Beyond Intersectional Political Economy

Adam D. Morton's and my latest article, entitled ‘The Dialectical Matrix of Class, Gender, Race’ published in Environment and Planning F, goes beyond intersectional studies on the themes of class, gender, and race to assert Marxist dialectics in the analysis of capitalist, patriarchal, and racial forms of oppression. Understanding the ways in which these forms are internally related is of utmost importance, considering heightened global tensions within the polycrisis reflected in the conditions characteristic of genocide in Gaza; or the wider global femicide; or the intensifying crisis of global capitalism.

 

Building on a previous article in Environment and Planning A, our more recent article assesses wider contributions within and between Marxism Feminism and Black Marxism to elevate consideration of the structural relationships between gender oppression, racial discrimination, and capitalism.

 

Commencing with commentary on the divergent positions evident within Black Marxist debates and Marxism Feminism on the origins of racism—from W.E.B. Du Bois, to C.L.R. James, to Eric Williams, to Angela Davis, to Cedric Robinson—we reveal shifting emphases on gender and/or race as structurally necessary to capitalist exploitation.

 

We then turn to Cinzia Arruzza who raises the political stakes in the most illuminating fashion by making an important distinction between logical and historical dimensions in the constitution of capitalism. In response to the question as to whether gender or racial oppression is a necessary feature of capitalism, Arruzza argues that ‘sets of social phenomena can be necessary consequences of the logic of capitalist accumulation, even if they are not logical preconditions for it’.

 

We assert dialectics as a specifically Marxist methodological approach to the political economy of difference grounded in the presuppositions and results of primitive accumulation, which assists in extending analysis of the internal relations of capitalist, patriarchal, and racial forms of oppression. In dialogue with those working on similar themes—such as inter alia the feminist dialectics of Melissa Johnston and Sara Meger or the racial capitalism contributions of William Conroy—we aim to move beyond intersectional political economy. With its consideration of many intersecting, interlocking, multilayered institutional structures, intersectional political economy amounts to an additive philosophy of external relations. This means that patriarchy becomes regarded as just one further structure of power sitting alongside other dynamics such as social inequality, or racialised power, as systems of knowledge that intersect. One outcome is what Sırma Bilge has called ‘ornamental intersectionality’, referring to the neutralisation and disarticulation of radical politics, rather than addressing how multiple oppressions become relationally articulated.

 

In contrast to extant literature on the structurally logical priority or historically contingent sequencing of the political economy of gendered and racialised difference, we argue that a return to Marx’s dialectical method on the history of primitive accumulation discloses ways of seeing the matrix of class, gender, and race differently today. Our argument is that the methodological unpacking of primitive accumulation—from Grundrisse to Capital—based on the presuppositions of capital as well as its results in the form of incorporating and renewing patriarchal and racialised oppressive relations enables a focus on the internal relations of the matrix of class, gender, and race. Put differently, gender and race maintain an internal relation within a larger totality of capitalist accumulation.

 

For example, we believe that the way Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe crafts the antecedents in the formation of capitalism as History 1 (the presuppositions posited by capital) and History 2 (the capital encounters with human difference) enforces a dualist opposition. At best, the presuppositions of capital (History 1) and the capital encounters with human difference (History 2) leaves a duality intact, so that both histories are treated in a relation of mutual dependence as external objects. What is missing is a focus on what we would recognise as History 3. For us, citing Marx in Grundrisse, this refers to how capital ‘creates the other in completing itself, and creates itself as the other’. Within this dialectical method of political economy, one category develops into the other as a ‘unity of two aspects’.

 

Appreciating how class power is internally also racialised and gendered thus gets us beyond intersectional political economy or the mystification of a new ‘trinity formula’—as Elena Louisa Lange and Joshua Pickett-Depaolis put it—where class/gender/race are externally related to each other just as capital/land/labour in the social production process were also separated in classical political economy. Intersectional research cannot escape its own abstractions of separating out, externally relating, and reifying the structures of power it seeks to assess. Our conclusion is that the presuppositions of capitalism also propose their own oppositions that are themselves internally related in class, feminist, and Black Radical resistance. Considering the current (global) challenges, it is more important than ever to assert that these are all our struggles.

This post was first published on the Progress in Political Economy blog at Sydney University on 3 December 2024. 

 

Andreas Bieler

Professor of Political Economy

University of Nottingham/UK

Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk

26 December 2024