conditions as Marxists do, you take as your starting point the subjective experiences of individuals and groups. But its limits come from how it fails to root its analysis in looking at how society is structured, how the production and distribution of goods and services is organised and in whose interests, how oppression is manifested and whom it benefits.
None of this means that understanding subjective experiences of oppression is not important. Marxists do take people’s experiences very seriously. Lenin famously spent as much time as he could listening to factory workers (of all genders) in Russia, trying to absorb and understand the real day-to-day struggles they were facing. He sought to use this understanding to help inform how the Bolsheviks put across their programme, to sharpen and hone it in a way that could make socialist ideas real and tangible to working class people. But if your ability to understand society becomes reduced to seeking to collect and collate individual experiences, instead of being founded upon a ‘big picture’ understanding of how society works at a structural level, only a limited and ultimately ineffective analysis can emerge.
For example, there is nothing which guarantees that a person’s experience of class means that, for them as an individual, class necessarily feels fundamental all of the time. In periods where class struggle has been at a low ebb, the number of people ‘self-identifying’ as working class can sometimes be reduced, for example. There is no rule that says that the number of people who think of themselves as working class and the number who actually are working class—who rely on the sale of labour power in order to live—will be the same.
Why class is primary
For Marxists, class is not fundamentally a question of subjective identity. It is about the actual, objective economic position people occupy in a system built around the exploitation of the majority by a tiny minority. We consider it to be ‘primary’ not because of its weight in the way individuals understand their experiences, but because it is the existence of society based on the exploitation of one class by another which is the structural foundation for all forms of oppression.
Saying this does not in any way mean that the fight against oppression is secondary or subordinate to working-class struggle over economic questions. Nor does it mean that the question of fighting racism, sexism or LGBTQ+phobia is in any way ‘lesser’ for Marxists. As Malcom X correctly said, “you cannot have capitalism without racism”. Indeed, the struggle against capitalism is inextricably connected to the struggle to end all forms of special oppression. Marxists fight for the workers’ movement to play its historic role as the “tribune of the oppressed” as Lenin said—for the struggle against oppression to ultimately become synonymous with the fight for socialism itself.
Without establishing a socialist, classless society, the root cause of oppression will not go away, and therefore, we would never be able to win true liberation. However, this does not mean that a socialist world will automatically get rid of oppression. These attitudes have been entrenched in society for generations. To get rid of them will take a concerted effort, even under a socialist society. This is why genuine Marxists work hard to combat prejudiced, bigoted or reactionary attitudes that stem from the need of the ruling class to maintain their divide-and-rule tactics and make profit.
Unfortunately, the history of organisations which claim to be Marxist is far from perfect on questions of oppression. The ideas that predominate and behaviours that are prevalent within society have an impact within socialist organisations. Where this is the case, it must be challenged internally within the revolutionary party.
Crude distortions of Marxist ideas—particularly those perpetuated by Stalinist organisations all over the world—have also led to a failure by huge numbers of socialist or communist organisations to fight oppression in the way that is necessary. As the Soviet Union degenerated, and with the rise of an ossified and bureaucratic caste in place of genuine workers’ democracy, old ideas about the idealised role of women within the family were rehabilitated under Stalin. Many of the gains made by women in the revolutionary period were rolled back—abortion was made illegal again, for example.
Stalinist organisations around the world often adopted crude politics when it came to questions of oppression. This meant often relegating the question of overcoming it to something which can ‘wait until socialism’. This led to a position which was to in essence tell those who experience sexism, racism, transphobia and other forms of special oppression that ‘nothing can be done’ to fight for liberation before capitalism is overthrown. In its other guise, this Stalinist position often boils down to a crude and dismissive position that taking up anything other than the ‘bread and butter’ economic questions would be a ‘diversion’ or ‘distraction’ from the class struggle. Lenin forcefully took up these ideas more than a hundred years ago, when he took on the wrong ideas of the ‘economists’ (socialists who wanted to solely focus on workplace issues) in the Russian workers movement at the start of the 20th century.
Meanwhile, in other circumstances, Stalinist forces put forward politics that separated the question of fighting oppression from that of fighting for socialism entirely. It was often argued by Stalinism’s ‘theory of stages’, for instance, that national liberation could be won under capitalism before being followed by socialism at some point in the distant future. Given the wide influence of Stalinist ideas within the workers’ movement internationally, these crude approaches have had an extremely negative effect.
The workers’ movement stands or falls based on whether or not the widest possible sections of working class people can be united in struggle. That is why racism, sexism and all forms of bigotry which divide working people are poison to the workers’ movement. Oppression is something which socialists must ferociously fight against. But we must do so on the understanding that it is only the multi-gendered, multi-racial, diverse working class—which includes people of all sexualities, nationalities, and disabilities—which can carry through socialist change, and which is the most effective force for winning major concessions, even under capitalism.
Misdiagnosing the source of oppression
Not understanding how oppression is rooted in capitalism contributes to a misunderstanding of where oppression comes from, and importantly of who (chiefly) perpetuates it today. An example is the school of privilege theory. This theory, which was first formulated by the academic Peggy McIntosh, rests on the assumption of power being distributed throughout society—differentiated primarily at an individual and interpersonal level. While the theory itself has separate origins to the term ‘intersectionality’, the language it uses and many of the ideas it contains are frequently conflated with an ‘intersectional’ approach. For example, the prominent British intersectional feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge writes in her bestselling 2018 book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race: “Racism’s legacy does not exist without purpose. It brings with it not just a disempowerment for those affected by it, but an empowerment for those who are not. That is white privilege.”
Privilege theory supposes that anyone who does not experience a particular form of oppression gains privilege as a result. A term commonly used to describe extreme wealth or great power is thus made applicable, in one way or another, to the vast majority of ordinary people. This can lend itself to the creation of a kind of reverse hierarchy, in which the question of who is the most oppressed is often divisively linked to whose voices ought to be heard or prioritised, and whose should not. Damagingly, this theory also implies that anyone who does not experience a particular form of oppression benefits (via their consequent ‘privilege’) from its continuation. Not surprisingly, these kinds of ideas feature prominently in many of the ‘woke capitalist’ corporate training programmes which have been introduced as a way to try and divert the fight against oppression from being a fight against the oppressor ruling class into a way to further divide ordinary people.
Of course, if society is being examined only through the lens of individual experience, without an attempt to understand things at a structural level, this binary notion of privilege and oppression makes some sense. The dominant ideas in any society are always those of the ruling class. The capitalist class benefits materially from the division of working class people along the lines of race, from the super-exploitation of people of colour. It benefits from the unpaid domestic and reproductive labour that is done primarily by women and gender non-conforming people. It is uninterested in the needs of disabled people and sees all those deemed by the market to be ‘unproductive’ as a burden on society. It fears the challenge that LGBTQ+ people pose to the idealised family structures it relies on.
All this means that the dissemination of oppressive ideas throughout society is beneficial to capitalism. It helps to create individual privilege unheard of in history, with obscene wealth concentrated in the hands of a tiny few. But it means that working class people do not, in an ultimate sense, benefit from oppression. This is not to crudely assert that all working class people suffer equally, nor to diminish the immense toll special oppression exacts on those who are subject to it.
Working class people who are one or all of white, male, straight, able bodied, cisgender etc, do of course enjoy some often really big comparative advantages which stretch across many aspects of life. White workers are statistically much less likely to experience police harassment, for instance. When or if they do, it will lack the component of it being based on the colour of their skin. Likewise, although people of all genders can experience catcalling at some stage of their lives, it is something disproportionately directed at women and gender non-conforming people.
But contrary to how privilege theory poses it, it is not, in the end, to the benefit of any section of the working class for these forms of special oppression to exist. Our ultimate interests as members of the exploited working class are not served by oppression and division. Where deep-seated prejudices or divisions exist, these are used by the ruling class to increase the exploitation of all workers — most deeply those who are most discriminated against, but also to some degree the working class as a whole. For example, the super-exploitation of migrant workers is used to pay them an appalling pittance, whip up racist divisions, and to push down wages for workers of all backgrounds more widely.
This, of course, does not immunise working people (whatever their background) from absorbing prejudiced ideas. At the extreme end, some of the most backwards and reactionary layers of the working class can actively support racism. They can perpetrate violence against women. They can support discrimination against national minorities, LGBTQ+ or disabled people. The same goes to the influence of the ideas perpetrated by the likes of Andrew Tate and co, as well as ‘incel’ culture, that have been influencing working class men’s—and even more worryingly, young boys—attitudes towards women.
Indeed, the influence of oppressive ideas is even more pervasive than that. No one’s consciousness can fail to be affected by the unequal and oppressive society into which we are all born and raised. There has been much focus recently on the subtler ways in which those who consider themselves ‘non-racist’ can contribute (sometimes unconsciously) to creating an atmosphere in which people of colour are undermined or ‘othered’, for example.
Challenging the backwards ideas or behaviour of individuals is absolutely necessary. In the revolutionary party especially, we strive to continually educate all members about special oppression and fight to establish the highest standards of behaviour possible. But we also understand that the task of dismantling oppression goes way beyond encouraging individuals to change their attitudes. A focus on the ways in which individuals of all classes are affected by oppressive ideas, if it becomes untethered from a clear analysis of who those ideas serve and where they originate, can lead people to draw deeply pessimistic conclusions about the possibility of unity and solidarity. Worse than that, it can lead people away from building the kind of struggle necessary to win real change.
What kind of struggle is needed?
If you assume that most working class people have an interest in the continuation of oppression, building the kind of broad-based social movements that have historically led to substantial steps forward starts to look impossible. This can shift the focus of activists away from fighting for radical societal change, and towards more piecemeal ‘harm reduction’. It can lead people to draw the conclusion that the solidarity shown by other sections of the working class towards movements of the oppressed—such as the participation in Black Lives Matter protests of people who do not suffer anti-Black racism—can only ever be cynical ‘virtue signalling’ and can never be sustained. It can encourage white, male, or straight workers to believe that the most important work they must do is internal: that of ruthlessly examining their own role in oppressing others. In short, beyond being politically problematic, this starting point is demobilising and disorienting.
In the midst of mass struggle, such as at the height of the George Floyd Rebellion in the US, these types of ideas are often undermined and pushed into the background. But, especially when movements suffer defeats, they can re-emerge and become more influential again. It is telling, for example, that in the wake of the overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the majority of both the establishment women’s organisations and left-wing reformist groups like Democratic Socialists of America, have developed a strategy focused almost exclusively on harm reduction — on a depoliticised strategy which seeks to provide ‘mutual aid’ to assist individuals to access abortion, but which fails to connect this with the need to build mass struggle that can win abortion rights for all.
This contrasts sharply with the combative, class-struggle based approach which our sister organisation in the US has adopted at this time. We managed to mobilise successfully because people are, in fact, looking for ways to fight back. Whenever we intervene or build in movements such as these, it is clear that these are the kinds of ideas many people are looking for — a way forward that goes beyond small concessions, that exposes the path to true liberation, dignity and equality.
As Marxists, we fight to build the power, confidence and solidarity of working-class and oppressed people everywhere. We support all movements which challenge oppression, and fight within the workers’ movement to bring the power of the organised working class to bear on the situation. We strive to improve and develop our understanding of the experiences of oppressed people, using this to hone and sharpen our demands and deepen our transitional programme for socialism. But we do this always in the context of understanding that it is only the united working class which has the power to transform society and win fundamental victories against any and all forms of oppression. At all turns, we clearly point out that it is only socialist transformation which can remove the material foundation for oppression, opening the door to the liberation of all humanity.
