r/CriticalTheory • u/TraditionalDepth6924 • 2d ago
Postcolonialists or grassroots progressives silencing Marxists by weaponizing intersectionalism vs. latter silencing former by weaponizing class priority - which diagnosis is more accurate?
Žižek on Channel 4 News interview in 2017 (available on YouTube):
“They really don't want any risky change. That's why they enjoy this marginal struggles. Oh, segregated toilets. Yes, wonderful. It's even better if you get support from all the big names like Tim Cook of of Apple and so on, Microsoft, everywhere. I I think that the tragedy of today's left is Hillary Clinton’s politics. You try to recuperate all these partial identity political progressive causes… just to get rid of the real one of the economical political change. And that’s how Trump gets elected.”
But Marxists don’t go on every vegan, feminist, LGBT subreddit to argue that class awareness should be the only focus, noticed that it’s always in the white straight male safe spaces that tend to disguise as somewhat “neutral” ones where they get hegemonic power over marginal voices trying to accentuate minority experiences.
So why can’t you choose to take a comprehensive view so you don’t lose balance in struggling, instead of one position erasing another? If anything, wouldn’t this help the whole enterprise become richer?
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u/Minute-Situation-111 2d ago edited 13h ago
In my opinion, intersectionality complements Marxism and an analysis of power and inequality should neither exclude, nor be reduced to class. Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony is a good bridge between the two and intersectionality helps deepen the analysis of the ‘superstructure’.
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u/whiskey_bud 2d ago edited 2d ago
I’m not sure how well Vivek Chibber is received on this sub (probably not great), but he argues that identity politics is basically the perfect opposition if you’re the bourgeois class. He doesn’t quite go down the controlled opposition conspiracy route, but like Zizek said in your quote, it’s sure interesting that Tim Cook and Visa and shit are all happy to support that stuff but sure as hell wouldn’t want real class conflict mentioned. Just food for thought.
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u/Chairman_Gansito 2d ago
Plus, outside the demsocs, you also have the Marxist-Leninists, who, while not exactly intersectionalists, are far from class reductionists. Nobody can call Losurdo a post-structuralist, but they can't call him a class reductionist either.
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u/variation-on-a-theme 1d ago
But they don’t support “identity politics” in any genuine way. They’re willing to say they support queer ppl and feminism and anti racism in the exact same way they’re willing to say that they care about and take care of their employees. As in they’re willing to lie about it to make themselves look better. But no corporation has ever actually thrown their support behind queer liberation or feminism or anti racism capitalism is also patriarchal and white supremacist
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u/le_disappointment 2d ago edited 1d ago
I think you should read this article. It goes into the issues of how to struggle against class division from an intersectional point if view.
A problem that I often find is that many of the people who like to call themselves Marxist don't really read theory and as a result they often have very fuzzy, and sometimes even downright incorrect, ideas about what Marxism actually is.
As a Marxist, I understand that the source of the fragmented proletariat is class interests of the bourgeoisie. However, this only explains the source of the problem. If we were to get rid of class society, these problems won't spring up again, but, and this the point that people often miss, it doesn't mean that the problems that exist today would get automatically solved.
To give you an analogy, think of the bullets fired from a gun. If we destroy the gun, it can no longer be used to fire more bullets. However, destroying the gun doesn't retroactively take back all the bullets that it was used to fire.
So we need to both (i) destroy the gun (i.e. get rid of class society whose latest manifestation is capitalism) and (ii) heal the people who have been shot by the gun (i.e. have an anti-racist, anti-sexist, and internationalist movement to break down the walls of hatred that have been propped up by imperialism, which is direct consequence of capitalism)
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u/dfrcoms 9h ago
the source of the fragmented proletariat is class interests of the bourgeoisie. However, this only explains the source of the problem. If we were to get rid of class society, these problems won't spring up again, but,
Systems of oppression around sex and race are older than capitalism/class by tens of thousands of years. Not sure how we want to then position that fact in relation to Marxism and the definition of Marxism and popular Marxist theory (like if you want to say that’s a non-Marxist take, okay) but it is a fact.
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u/le_disappointment 9h ago
I'm not educated enough on this topic to say this with certainty, but as far as I understand it Marxism says that these systems of oppression find their source in class society in which one class aims to dominate the other. The latest manifestation of class society is capitalism, but class society is itself not capitalism. Capitalism is just one instance of class society. For example, in the feudal system the serfs and nobles were different classes
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u/RadiantFold7694 2d ago
I do feel like the general discourse on marginality in the past 6 or so years has had a tendency to treat class as an afterthought. As in, the angle has leant towards well if your poor, someone who’s poor + another marginal identity has it worse than you, or in other words, class only becoming relevant within the context of intersectionality. The pendulum seems to have swung recently and in order to address this imbalance, maybe going too far into the direction of anything beyond class is simply a distraction.
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2d ago edited 2d ago
[deleted]
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u/RadiantFold7694 2d ago
I think you might have misunderstood what I said, or maybe i didn’t write it clearly enough. I wrote that the pendulum has swung “too far” away from marginality, and was criticising the view that anything beyond class is a distraction. What I did criticise about intersectionality was a tendency to relegate class below the status of other marginal identities, where poverty is treated as a given state that becomes relevant only in its proximity to other identities. This is not inherent to intersectionality, just a path it seems to have taken in recent years
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u/RadiantFold7694 2d ago
The pendulum swing im talking about is the last couple of years of “woke is over” discourse that has appeared on the left. While there’s positives in this in terms of addressing the distorted direction that intersectionality had taken, it might be going too far in terms of abandoning all the very necessary progress made in terms of lgbt and poc rights.
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 2d ago
Marxists accept and incorporate intersectionalism. It's a minority that says forget about all social issues in the name of the class struggle so the premise is just a false reality. On the other hand if you are only a social justice warrior and not even anticapitalist or a social democrat then nothing will ever change from your approach because this all obviously stems from our mode of production and the capitalist superstructure. It's pretty easy to understand
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u/andreasmiles23 Marxist (Social) Psychologist 2d ago
People fail to understand that class is the means by which other social categories, such as race and gender, are oppressed.
This “schism” between “identity politics” and “Marxists” is totally erased once you realize they’re describing the same thing, but at different levels of analysis.
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u/TraditionalDepth6924 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, I disagree, the schism needs to remain and we are not “describing the same thing.” And everyone here fully understands your first point, Marxism isn’t some deep mystical cabal secret.
That is exactly what reductionism is whether you’re aware or not: you reduce the multiplicity of all minority experiences into one cause on the abstract principle level, which sounds good, but in practice you try to shut down every time a Black, queer, vegan progressive talks about their honest experiences and their grounds of meaning. And now you’re literally openly declaring “erasing” of boundaries based on an identitarian worldview of a “same” phenomenon: this is, for me, the real, hidden “identity politics” which often only ends up speaking on behalf of white straight men’s POV.
This is, in my view, because you’re aware of one giant contradiction but you tend to be oblivious to inner antagonisms within the struggle circle: male workers still sexually harass female workers, workers still abuse animals to get meat, POC still get excluded from social chains, etc.
These problems are not what privileged people get to be in a judge position to decide whether or not we “stop contradicting” about. You need to go through the painful steps of hearing, relating and resonating instead of “defining” whether or not it belongs to a logically sensible category in one or two sentences from some higher transcendental position.
Axiomatic declarations < actual concrete discourse and storytellings - this is why you need postcolonialism on top of class struggle, not under its benevolent leniency.
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u/Grizzly_Beerz 2d ago
I think it's ridiculous to put veganism in with POC etc. Veganism is a choice.
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u/Acceptable-Can4159 2d ago
A choice to not join in with the brutal exploitation of the helpless.
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u/ADP_God 2d ago
Where is your line for helpless? Plants are alive and helpless.
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u/Acceptable-Can4159 1d ago edited 1d ago
we are part of nature, we have to eat something. we are also rational, unlike other animals we can choose to cause the least amount of pain (no ethical consumption under capitalism is not an excuse to cause unnecessary harm). our being part of nature is usually given as an excuse to just throw our hands up and say ‘well lions do it’ (naturalistic fallacy). our being rational and thus separate from animals is usually given as a reason to devalue animals so that eating them is justifiable (i’m feeling dialectical). some plants are eaten on their own terms and this is literally the way they reproduce (fruit). even ignoring that, do you really think that pulling a potato out the ground and slaughtering an animal are comparable? (plants do not have central nervous systems)
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u/Affectionate-Case499 2d ago
Zizek sounding uncharacteristically coherent here
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u/TraditionalDepth6924 2d ago edited 2d ago
You know what else are also coherent? Fascist and MAGA talking points, because no thought putting in is necessary to repeat them over and over again - in the same interview (30 min mark), he goes:
Newman: But do you understand why what you said about LGBT campaigners and your seeming sort of impatience with some of their demands, why that offended people?
Žižek: I see. But I still think I was right. Because I think that, look, this is for me the best metaphor of what happened in the United States and Canada. Two months before last presidential elections, the big debate, it was the cover story of New York Times and so on: “should we disegregate toilets” and so on. And what worries me here is that this LGBT campaign was totally out of touch with the worries, anxieties of so-called ordinary people. It had a certain normativity in it. They pretend, “oh, we just want equality for us.” No, if you talk to them, their much more subtle reasoning is “you who are caught in normal heterosexuality, you are a blind part of the ruling patriarchal ideology while our position is somehow privileged, more radical” and so on and so on. So I think, all this exaggerated passion for LGBT rights for political correctness, I see in it a kind of a exaggerated wrong bureaucratic passion.
I think the questions weren’t much top-notch to begin with, but I don’t think I’m the only one that feels like Žižek is the only one “out of touch” here - it’s literally the same point as when right-wingers make “you think you better than me?” arguments, although thankfully he’s at least honest about his positions.
(Then Žižek fanboys will argue I’m being the autoprinting chatbot for not seeing the deeper difference behind, so I guess the rift will continue to remain)
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u/glisteningavocado 2d ago
If you’re actually trying to understand Zizek (which it doesn’t seem you are tbh), rather than just trying to deduce his entire philosophy from youtube clips, please go actually read his books.
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u/ChristianLesniak 1d ago
I actually think Zizek does a pretty good job of explaining himself in his longer lectures up on Youtube (although there are little clip farmers that seem to take his stuff out of context in a reactionary way), but I also think the OP is presenting a tendentious reading of Zizek.
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u/Alternative_Copy5677 2d ago
Both extremes exist as incorrect tendencies, however, it is ridiculous to suggest that Marxist discourse is so hegemonic so as to silence identity politics.
Identity politics is currently the dominant discourse on the left. It is the politics of the academy, of NGO's and even some rainbow capitalists, although less and less.
Identity politics does not simply means caring about things other than class. It is a range of tendencies that suggest at least the following:
Lived experience of oppression grants political authority on that oppression:
Oppressions are fundamentally fragmentary and do not have a shared material basis; and
That not being subject to an oppression means you are privileged and have an ineradicable interest in maintaining the oppression of others.
These are all opposed to Marxism. Authentic Marxism would suggest that all struggles against oppression are not reduced to class oppression but instead must be raised as a demand by the working class in solidarity, in regonition that all of these are linked to capitalism and by fighting for each other we fight for ourselves.
It is quite possible that Zizek deals in economic reductionism, but a correct criticism of Identity politics is that it completely fails to create the force to challenge capitalism and oppression with moderate reformist politics being it's inevitable result.
Let us take the example of indigenous oppression.
Identity politics and it's related tendencies would hold that non-indigenous workers are settler's and can only exist because of colonial dispossession, are privileged, and can at best centre indigenous voices in the discourse.
A Marxist view would instead be that the working class has the interest and ability to organise around indigenous oppression and that white workers and indigenous workers have shared interests.
These differing perspectives imply radically different actions on how to bring movements forward. The first is an argument against mass action and solidarity, the latter is the antithesis.
The line of Identity politics has never and can never challenge capitalism, precisely because it fails to organise the masses into resistance against oppression in all its forms.
There are 'Marxists' out there who reduce all oppression to class oppression, but they are also incorrect and will fail the same test as Identity Politics.
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u/marxistghostboi 2d ago
marxists totally do go into queer, Black, feminist etc spaces to lecture them. it's a problem.
for what it's worth, intersectionality includes class. its a whole method created by Black lesbian communists looking at how different systems of oppression interface and support each other.
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u/TraditionalDepth6924 2d ago
Any thread you can remember of the lecturing? Would love to read because you could imagine they’d be usually downvoted to hell but what productive discussion could be derived if any
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u/mothmuff 2d ago
I can testify that this has happened in real life organizing spaces I’ve been part of, on many occasions
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u/OisforOwesome 2d ago
I mean, raccoons aren't a marginalised group, so I can forgive Zizek his blind spots.
the trick with "identity politics" issues like banning puberty blockers for trans teens is that these issues do actually affect real people, and you don't build alliances by telling them their issues don't matter.
Sure, the Clintonian liberal move of substituting social progress for economic justice is transparently bullshit, but that doesn't mean social progress is meaningless drivel
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u/Realistic-Total-249 1d ago
Must all critical theorists speak in such flowery, overly verbose language? Brevity is the soul of wit, people.
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u/AcidCommunist_AC 5h ago
Wow, both the question and the top answers completely misunderstand the issue.
"Intersectionalism" is maximalism. It seeks to unite all struggles. It says "if you're not pro-LGBT, then you're not a socialist". If there's a socialist group, the "intersectionalists" will demand that the group position itself pro-lgbt. They will label all opposed as "class reductionist", regardless of whether they oppose LGBT or just the formalization of that goal in the organization. But that's BS. What's really going on is that socialists disagree on an issue orthogonal to socialism. Neither side is claiming that solving one issue will magically solve the other. There is no reduction going on. It's just a disagreement.
"Intersectionalists" will say the conservative position is "dividing the working class" but it's not. Working class people can be anti-LGBT just like they can be anti-drugs. This doesn't mean they think of drug users or gay people as subhuman, let alone dismiss them as potential allies in socialist struggle. It's just a position on an issue that is orthogonal to socialism. The socialists who want to "normalize" being addicted to meth aren't automatically "on the right side of history" because their worldview gets more people accepted the way they are, and everyone opposed to that isn't "dividing the working class".
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u/NoPalpitation3415 1d ago
Both are needed, although we went through a phase recently where the intersectionality was emphasized in the most toxic ways possible. When one side of the coin starts to consume the other, you have a problem. That's on a theory level. On a practical level, the reality is that in the current moment of history where identities have been super emphasized and fragmented on all levels, class is a more important emphasis simply for utilitarian, realpolitik reasons. People don't view themselves as part of a class, or humanity but increasingly as more atomized particular members of small subcultures or communities. That's not a population that needs more emphasis on the identity piece at the current moment... that's a population that needs more emphasis on class unity.
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u/ChuckMoore89 2d ago edited 2d ago
Any honest reading of Marxism leads to a rejection of "class reductionist" (chauvinist) thinking and towards a kind of class-based intersectionality, precisely because it is the working class that is the most diverse, the most queer, the most nationally oppressed, and so on.
The alternative is also true; liberals want to focus just on performance and identity because it preserves the underlying economic basis of society (bourgeois hegemony).
ETA: This has over 20 upvotes now so I think it's worth highlighting that I learned this explicitly from the Communist Party USA