The ideology of intersectionality: Historical materialist observations

Abstract

In this article, I argue that intersectionality, in addition to being a widely used social science analytical framework, fulfills important ideological functions in the context of capitalist social formations. It reinforces the turn toward identity politics and theorizing, thus strengthening the use of identity categories of analysis as proxies for class and, consequently, the racial, gender, ethnic, and other divisions that weaken the working class and undermine the possibility of the emergence of working class solidarity.

Introduction

Like its predecessor, the Race, Sex (later changed to Gender) & Class trilogy, intersectionality is an exceedingly popular category of analysis in the United States and elsewhere. An Amazon search for titles with Race, Gender & Class, or Intersectionality, yields over 1000 results for each one. Widely used in the feminist literature and within the social sciences (e.g. Sociology, Human Geography, and Anthropology), it is generally considered “one of the more important interventions in feminist theory” (Carbin and Edenhelm, 2013: 233–234, cited in Gimenez, 2018: 95).

In this article, I will argue that, from the standpoint of historical materialism, like most social science categories of analysis, intersectionality has ideological effects that strengthen the power of capital over the working class. Intersectionality, an analytical framework focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics which presumably coalesce in “intersectional identities,” reinforces the individualism inherent in U.S. culture and political discourse which excludes any understanding of capitalism and its effects on the material conditions affecting individuals. In doing so, it unwittingly contributes to the persistence of identity politics in the U.S.

What is intersectionality?

For an excellent introduction to intersectionality, see Collins and Bilge (2016). This widely used framework is the logical outcome of critiques aimed at early theories about the oppression of women, on the grounds they universalized the experience of middle class white women and ignored the experiences of non-white and working class women (Lutz et al., 2011: 3). The first alternative to such theories was the race, gender and class perspective, gender usually meaning women at the time.

Several metaphors were used to describe the nature of their conjuncture: foe example, interplay, interrelation, intersection, interlocking, among others. Eventually, intersection became the metaphor of choice. In time, the number of oppressive intersecting relations grew to include the effects of all forms and sources of inequality and oppression, such as class (usually reduced “classism” or to income differences), systemic gender, racial and ethnic inequality, and status differences between individuals and groups based on, for example, sexuality, ability, religion, national origin, ancestry, and immigrant status.

Unlike feminist theory, focused on the oppression of women by men, intersectionality focuses on inequality as a generalized phenomenon, the result of many interacting factors affecting all members of the society: “When it comes to social inequality, people's lives and the organization of power in a given society are better understood as being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race, or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other” (Collins and Bilge, 2016: 2). Echoing this description of stratified societies, Yuval-Davies argues that “Intersectional analysis should encompass all members of society and thus intersectionality should be seen as the right theoretical framework for analyzing social stratification.” (Yuval-Davis, 2011: 159, cited in Gimenez, 2018: 102).

It is a sociological truism that the lives of all members of stratified societies are shaped by their location in the social stratification system. Collins and Yuval-Davies, who argue that intersectionality and intersectional analysis exclude no one, restate this sociological insight that identifies intersectionality not as a feminist theory but as a social science analytical framework.

The social sciences versus historical materialism: The social context of intersectionality

The social sciences developed as an antithesis to historical materialism. Social scientists dismissed or ignored the pivotal role of the capitalist mode of production and of class struggles upon the economic, political, social, and cultural processes of capitalist social formations, and upon the quality of life of the working classes. It was during the 1930s, a period of intense class struggles in the U.S., characterized by “mass unemployment, ferocious resistance to trade unions from employers… martial law… police and military interventions to break strikes… that Talcott Parsons formulated his sociology of value integration … the sociological experience of the 1930s led to the virtual disappearance of the concept of class struggle from sociological language … the concept of class was submerged under ‘stratification’… The 1930 edition of The Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences had entries for Class, Class Consciousness and Class Struggle but no entry for Stratification.” (Therborn, 1976: 421–422). There were no entries for Class or Class Struggle in the 1968 edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Therborn, 1976: 422).

Generations of academics learned stereotypes about Marx and Marxism and “order” models of “society” which, eventually, were challenged in the 1960s by “conflict” models of society and the rise of interest in Marx and Marxist theory. The Cold War, the McCarthy era and decline in unionization, among many other factors, contributed, in the U.S., to the near eradication of class (in the Marxist sense), class struggles and class consciousness from social science thinking, acceptable political discourse and everyday understanding of class relations and the sources of social conflicts and inequality. Instead, common to the social sciences, popular culture, and the media is an image of the U.S. as a “middle class” society, fragmented on the basis of invidious distinctions and prejudices attached to status groups based on gender, race, ethnicity, age, citizenship, ancestry, etc.

This ideological view of the U.S., divided in three groups, the rich, the middle class (everyone above the poverty level) and the poor, has become increasingly untenable in light of the deepening of income inequality since the 1980s. This view, challenged by Marxist social scientists who have written extensively about class and the complexities created by social stratification within classes, has not affected the ideological way in which class is commonly understood in the U.S. This is why, for example, when the media publishes information about the U.S. population, it highlights only or primarily gender, racial or ethnic differences. As Navarro (1989) observed, “the U.S. is the only western developed nation whose government does not collect mortality statistics by class … [but] by age, sex, and race … in the U.S., race is used as a substitute for class.” ¹ Three decades later, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) continues that practice when it reports the higher risks for hospitalization and death caused by COVID-19 among non-white workers in terms of race and ethnicity and states: “Race and ethnicity are risk markers for other underlying conditions that impact health—including socioeconomic status, access to health care and increased exposure to the virus due to occupation (e.g. frontline, essential, and critical infrastructure workers).” ² Race and ethnicity substitute for class, reduced to descriptive categories: occupation and socioeconomic status.

It is in this context that the social science theories and perspectives that developed in the aftermath of the 1960s social movements against sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, etc., can be understood. Intersectionality is no exception.

Intersectionality and ideology

In this section I will argue that some aspects of intersectionality function as ideology in the U.S., that is, they have unintended ideological effects that reflect the social context from which it emerged. Salient features of this context, briefly described above, are the dismissal of class (in the Marxist sense) as a legitimate political and social science category and as part of the average person political discourse; the reduction of class to an identity, to “classism,” or to socioeconomic status; the emphasis on identity and identity politics, and the use of identity categories of analysis (e.g. gender, age, race, and ethnicity) as substitutes or proxies for class.

Avoidance of “class reductionism” underlies the idea, essential to intersectionality, that no oppression is more important or more causally effective than any other: “Oppressions should not be ranked nor should we struggle about which oppression is more fundamental: to theorize these connections [i.e. intersections] it is necessary to support a working hypotheses of equivalency between oppressions.” (Collins, 1997: 74, cited in Gimenez, 2001: 27). However, from the standpoint of historical materialism, class is the fundamental social location that underlies all the forms of economic and social inequality and oppressions that characterize capitalist social formations, where the “hidden injuries” of class are generally understood as the effects of oppression or discrimination.

At the level of analysis of the mode of production, the logic of class relations, exploitation and capital accumulation is indifferent to the identity of capitalists and workers.

At the level of analysis of the U.S. and other capitalist social formations, the proletarianized population is stratified in terms of income, education, and occupational status. It is also stratified in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, age, ancestry, citizenship status, and so on. This is the level of analysis where intersectional analysis finds, at the macrolevel of analysis, the “axes of oppression” and, at the microlevel of analysis, individuals with intersectional identities.

Historical materialism does not deny the reality of oppressions nor seeks to “reduce” them to class exploitation; it views the fragmentation of the working class into aggregates that differ in socioeconomic status and oppressed aggregates as a historical result of capitalist practices, past and present, intended to maximize surplus extraction fueling competition manipulating the gender, racial, ethnic and other divisions within the working class, enslaving, racializing and denigrating people of color and immigrants from despised national origins, stereotyping women, and so on. This is why “it is the capitalist mode of production and the social relations underlying it which provide the key to understanding why gender, race and other identity markers evolve into oppressions … identity categories are activated as mechanisms to facilitate exploitation.” (Aguilar, 2015: 211–212).

The ideological effect of intersectionality's notion of equivalency between class and other oppressions is to reinforce the exclusion of class (in the Marxist sense) from academic, media and political discourses which have considerable influence in shaping the public's understanding of American society. Most people's notion of class is about income and or ‘life style.” The emphasis on oppression as the cause of the problems of identity based individuals and groups obscures the shared, collective nature of the effects of the balance of power between capital and labor upon large sectors of the working class, such as, for example, unending economic insecurity, unsafe and toxic working conditions, sudden layoffs and downward mobility, and a difficult and precarious old age. There are also the emotional, psychological and health effects of poverty, near poverty and economic uncertainty, such as hunger, homelessness (these days obscured, respectively, by the euphemisms “food insecurity” and the “unhoused”), stress, lack of healthcare, higher incidence of chronic illnesses, and higher mortality rates (see, for example, Cherlin, 2014 and Case and Deaton, 2015).

It must be kept in mind that the “working class is a majority not only within the total population, but also within the particular populations of the various ‘non-class categories” (Wallis, 2015: 618). The working class includes women, white and non-white, and men, white and non-white. This may seem a trivial observation but it is intended to point out that the effects of class relations affect not only the segments of the population usually singled out as oppressed, that is, female and non-white, but white males as well. The overall situation of the working class has deteriorated in the last 50 years: “Since the 1970s … wages have stagnated for many: adjusted for inflation, the median male worker earns less now than he did in 1970. On the other side … C.E.O.s at the largest companies now make 270 times as much as the average worker, up from 27 times as much in 1980” (Paul Krugman, “For whom the Economy Grows, The New York Times, August 30, 2018). This is a process that affects not only working women and workers of color but also white male workers whose plight, in comparison to the volume of scholarship and media accounts about what afflicts women, children, the elderly, and ethnic and racial minorities, is relatively unnoticed.

From the standpoint of historical materialism, in reducing class to a form of oppression and postulating equivalency among all oppressions, intersectionality fulfills ideological functions similar to that of using race, ethnicity or other identity categories, while ignoring class or reducing it to socioeconomic status, in health and other statistics gathered for scholarly, policy making or public consumption. It strengthens the belief, dominant in the U.S., that only the disproportionately disadvantaged, that is, women, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, children, single mothers, the poor, the disabled, the homeless, can benefit from public and private sources of assistance. This ideological belief about the identity of the disadvantaged calls attention away from (1) their class location (the lower layers of the working class); (2) the fact that their plight is not exclusively caused by their identity but reflects their class location; (3) the fact that identity groups are divided by class and stratified on the basis of income, occupation and education, a fact lost in gender, racial, ethnic, and other stereotypes; (4) the fact that because whites are 75% of the population, the total disadvantaged population (the poor, near poor, unemployed, underemployed, laid off, etc.) contains a substantial proportion of white men and women whose problems and needs are relatively unacknowledged. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2021, whites, including Latino or Hispanic ancestry whites comprised 75% of the population; excluding them, whites comprise 59% of the population (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045221).

Just as poverty and other forms of economic and social disadvantage are coded female and non-white, being economically better off is coded white and male. As observers have pointed out, it is in the context of the relative invisibility of the problems and needs of the white working class, male and female, that the rise of white identity—which reinforces identity as the terrain of political discourse—and the deepening of conflicts among population aggregates sharing the same class location can be understood. For example, federal civil rights legislation, which protects people against discrimination in employment, education, and access to home ownership, while exceedingly important, was conceived taking into account the problems facing the “disproportionately disadvantaged”; that is, women and members of racial and ethnic minorities. But, as indicated earlier, a focus on discrimination and identity overlooks, as indicated above, the common economic basis of problems facing “majority” and “minority” populations as well as the class differences within those groups. Perhaps the recent Supreme Court decision that put an end to Affirmative Action will contribute to the reemergence of class, not in the Marxist sense but reduced to income, as the criteria to further diversity used by educational and other organizations. Were this turn to “class” occur, it would support the argument put forth in this article that race, ethnicity, gender, and other forms of “difference,” were used as proxies for class difference.

Another aspect of intersectionality with important ideological effects is the notion of intersectional identities; that is, “everyone has a race/gender/class specific identity” (Collins, 1993: 28, cited in Gimenez, 2018). An isomorphic relation between structural location and identity presupposes the kind of structural determinism that feminists and social scientists usually impute to Marx and Marxism. Structural location, however, though it shapes people's experiences and opportunities, “does not necessarily entail awareness of being thus located or the automatic development of identities presumably corresponding to those locations” (Gimenez, 2001: 27). It cannot be assumed that everyone, self-consciously, has a class, racial, gender, ethnic, or “intersectional” identity.

In all social formations, the prevalent identities are the effect of processes of ideological reproduction of labor power and the relations of production (Althusser, 2014: 234–237); in the context of capitalist social formations, the fundamental capital-labor relation underlies a complex social hierarchy based on the division of labor and the racialization and ethnicization of occupational categories (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991: 83). Identities, intersectional or otherwise, do not emerge automatically structural locations or “intersection”: they are taught and learned through “ideological state apparatuses” such as the family, the church, the educational system, the media, etc.

Just as the women's movement taught women to think about themselves in terms of women, a category of analysis that abstracts from their class and other locations, intersectionality has successfully taught that everyone has intersectional identities and experiences. According to Crenshaw, for example, the purpose of descriptions of how intersectionality may affect the lives of women in different contexts is “to introduce a language for people to attach to their own experience” (Crenshaw, 2014, cited in Gimenez, 2018: 104). This language may be introduced by researchers, policy makers, activists and, last but not least, taught by college professors, education being one of the ideological state apparatuses through which the capitalist system is reproduced, and by the mass media (Althusser, 1971: 83). Identity is a relational phenomenon, taught in the family and schools, imposed by the State, imputed by others which, depending on the historical context, it may or may not be accepted by those thus labeled. Non-European foreigners arriving in the U.S. have to learn about the various identities others will impute to them, about the racialization of their national origin, or the expectations that because of the way the look or their ancestry, they may have the same experiences as U.S. citizens who, apparently and in American eyes, are just like them.

In the U.S., the scholarly and political emphasis on identity has erased the difference and the psychological space between social role and personal identity. Ideologically, the conflation between social role and identity, between having to play multiple and often oppressive roles and the notion of having an intersectional identity, makes it harder for individuals to grasp the structural sources of oppression and discrimination which are also the sources of the identities bestowed upon them by those in positions of power, and to construct resistance identities that transcend the boundaries of group identities.

Conclusion

Intersectionality is a uniquely American perspective, in harmony with the social, political, and ideological characteristics of American society, where grievances are acknowledged only if articulated in terms of identity-based oppressions, and the absence of class (in the Marxist sense), from people's self-understanding and political vocabulary, leads to the perception of the effects of class exploitation in terms of systemic oppressions and discrimination.

The Marxist alternative to intersectionality is capitalist social reproduction theory, according to which, struggles against oppression and discrimination and for employment, fair wages, safe neighborhoods, healthcare, housing, safe working conditions, good schools, against police brutality, against environmental racism, and so on, are class struggles for access to the material conditions for the social reproduction of the working class. All persons objectively located in the working class, regardless of socioeconomic status, gender, race/ethnicity, and membership in other oppressed groups, have similar interests; their economic survival and the survival of themselves and their families depends on economic stability, good wages or salaries, good working conditions, access to good housing, education, healthcare, opportunities for advancement. This does not mean that “class is raced, or gendered or ethnicized or … ”; it means that the people who organize struggles for those goals are located in the working class, whatever their gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, ability, etc. may be.

The “making” of the American working class, however, seems to have been indefinitely postponed; the hegemony of identity politics and its elective affinity for social science perspectives that privilege identities, together with the collaboration of the mass media in shaping public views about these matters are likely to last a long time, at least until people start to realize that court victories and legal precedents do not substantially alter their lives.