However, if we have a more dynamic view of CLASS which sees it not so much as a thing, or a “structure,” but rather as SOCIAL RELATIONS then we can begin to conceptualize its relation to gender/race/and sexuality (though, like Jrochkind I’ve also found less analysis of the latter . . . ) much more dynamically, and in much more useful ways for engaging in class struggle today.

I like how EP Thompson puts it in the preface to his book “Making of the English Working Class”:

“By class I understand an historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the *raw material of experience* and in consciousness. I emphasize that it is an historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships.”

If we stop seeing class as an abstract “structure” and start seeing it as a series of relationships which are historically defined, then we can begin to see the more organic and material intersections of race/gender/class . . . black oppression is rooted in historical relationships of chattel slavery, gender oppression is rooted in control over women’s bodies (see Caliban & the Witch by Silvia Fediricci for a dope analysis of the witch hunts in Europe and the relation between them and the “primitive accumulation of capital”. Fediricci was of a similar political milieu as Selma James . . . ) and specifically over control of the reproductive capacities of their bodies . . .

These historical phenomenon are indeed interdependent with the accumulation of capital – they are the concrete, historically defined ways in which capital has accumulated throughout much of the world, and are thereby linked to the ongoing accumulation of capital and as a result the class struggle is inherently racialized and gendered.

http://www.kersplebedeb.com/raceburn.html

This liberal intellectual polarity that “race issues” and “class issues” are opposites, are completely separate from each other, and that one or the must be the main thing, is utterly useless! We have to really get it that race issues aren’t the opposite of class issues. That race is always so electrically charged, so filled with mass power, precisely because it’s about raw class. That’s why revolutionaries and demagogues can both potentially tap into so much power using it. Or get burned.

You can’t steer yourself in real politics, not in amerikkka and not in this global imperialism, without understanding race. “Class” without race in North America is an abstraction. And vice-versa. Those who do not get this are always just led around by the nose, the manipulated without a clue — and it is true that many don’t want any more from life than this. But wising up on race only means seeing all the class issues that define race and charge it with meaning. Why should it be so hard to understand that capitalism, which practically wants to barcode our assholes, has always found it convenient to color-code its classes?

When i started high school way back in the daze, it was up North and in theory there was no segregation. But our city school system had five intellectual levels or “tracks”—from the highest college-prep track to the lowest remedial vocational ed track. In a high school that was 85% Black, the top college-prep track never had more than one or two New Afrikans. In fact, those classes would literally close for Jewish holidays. When we started high school all of us non-white types were automatically assigned to the bottom two tracks, which we could only rise out of by “achievement”. Those two “colored” tracks (although there were a few hillbillies in them, too) were non-academic, which meant that after four years of attendance you “graduated” high school—but instead of a diploma you only got a paper “certificate of satisfactory attendance”. This was real good for getting you your slave job as a porter or at the garment factory — my first full-time job, the summer i was 14 — but in fact you couldn’t qualify for college with it even if you had somehow managed to get literate.

So college education and middle-class careers just “accidentally” happened to be legally forbidden to most New Afrikans in our city. Everyone knew this who wanted to, it was just a fact of life. So much so that when i started working for the neighborhood gang council (some small gangs, but mostly the big vice-lords and cobras and d’s) as a nerdy ten year-old, the leader said that they wanted me to go on to graduate from high school since none of the rest of them would (obviously, even then Asians were designated to finish school). Of course, now neo-colonial capitalism has had to get much slicker and share some loot, create neo-colonial bourgy classes.

But, okay, let’s look at the gender/class thing, which is more straightforward.

The argument is that, yes, class is an essential part of capitalism. But I assume we all pretty much agree that ‘gender’ as experienced is socially constructed, right? (As, obviously classes are). The argument is that the category of ‘gender’ is a class category. It’s a category of people who have a specific ‘relationship to the means of production’, a specific economic role. “Housework” is a productive economic role, and it’s one assigned to women. Women as a category have a certain relationship to ‘the means of production’, that makes the category of ‘women’ a class.

Of course this changes somewhat in the 20th century,and even more so in the past 30 years or so. It’s more clear historically. (And a very analagous argument, down to this last part, can be made for race).

So, what other writings go into this? I’ll have to look through my notes and books and get some good cites. But the James essay cited in the original essay in this post touches upon it, so I’ll quote from it since it’s what I have at hand, although I’ve seen it explained more clearly elsewhere and don’t agree with everything in the James essay.

The Black movement in the U.S. (and elsewhere) also began by adopting what appeared to be only a caste position in opposition to the racism of white male-dominated groups. Intellectuals in Harlem and Malcolm X, that great revolutionary, were both nationalists, both appeared to place colour above class when the white Left were still chanting variations of “Black and white unite and fight,” or “Negroes and Labour must join together.” The Black working class were able through this nationalism to redefine class: overwhelmingly Black and Labour were synonymous (with no other group was Labour as synonymous-except perhaps with women), the demands of Blacks and the forms of struggle created by Blacks were the most comprehensive working class struggle . . . (p. 8)
It is not then that the Black movement “wandered off into the class struggle,” as Avis says. It was the class struggle and this took a while to sink into our consciousness.

[...]
Here is the “strange place” where we found the key to the relation of class to caste written down most succinctly. Here is where the international division of labour is posed as power relationships within the working class. It is Volume I of Marx’s Capital.

“Manufacture . . . develops a hierarchy of labour powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages. If, on the one hand, the individual labourers are appropriated and annexed for life by a limited function; on the other hand, the various operations of the hierarchy are parceled out among the labourers according to both their natural and their acquired capabilities.” (Moscow 1958, p. 349)

In two sentences is laid out the deep material connection between racism, sexism, national chauvinism and the chauvinism of the generations who are working for wages against children and old age pensioners who are wageless, who are dependents.

A hierarchy of labour powers and scale of wages to correspond. Racism and sexism training us to develop and acquire certain capabilities at the expense of all others. Then these acquired capabilities are taken to be our nature and fix our functions for life, and fix also the quality of our mutual relations. So planting cane or tea is not a job for white people and changing nappies is not a job for men and beating children is not violence. Race, sex, age, nation, each an indispensable element of the international division of labour. Our feminism bases itself on a hitherto invisible stratum of the hierarchy of labour powers-the housewife-to which there corresponds no wage at all.

…The social power relations of the sexes, races, nations and generations are precisely, then, particularized forms of class relations…. But housewives, Blacks, young people, workers from the Third World, excluded from the definition of class, have been told that their confrontation with the white male power structure in the metropolis is an “exotic historical accident.”

“The arguments I’m persuaded by, that the James essay approaches but others I think have been even more persuasive on, is that race and gender essentially ARE class.”

Can you tease this theory out a little more? I don’t really know much about the line of thought you’re referencing and it would help me to hear some concrete examples, especially in reference to the LGBTQ community, which I think is a little bit harder to tie to class than say the oppression/exploitation of black people in the U.S.

Also, class is an inherent structural feature of capitalism. To say that gender IS class, on the surface appears to be a bit of a stretch. At least when compared to a more modest supposition like gender or race being used to reinforce and maintain class position.

But I’m more persuaded by similar arguments about race and gender. I’m curious what you think of such arguments.

The arguments I’m persuaded by, that the James essay approaches but others I think have been even more persuasive on, is that race and gender essentially ARE class. So from that perspective, it’s not “intersectionality” exactly, nor is it saying that “the party needs a certain kind of consciousness”. It’s saying that the class structure of our society uses race and gender as differences to actually create classes.

Reading arguments on that sort of thing (by marxists, communists and maoists) is what originally kind of made communist analysis “click” to me, I saw how powerful an explanatory tool it was, and how understanding race and gender as oppressed classes with a material basis, not just as difference oppressed by psychological prejudice, explained a lot and grounded one in a radical place. So I remain curious why this line of reasoning seems to be so unpopular among the kasama crowd. (I was never curious why it was generally unpopular among dogmatic sectarian communists, that was self-evident).

The fundamental problem with this piece is that it really doesn’t actually demonstrate its fundamental point – that the radical struggle of the LGBTQI movement is a part of the class struggle. That may in fact be the case, but this whole piece is a big fail in terms of trying to show that.

So if one were to ask me if Queer Liberation were “antagonistic” toward the mode of production called capitalism, I couldn’t say it is. More or less, I don’t believe in fact it is in an abstracted sense. There is no reason to think that despite the contradictions of the social-political kind (regarding the State and the organization and reproduction of productive relation), that capital couldn’t manifest itself in such a way as to reorganize based upon reconfigurations of relationships of kinship, gender, and identity.

There is serious reason to think that WON’T happen, that capitalism can’t provide basis for queer liberation, but those reasons to think that are in fundamental distinction than those provided in this piece. Those reasons have a fundamentally different orientation in understanding how revolution can be made, and how history develops.

Unfortunately the tale provided in this piece resides solely in the oldest and worst historicism in the book – the “worker revolution.” This of course stems from Marx himself (in so much as when spoke politically, he spoke in the context of the ongoing capitalist transformation of Western and Central Europe) and various “workerist” oriented positions from syndicalist and Trotskyist movements. For these movements, “the workers” (those who sell labor power and are exploited) become the revolutionary subject, and only their emancipation can make possible a different social system from capitalism. Within this understanding, I will say, that the proletariat finds identity within the actualized position of the “worker.”

More or less I find this position certainly to be a class reductionist position that is based upon a dogmatic or unbending class analysis stuck within the early period of capitalism – it is completely insufficient to provide a look at LGBTQI movement, Queer Theory, and the question of liberation within it all.

I think we should stand against a position that merely thinks that Marxism needs an injection of queer consciousness (or race, or gender for that matter), but look to see how system(s) of oppression play upon each other and overdetermine their character. In other words, the concept of intersectionality still has promise at least as a flag for reconception of the wheel.

For a different position, I’d recommend reading what appears on the Freedom Road website by Malik Guevera about Intersectionality

http://freedomroad.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=189%3Aintersections-organizing-all-the-oppressed-to-end-all-our-oppressions&catid=181%3Aintersecting-oppressions&Itemid=234&lang=en

I don’t think it is final word on the matter, but gives a rather more nuanced and daring attempt of overcoming the blindspots within a general “Marxist” framework.

The essay makes a case that sexuality/queerness is such.

It is less persuasive to me than the cases I’ve read that both gender and race are such, by arguing that gender and race are in fact markers of class, signifiers of assigned material economic roles (not merely oppression of difference due to subjective prejudice). But I know the arguments for race and gender being ‘genuinely antagonistic’ are not well receievd by most of you anyhow. I find James’s “Sex, Race and Class” more reasonable and persuasive than apparently the folks here do.