Book Review: Marxism and Intersectionality: Race,Gender,Class and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism by Ashley J Bohrer

In August 2020, the New York Times Schäbel reported that, a few months prior, the emeritus professor of political science Adolph Reed Jr had been invited to speak to the New York City chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, but that this invitation was later rescinded due to objections by several members of color. Despite Reed being a notable African American scholar, these members insisted that his talk would be ‘reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf’, given Reed’s long-standing insistence that the modern Left focuses too much upon race and not enough upon class, thus undermining multiracial organizing to fight capitalist exploitation. Meanwhile, many socialist groups (especially those, admittedly, comprised predominantly of White members), lambasted ‘identity politics’ as simply another means of dividing the working class, even insisting, in the wake of this controversy, that such a focus upon race had more in common with right-wing reactionary politics than a genuine leftist egalitarianism.

Such an event seems almost perfectly designed to highlight the importance of Ashley J. Bohrer’s book, Marxism and Intersectionality. As she writes in her introduction, ‘Theories and practices of social justice and liberation need to be aware of their own caricatures, of their own worst versions, of the dangers of what they propose and of the vision of the just world they strive for’ (p. 21). Indeed, her book constitutes less an attempt to reconcile the supposedly different worldviews of Marxism and intersectionality and more an exploration of how their own histories and theoretical underpinnings demonstrate shared conceptual roots.

Bohrer opens with a shared history of intersectional and Marxist traditions, highlighting, for example, how those 19th-century Black women thinkers and activists who are often heralded as touchstones of intersectional thinking – figures such as Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth – spoke as much of labor and exploitation as they did race and gender. Likewise have many Marxist thinkers explored how racial and gender divisions ultimately serve the cause of capitalist accumulation. After this background, Bohrer moves into an exploration of the intersectional tradition, emphasizing the debates and disagreements within the tradition itself before moving on to Marxist critiques of intersectionality, including the above-cited dismissal of ‘identity politics’. In contrast to the version of identity politics often ascribed to intersectional thinkers, the author argues that ‘inside the particular historical context of the exclusion and marginalization of women of color from both mainstream theory and political practice, the act of recentering analysis on these groups itself constitutes an intervention into sedimented structures of domination’ (p. 106). Besides, there exist a variety of feminist, queer, anti-racist and anti-imperialist traditions within Marxism itself devoted to the analysis of labor and exploitation from the standpoint of individual and group identity, highlighting ‘the ways in which people become defined by the work they do and that work becomes valued on the basis of who performs it’ (p. 128). Thus do the ‘class reductionist’ critiques of Marxism not reflect the variety of thinking within the larger tradition.

As Bohrer argues, capitalism depends upon such false divisions of the economic and political, of the private and the public, for only with this split can capitalism, as manifest in liberal democracies, ‘insist on enfranchisement and (an always anemic form of) democracy, while insisting that workplace relations should be run through absolute authoritarian hierarchy’ (p. 150). Another one of these divisions, a source of contention between Marxist and intersectional thinkers, is exploitation and oppression. Rather than equating these with each other or arguing for some ‘hierarchy of oppressions’, Bohrer advocates for the ‘equiprimordiality’ of oppression and exploitation, outlining four positions to which any theory seeking to integrate Marxist and intersectional insights much commit, ‘1. Capitalism cannot be reduced to exploitation alone. 2. Capitalism cannot be reduced to class alone. 3. Class cannot be reduced to exploitation alone. 4. Race, gender, sexuality cannot be reduced to oppression alone’ (p. 204). The temptations to conceptualize some super-category under which everything can be subsumed or to emphasize the endless multiplicity of individual identities would prove disastrous, for ‘unilateral valorizations of either difference or sameness are strategies complicit with the production, reproduction, and maintenance of capitalist norms’ (p. 226). Instead, Bohrer argues for a ‘dialectics of difference’ that recognizes that identities are already coalitions while also being contested, and that solidarity requires unity but not uniformity. As she writes,

Solidarity is thus the name for affirming the differences that exploitation and oppression produce within and between us; it is also the name for recognizing that every time I fight against anyone’s oppression or exploitation, I fight against my own, I fight against everyone’s. (p. 259)

Although this book lacks an index, it would nonetheless serve as an excellent teaching tool, as well as a guide to coalitional activism. After all, history is rife with examples of when the larger Left has, through internal division and disagreement, allowed fascism to take hold within a nation, and the year 2020, as of this writing, threatens to offer another prime example, with caricatures of class reductionism and identity politics in the United States sniping at each other even as an already anemic democracy faces imminent doom. Thus is a book like Bohrer’s Marxism and Intersectionality desperately needed at this moment. She expertly cuts through the accumulated caricature and stereotype of both traditions, going back to their roots to demonstrate their shared worlds of concern and tracing their histories to illustrate how these traditions have evolved, through praxis, more closely to each other than some of their respective diehard adherents would care to believe. And likewise, she offers a guide to going forward, one that may well reframe the conversations and debates we will be having in the future.