Class, Gender, Race and Colonization: The 'intersectionality' of Marx

by Kevin B. Anderson

It is important to see both Marx’s brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.

Kindle Edition

Published April 5, 2020

About the author

Kevin B. Anderson is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with courtesy appointments in Feminist Studies and Political Science. He is the author of Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism (1995), Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (with Janet Afary, 2005), and Marx at the Margins (2010/2016). Among his edited volumes are the Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with Peter Hudis, 2004) and the Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell, 2012). He writes regularly for New Politics, The International Marxist-Humanist, and Jacobin on Marxism and on international politics and radical movements in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

Reviews

[Anita · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a nice reflection on Marx's own ideas regarding intersectionality. Unfortunately, if you're getting this pamphlet expecting a quick primer on these concepts without some basic level of knowledge, then it won't do the trick. It's really more of a short academic paper that confirms Marx's interest not only in class but in other social systemic issues. The language used is also quite verbose.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short pamphlet underscoring the depths of (and importance of an intersectional approach to) Marx and his message, which appears to outline the basic arguments of Anderson's larger work Marx at the Margins. Anderson pushes back against common tendencies to portray Marxism as economically reductionist, and euro- and androcentric, drawing on short extracts from the primary sources to portray Marx as an individual much more sensitive to cultural nuances than his critics acknowledge. One particularly pertinent section looks at Marx's sketch of British bourgeoisie's use of immigrant Irish workers to pit the proletariat against one another at a cultural level (a strategy still in use today). As another reviewer has commented, this is not completely entry-level analysis and Anderson assumes the reader has a general grasp of dialectics (or, it would be enough at least to understand what dialectics are), but he does a good job of highlighting the continued relevance of Marxist theory in the present day, albeit in much abridged form compared to his book-length study.