Capitalism And Oppression: Making The Links

by David McNally


One of the most debilitating debates on the Left over the past 15 years or so has revolved around the relationship between identity-based struggles and class struggles. At one extreme have been the class "fundamentalists" for whom all struggles not directly organized around class are of secondary importance. At the other end of the spectrum, people immersed in "identity politics" have generally dismissed class politics as foreign to their concerns with specific issues of oppression based on gender, race, and sexuality in particular. The result has been an often bitter contest between two positions neither of which offers a meaningful perspective for linking anti-capitalist and anti-oppression politics. How then did the Left get caught up in this debate? And how might we move beyond both of these one-sided positions?

Several factors account for the identity versus class debate on the Left, three of which deserve special emphasis. First, the earliest working class movements tended to express the experiences of those who created the first labour and socialist organizations. Since the members of these movements were predominantly working men in Europe and North America, these organizations tended to reflect their experiences of the world. As important as the achievements of these movements were – in building unions, winning the right to strike, and popularizing the ideas of socialism – the more marginalized experiences of working class women, non-European workers, and non-white workers rarely found a place in these movements, their programs and their demands. As a result, many early labour and socialist movements reproduced the very exclusions of women and workers of colour that characterized the society as a whole.

A second factor was the development of rigid, bureaucratic organizations on the Left, often dominated by elite groups of trade union officials and parliamentary representatives. These groups acquired a unique set of privileges and a degree of acceptance into places of power that made them hostile to radical demands coming from feminists, immigrant workers and others. Privileged bureaucrats of the Left often feared that association with those less socially "respectable" than skilled, white, male workers would result in their being ostracized and pushed out of the corridors of power.

In the Europe of the early 20th century, for instance, the leaders of many of the mainstream parties of the parliamentary left supported colonialism, arguing, much to their disgrace, that European domination would "civilize" people of the colonial world. Similarly, these parties tended to reproduce patterns of male domination that characterized the capitalist society around them.

When we look at most trade unions and bureaucratic parties of the Left these days, then, we see groups which have often marginalized, and sometimes denigrated radical struggles by anti-racists, feminists, lesbian and gay liberationists and others.

There is, of course, a third factor in the equation: the ability of capitalism to channel identity-based struggles into a liberal politics of civil rights, one in which the legal entitlements of a specific marginalized group are advanced without a broader challenge to the very structures of capitalist society which breed oppression and exploitation. One result of this tactic is that a small elite from oppressed groups is often elevated to privileged positions as consultants and advisors on "race relations," "equity" and "multiculturalism" while the majority of people in their communities continue to suffer the same oppressions. In the United States, for instance, a few thousand black politicians have been elected to political office since the struggles of the 1960s, yet more African-Americans today live below the poverty line than was the case 40 years ago. The failure of identity politics to address capitalism and class often produces a liberal approach that the system can easily accommodate. Indeed, capital has often proved itself quite adept at pitting one identity group against another – yet more evidence as to why we need a generalized politics of opposition to the system as a whole.

Fortunately, we have some important resources for working our way out of the unhappy polarization between a "class politics" that fails to advance an anti-oppression perspective on issues like sexuality, gender and race, on the one side, and a narrow "identity politics" on the other that refuses to address the class relations of capitalism and the exploitation of labour which sustains it.

To begin with, the radical and revolutionary socialist tradition (as opposed to the bureaucratic one) has seen some important attempts to shape a theory and practice that truly connects anti-capitalism and anti-oppression issues.

The writings of Marx and Engels against British colonialism in Ireland are invaluable in this regard, as are the first Marxist efforts to theorize the oppression of women – Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, August Bebel’s Woman under Socialism, and major works by the German Marxist Clara Zetkin and the Russian Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai.

On issues of sexuality, the German socialist and communist movements between 1910 and 1935 waged some impressive mass campaigns against criminalization of homosexuality, in defence of abortion, and for sexual rights for youth. Some of the most important work in this area involved the Sexual-Politics (or Sex-Pol) movement often associated with the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. The Gay Left of the 1970s took much of this work many steps further, as Rosemary Hennessy has recently pointed out in her book Profit and Pleasure.

Marxist analyses of racism and imperialism have also had a long, if sometimes tortured, history on the Left. Particularly noteworthy are the writings of W.E. B. Dubois on racial oppression in the US, the work of Communists in Harlem and Alabama in the 1930s and ‘40s, the theory and practice of the brilliant Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James, the profound dissections of racism and colonialism by Frantz Fanon, author of The Wretched of the Earth, and Angela Davis’ classic text Women, Race and Class.

This is not to suggest that these works are without imperfections or that they all fit together seamlessly. But radical socialists should not be looking for a dogma. We ought instead to seek out the resources of past struggles in order to build a better anti-capitalist movement today– and the theory and practice described above is rich in resources to that end. However, timid and bureaucratic movements of the Left have usually buried these radical traditions. One of the duties of those who practice the politics of socialism from below is to recover these traditions, extend them, modify them where necessary, and build upon them.

Fortunately, there are some very real prospects for doing this today. The re-emergence of anti-capitalism as a growing current within the global justice movement means that for the first time in many decades it may be possible to create a radical movement that is not dominated by union and parliamentary officials. If we can make anti-oppression issues central to our anti-capitalism from the start, it will be much more difficult for more conservative elements to marginalize these issues later.

One of the ways socialism-from-below activists can help in this regard is by clearly advancing an anti-racist, feminist class politics. This perspective begins from an understanding that class relations in any society are always gendered, racialized and organized in terms of systems of sexual regulation. There are no class relations which are not intimately bound up with systems of racial, sexual and gender domination. The development of an effective anti-capitalist class politics, therefore, can only take place on the basis of directly addressing the issues of racial, sexual and gender oppression that scar the lives of huge numbers of working class people.

In addition, since socialism from below has an internationalist outlook, this means recognizing that the world working class is predominantly non-white. Workers of colour are the majority globally – and this is increasingly true in major North American cities such as Toronto, Los Angeles, and Vancouver. Not surprisingly, some of the most dynamic working class organizations in North America in recent years have been those – like the Justice for Janitors movement and the Bus Riders’ Union in LA – that have creatively woven together anti-racist, feminist and working class demands.

It is this kind of politics, reconnected to the best anti-oppression theory and practice in the Marxist tradition, that offers a meaningful way beyond the stale debate that has too often stymied the Left.

"The re-emergence of anti-capitalism as a growing current within the global justice movement means that for the first time in many decades it may be possible to create a radical movement that is not dominated by union and parliamentary officials. If we can make anti-oppression issues central to our anti-capitalism from the start, it will be much more difficult for more conservative elements to marginalize these issues later."