4/12 The crisis and intersecting identities, national and sexual : Peter Drucker

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SUMMARY

The simultaneous crises of capitalism, the labour movement and the socialist alternative
have produced a turn towards non-class, particularly national/ethnic and sexual identities.
The feminist concept of "intersectionality" can help us understand how these different identities
overlap, interact and clash, how their reactionary aspects can be combated,
and how different liberation struggles can dovetail with the struggle against capitalism.

OUTLINE

Introduction

Introducing the reporter: his national, ethnic and sexual identities
Place of the report in the session: closely linked to earlier reports
(crisis, working class, migration, women) and
later reports (social movements) — and the missing report on religion!
Central question: relationship between class-consciousness and other identities
(Multiple) crises and people’s impulse to take refuge in (pre-existing) identities;
forms of resistance and forms of reaction
Central principles: self-organization and self-emancipation
Motto of the report: citation from Lenin
Difficulties of the report: enormous diversity of religious, ethnic and sexual identities
Objective analysis and lived experience, collective and individual: for the discussion
Three interlinked parts: intersectionality; nationalism/ethnicity; sexuality

Part one.Intersectionality

Conceptual tool developed by feminists of colour
Oppressions are not additive
Brenner’s Marxist adaptation: capitalist restructuring and relative privilege
Towards an inclusive, working-class, internationalist movement (of movements)
Autonomy and unity: a dialectical relationship

Part two. Nations and ethnicity

What’s at stake politically

National liberation and socialist revolution in the 20th century:
Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua
Contemporary national struggles: Kashmir, Mindanao…
… and workers’ movements fragmented by national conflict

Nationalism and internationalism: a contradiction of capitalism

Capitalist classes need national markets and a national state
At the same time, capital needs to expand beyond national markets
Limits of Marx and Engels’ understanding in the Communist Manifesto

Rules of thumb for our positions on national conflicts

Abstract internationalism is not enough
Oppressor nations and oppressed nations
The right of self-determination — even for ethnic groups that are not ‘nations’

Globalization, nationalism and crisis

Partial and dependent integration of the periphery into globalized capitalism — and into its crisis

Indigenous struggles: sovereignty and autonomy

In Latin America: from the Comintern (Mariateguí) to Nicaragua and 1992
Chiapas: Mexican sovereignty and indigenous autonomy — and Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru?

Armed globalization, ‘war on terror’ and the Arab world

Nationalism, fundamentalism and Islamophobia
Muslim immigrants in Europe — a national question at the heart of European working classes

National identity, religion, gender and sexuality

Abortion, homosexuality and Catholicism
Imperialism: champion of women and LGBTs?
Intersecting oppressions: the explosive issue of the Islamic headscarf

Internationalism and identities:

Towards a new internationalist culture

Part three. LGBT sexuality and identities

The rise of LGBT movements in imperialist countries

Massive scale of mobilizations
Recent right wing and Islamophobic tendencies (Netherlands, Denmark)

LGBT liberation: a global struggle

Universality of oppression
Imperialism and homophobia
Transgender and bisexuality (MSMs)
LGBT people in the crisis
The Arab world: a special case (similarities and differences in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia)
Beyond gay and straight?
Imperialism and repression: Egypt and Iraq
Hybrid identities, combined struggles: Lebanon and Palestine

LGBT immigrants

Heteronormativity, homonormativity and tolerance
What’s at stake: unity against an oppressive system in crisis

Conclusion

The workers’ party as a tribune of all the oppressed


READING MATERIALS

Lenin Discussion on self-determination

Lenin Collected Works Volume 22,

The discussion on self-determination summed up pp.355-356

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will he a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”. Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

Johanna Brenner on intersectionality

  • From: Women and the Politics of Class

Johanna Brenner, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000
Conclusion: Intersections, Locations, and Capitalist Class Relations:

Intersectionality from a Marxist Perspective

In feminist theory ‘intersectionality’ has emerged as an analytic strategy
to address the interrelation of multiple, crosscutting institutionalized power relations defined by
race, class, gender, and sexuality (and other axes of domination).
[…] If feminism is to become a powerful movement again, working-class women will have
to organize across the divides of race/ethnicity and sexuality.
Therefore, it is of political importance to understand how class locations,
in intersection with race/ethnicity and sexuality, shape women’s survival projects [….]

Class Locations and Intersections

Intersectional analysis, developed primarily by feminist women-of-color scholars and writers,
demonstrates that race and gender oppressions do not build on each other in any simple additive way.
White feminists’ failure to understand this has contributed significantly
to missed opportunities for building an inclusive feminist movement. […]
Class locations are difficult to define
[….] Defining class locations becomes especially fraught for intersectional analysis,
because in most instances we are not comparing those who own capital with those who do not,
but are trying rather to understand relations of power
and relative privilege among those who do wage and salaried work. […]

Capitalist Class Power and the Politics of Resistance

The civil rights and feminist movements combined revolutionary and reformist aims,
their radical wings seeking to redistribute economic and political power.
Though falling far short of this goal, the movements did dismantle
the old gender and racial orders and opened the field for other movements against oppression
(for example, gay/lesbian rights, disability rights).
They have made it possible for a new left challenge, when it develops,
to be far more self-consciously and powerfully
anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-heterosexist than any that has gone before.
On the other hand, by almost any measure, neither racial oppression nor male domination
has disappeared from the scene.
They have, however, been fundamentally reorganized.
Both operate, now, not through an explicit, legally and culturally authorized system of exclusion,
but through a process of incorporation that systemically reproduces disadvantage. […]
To understand […] both the gains and impasses of the civil rights and women’s movements,
their ability to challenge so thoroughly and to change ways of thinking about race and gender
and their inability to sustain this challenge,
it is helpful to put them in the context of the periods of capitalist economic transformation.
The economic changes that were already reshaping
the political landscape in the 1970 and 1980 accelerated in the 1990s:
the expansion of markets and production, the increase in labor migration both within and
across national borders, the flexibility and mobility of investment/production,
the penetration of global firms into the U .S. economy not only in goods but in services,
the increasing freeing of global firms from control and regulation by national states.
The capitalist restructuring that first undermined the conditions of blue-collar workers
in core manufacturing industries now threatens security and stability of jobs
in many sectors - from middle managers and supervisors to production workers.
At the core of these changes are not simply globalization but capital’s increasing
flexibility, mobility, and concentrated power, as well as the intensity of capitalist competition
and the employers’ drive to squeeze ever more out of the workforce.
[…] As in the significant periods of capitalist restructuring that preceded this one,
the institutions of working-class political and economic defense that had been built up
under the old paradigm and that might have worked (although not all that well)
previously are now utterly unable to respond to new conditions.
Until some alternatives develop, the political hegemony of the modernizing right can be expected to remain in place.