Meditations on the Folly of Intersectionalism
By: Alex Cypher
Tags: Communism, Socialism, Politics, Identity Politics, Intersectionality

One of the central talking points you will hear from advocates of identity politics, or more aptly intersectionalism, from certain corners of the left is the idea that all struggles are equal in that they “intersect” with another and are hence intertwined. The central problem with this, however, is precisely this assumption that all struggles are equal, and this is rooted in the fact that, in every society, struggle manifests itself differently, into different struggles that, by their nature, cannot be equal to each other.

It is often a truism that life comprises of struggle, and it is a truism that I tend to agree with: life, for me, can be viewed broadly as a struggle. However this on its own is rather simplistic. For while indeed life can be seen as struggle, the principle of struggle does not manifest itself monotenously, as but one single, universal, reified activity. Instead it manifests itself in several struggles, each serving to underpin its fundamental reality in different ways, and more crucially each of them possess different characteristics that render them distinct from other struggles. Rather than the intersectionalist way where we might picture a venn diagram of struggle, we might instead picture there being a hierarchy of struggles, with each struggle ordered in its respective place in terms of magnitude and importance. Class struggle, for the socialist, should be very much at the top of this hierarchy when it comes to political praxis and theory, on the grounds that many of the struggles claimed by the intersectionalist are stem from capitalism by manner of having originated from the material base of capitalism, and thus can be collapsed into the realm of class struggle. All other struggles have their own meaning and magnitude, but are not comparable to the class struggle on the grounds of material basis.

As much as I loathe TheFinnishBolshevik for his insufferable and frankly sheepish apologia for Joseph Stalin, he actually did explicate this point somewhat saliently in his video about the debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek, specifically in response to Jordan Peterson’s claim that class struggle is not connected to capitalism on the grounds that humans supposedly struggle in the world simply on the basis of hierarchy as a universal, reified concept:

What does hierarchical struggle even mean? It means absolutely nothing. If I am playing a game of soccer, I’m competing to be the best athlete in my team and I’m competing against the opposing team. That’s hierarchical struggle. But is that the same kind of hierarchical struggle or even in any way comparable to the type of struggle that is class struggle? No. It’s totally apples and oranges, there’s nothing even remotely similar, you can’t compare them. In order for this hierarchical struggle argument to make sense, Peterson would have to demonstrate that this other type of struggle, that is not class struggle, is somehow more primary, but he can’t do that. He tries, sort of, but he really fails. Marxism talks about class struggle because class struggle is primary, and then, in the modern era, a lot of Marxists consider that imperialism is the primary form of class struggle, so we look at that, but we always define what is the primary type of conflict. If I’m playing Quake Live or something, that’s a type of struggle, but that’s not significant, that’s not the primary struggle of my life, that’s not the primary struggle of my existence. Yes, there are all kinds of different hierarchies. There’s hierarchies between me and my friends: some of us are better looking, some of us are smarter, some of us are more articulate. Now, let’s assume that you are black, or a woman, or gay for example, or trans. Well OK, in that circumstance, you will have a significant, different type of hierarchical struggle. OK, so, if you’re black you face real oppression, racism. A Marxist would say that that is tied to class, it’s tied to the capitalist, imperialist, neocolonial system, it’s tied to poverty, and certainly if you’re not poor you can mitigate the racism. It doesn’t really sharply impact you anymore if you are super rich. I would say that’s a different form of class struggle. But, Peterson doesn’t talk about anything like that, as if any kind of hierarchy, or any kind of difference, or any kind of struggle is equally significant, and therefore we shouldn’t talk about class struggle. That’s just crazy! It’s like if my middle school band doesn’t win the middle school band project, then that’s supposedly the same level of struggle or as significant as, like, if I’m a Palestinian child and I have to dodge Israeli bullets. Some struggle just is primary, and some struggle just is entirely secondary and not as meaningful and doesn’t matter. Class struggle is the defining struggle of our whole society, of our whole economic global system. This other type of stuff just isn’t.

The intersectionalist can be compared to Peterson in this way in the sense that, like Peterson, the intersectionalist (and indeed the anarchist as well) assumes that there is an intrinsic equality to all struggles and all hierarchies (and indeed all “hierarchical struggles”), but when you try to break this idea down in a way that relates to normal life and try to compare normal, everyday struggles with much larger ones, indeed the grand dialectical struggle of class, such a view concerning the equality of struggles becomes absurd. On this basis the struggles cannot be equal, they cannot intertwine (or “intersect”), because the material basis for these struggles is either different or fundamentally dependent upon a larger material struggle, and so they cannot, and should not, be held equal to each other as the idpol enthusiast would insist.

Another problem I find with intersectionalism is that, as an Amerocentric political outlook, it bases its outlook on contradictions of capitalism that are especially highlighted, perhaps even exaserbated, in the United States of America, and it lives and breathes as a product of those contradictions, but in such a way that it cannot be a salient antidote to said contradictions. We see this in the way that intersectionalists will often dismiss or attack any framework aiming at eliminating, rather than facilitating, these contradictions in a way that results in a societal unity that surpasses the capitalist conceptions of socially constructed identity after the class struggle.

We see this in a recent video uploaded by BadMouseProductions entitled “Unheard Voices of West Asia and North Africa”. The video was largely centered around bringing to light the plight of Christian minorities within what is termed the WANA region, in itself a laudable subject considering that the right-wing tends to monopolize the subject at the expense of the left. However, for the purposes of this short post, there is one specific argument — and no, I’m not talking about the almost entirely purposeless discussion of CPGB-ML’s article on gender fluidity that introduced the video. About 15 minutes into the video, after crticizing Rojava (which I must admit I did not expect him to do), he chides Western anti-imperialists for defending Muammar Gaddafi from bourgeois lies on the grounds that, according to him, Gaddafi “denied the existence of the Amazigh” (referring of course to the people known to everyone else as Berbers) and “harshly repressed” their national identity. What is this “repression” that BadMouse speaks of? Well there doesn’t seem to be any sources for that claim within his bibliography so we can’t accurately say what he means, but if I had to guess, I think it has something to do with the fact that Gaddafi considered Berbers who were Libyan citizens to be Libyans first and foremost, as he did for everyone else:

You can call yourselves whatever you want inside your homes — Berbers, Children of Satan, whatever — but you are only Libyans when you leave your homes.

Yes apparently deciding that you are a Libyan first . I have heard that there are activists who claim that they faced torture under Gaddafi’s Libya supposedly for speaking up for Berber rights, but I would take any claims concerning Gaddafi with quite a bit of salt, particularly when consider that UN’s own most recent report on Gaddafi’s Libya, which was conducted mere months before Gaddafi was brutally overthrown in a CIA-backed coup (in response to what the New York Times claimed was a violent suppression of unrest), stated that Libya was in large part upholding the civil rights of its people. Not to mention that even on an outlet like Foreign Policy you will find a repudiation of the idea that Gaddafi’s government amounted to brutal dictatorship. And if you ask me it is certainly questionable praxis to parrot what amount to CIA narratives on Libya, let alone with no traceable source, particularly when we know that Berber forces consisted part of the West’s campaign to crush Gaddafi’s Libya. But hey, why am I expecting an intersectionalist to play straight with the truth in most instances?