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Once again, the point here is not to criticise the practices associated with the ’99 per cent’ slogan (and obviously not to propose its adjustment to 75-25, 50-50 per cent or any other ratio). The simple-mindedness of slogans dividing the world into identity groups (whether 99-vs-1 per cent, nationalities or ‘classes’ as hallucinated in cultural terms) is emphasised only because what it occludes is precisely the way contradictory interests cut across all such groupings. Only a dynamic conception of interests – one extending far beyond Graeber’s ‘pursuit of profit’ definition, all the way in fact to his ‘love, spite, pity, torpor’ etc., as mediated by the crudest material need – allows some understanding of the contradictory needs, stakes or exposures intersecting in any subject position and the relations of dependence binding these contradictory elements together.

Nor is attention to interests in any way pessimistic. Graeber is relentlessly hostile to ‘impersonality’, which he finds gestating throughout ‘coin economy’ episodes in world history until it becomes the defining characteristic of ‘capitalist empires’. But he fails to see why the impersonality of interests – and of the classes comprised by them – holds out the only possibility of overcoming intra-class warfare, even as the depth of conflicting dependencies makes the attempt so traumatic. A subject does not belong to its interests in the way a person is imagined (for as long as the superstition holds) to belong to categories of identity: kinship, caste, feudal station, nationality, psychological profile, etc. These latter categories also represent interests with coercive social weight of their own, of course, but once they are recognized as such – or secularized – the spell is broken. An interest bespeaks a relation, a situation, rather than an innate personal attribute. As such it may be contradicted by other relations or interests binding the same subject. And as such, unlike personal properties, it is susceptible to change, repudiation, or, in the language of identity so often superimposed on interests, betrayal.

Repudiation of interests is not a matter of inner conversion but of changing ‘external’ relations, as a consequence of which a subject position composed of interests may change. Again, this is not some outlying Marxist notion. A conception of contingent, interest-bound, internally contradictory subject positions is implied in the Realpolitik practised by the factions administering bits of capital in their dealings with each other and their private discussion of the merely-breathing-and-working class. Identity superstitions are only introduced when the administrators address their inferiors, who are welcome to maul one another in the name of ‘competition’ or ‘community’ but can’t be trusted not to turn a realistic image of contradictory interests into the wrong kind of social explosive.

A collective interest is possible in a way that a collective identity is not, because an interest doesn’t fully account for the bodies involved: it describes one shared relation to the social totality, leaving all other contradictions raging. Solidarity in a collective interest must overpower the contradictory interests of the same subjects if it is not to be destroyed by the contradictions (as, for example, in a strike defeated by the immediate threat to the strikers’ means of survival). Self-betrayal for the sake of collective or expanded self-interest may be merely momentary (as in the ‘gang truce’ reported during last year’s London riots), or otherwise slow, uneven and perpetually reversible (as in the ordeals of class formation through history). Its generalized, irreversible form is as yet unseen: Marx called it the self-abolition of the proletariat.
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Firstly I’d like to say I’m more than a little miffed at being put alongside a performing seal like Zizek. Much as my resentment of the Slovenian slobberer maay be put down by the meanspirited to simple jealousy due to my significantly lesser amounts of published work, fame and indeed, hair, I maintain that his work is more in the way of entertainment than serious theory. As indeed your succint but deft references to the inconsistencies in his positions in the above article make out. But even more so, that such a facilely essentialist approach to gender, sexuality, race and like issues in this day and age reveal a laziness and lack of willing to seriously engage with the current thinking in those fields.

Moving on from the partially flippant to the more significant preliminary, I put it to you that the major threat to intersectionality comes not from the class warrior “left”, but the liberal “right”. That is, despite the desire by people within the libertarian left who have contributed to the intersectonality trope, for it to be independent from the kind of liberal, pro-capitalist, “anti-classist” politics dominant on US college campuses, in fact the term has already been simply assimilated by the latter – the way is over and the good guys/gals lost. The reason for this is not due to a lack of willing by the libertarian left or anarchist proponents, but by a major strategic theoretical weakness – the failure to theorise any unbridgeable rupture or break separating the radical anticapitalist contigent and the dominant liberal ideology means that they have already eaten your lunch and you have no response to them. That fact is external to the engagement between our positions, but I would argue, it is actually the weakest aspect of your position that you are already reduced to engaging with the communist minority rather than the liberal majority, given the actual state of affairs.

So, preliminaries dealt with, how best to unpick a thread where to start teasing out the differences between us? Perhaps the best place is if I start with the one phrase in your article that lept out at me in the greatest contrast, namely “The classic leftist call for unity in a universalist project of class struggle across such divides…”. The key phrase here is the idea of a “universalist project of class struggle” which basically is using the term “universalism” in an orthogonal sense to the one I was using in my article on class composition. That is, for me the notion of a “universalist class struggle” is a contradiction in terms. To be lazy, I’ll just quote the relevant sections on universalism from that article for reference:

“What useful extra does class add to that? In what way does class step outside the dead end of the “rationalist” programme? Simply put, by rejecting the unspoken, underlying presumption of such a programme – by rejecting universalism – and its bogus moralising.

A class analysis accepts the truth that the status quo is not against everyone’s interests. That being the case, any attempt to construct a programme of radical social change in the name of the “general interest” is doomed to failure, because there can be no universal interests so long as the interests of a minority resist change. In fact it is the very ability of a tiny minority to make its own interests rule over those of the vast majority that is one of the most important things that needs to change.”

“… the universal admits no other. That is, an other to itself, as opposed to the particular others it constructs by valorising corresponding norms. It cannot and must not do so – the universal is the social plane within which all particular others are inscribed. To struggle against the oppressions specific to a given category of otherness is to assert your right to the universal. At least by default in the first instance, not that this is the predetermined limit of such struggles, by any means. Nor, let’s be clear again, should we be opposed to the consciousness raising strategy of contrasting the ideal of equal human rights for all, with the reality of particular oppressions that make a mockery of such rights. It is both a natural and a necessary first step. The problem arises if, and only when, the composition of a movement against particular oppressions fails to go beyond that first step, and remains constrained within the bourgeois horizon of universalism – a horizon that fails to challenge the separation of the political sphere from the economic. Universalism is the utopianism of capital.”

“…the specific utopianism of capital – that society is already, from the start, one undivided sphere of sociality.”

So, hopefully it becomes a little clearer when I say that I reject the frame of “class exceptionalism” for my own position, which I would rather describe as one of ontological dualism. The exception proves the rule, which is to say that to frame class as an exception is to already accept that the social sphere is already one undivided sphere – the very ontological starting point which I fundamentally reject. The graphic chosen for the above article, using an unproblematised metaphor of space or topology, extended in the notion of class being “…different to other “axes of oppression”” is a tacit presupposition of ontological monism. My article definitely did not propose that class was different from other axes of oppression, it said it was not an axis of oppression at all, but a relation of exploitation, and further that exploitation and oppresssion are distinct relations, under the historically specific social relations of capitalism. NB regarding this position, that ontological dualism is not a general theory of history or society, but historically specific to capitalism alone.

So, to lay down the ontological grounds, which abstract as it may appear, actually has real-world organisational and political implications, which I will get to in response to the third challanging thesis proposed in Aiden’s piece. Firstly, as already stated, there is the monist assumption of an undifferentiated social sphere. Universalism is the liberal (i.e. anti-class) version of this, but there are also left-wing variants, for e.g. the post-autonomists who followed Negri into declaring the death (or more coyly “crisis”) of the law of value and the ending of the separation between the spheres of economic and political logics. Argueably we could also include a number of the “Communisation” tendency, following Cammatte’s theory of “full subsumption” (which Negri has also appropriated). Similarly the neo-anarchosyndicalist ideology of SolFed and its volutarist (and imo utopian) strategy of the “political-economic” unitary organisation, is based implicitly on a monist ontology.

The other non-dualist ontology is the determinist separatism of the old-school orthodox Marxists and, whisper it, the Friedmanites, Hayekians and other Austrian-inspired free market right libertarians. This Cartesian-like ontology accepts a strong separation of the economic and the political, but valorises the former at the expense of the latter, whether through the base/superstructure determinism of the orthos, or the “defend the markets from political interference” of the market fundies.

Ontological dualism is the recognition that the “ontological doubling” that capitalism effects, is real not illusory, but not dichotomous, i.e. not a fully separating cleavage. Further that the two logics, while genuinely autonomous, are not independent – that economic crises create political crises and vice versa. More, epochal crises in global regimes of accumulation (such as the one we are currently in) are always, to some degree, crises in the very separation or the autonomy of the spheres – witness the frustration of market traders at the moment at the binary swings of risk on/off trading currently surging backwards and forwards to the rythym of the political and economic crises of the Eurozone compositional/constitutional process inter alia.

Grounds established (or at least sketched in outline), lets move to the substantive. Taking Aiden’s 3 theses in reverse order, let’s start with number 3. As always in any serialisation of arguments, the last is really the most important. Everybody likes to end on a KO if they can. The proposition is:

“Even if (1) and (2) do not hold, there are pragmatic reasons to adopt an intersectional mode of analysis.”

The main argument (other than a slightly tangential Foucault quote on the authoritarianism of the ortho claim to “scienticity”, which any anarchist accepts) for this is:

“…if the discourse of class centricity can adequately accommodate the political demands of feminists, queers, people of colour etc., then adopting an intersectional position offers no threat. If it can’t, then why bother defending it? Does the theoretical project of proving that class is special move us closer to the eradication of relations of domination and exploitation?”

We’ve already discussed the failure, mostly, of intersectionality to prevent itself from being absorbed by liberal bourgeois ideology at the start, so I won’t belabour that point. But the abandonment, not of a class “centricity”, because again, that would put class on the same plane or within the same ontological sphere as that of relations of subjectification, but of ontological dualism is a threat to the project for class recomposition and the overthrowing of capitalist social relations. Given the specific relations of capitalism, the recognition that relations of domination and exploitation operate by distinct logics is a vital theoretical precondition for strategic effectiveness.

Consider one of the impulses for ontological monism (beyond the “common sense” cognitive bias that corporeal space is undivided), that I call the 9/11 impulse. We find this echoed in the Indignados slogan that “the crisis is a con!”. After 9/11 many americans found the pricking of the bubble of US state invulnerability so psychologically threatening that they preferred to turn to conspiracy theories that the US government had engineered the whole thing. Faced with the option of believing either that the people “up there” you thought were in control, were either not in control at all, or were still in control but lying evil schemers, many people find it psychologically easier to believe in the evil of power rather than its lack. Similarly, one of the biases towards monism, to believe that the economic crisis is not that the powers that be haven’t got a clue how to manage the global economy, but that the crisis is simply another mean trick to make those evil parasite finaciers even richer at the expense of the ordinary people. Of course the flipside to the notion that the crisis is simply another neoliberal conspiracy, is the idea that voting for a SYRIZA or other anti-neoliberal social-democratic party can make the crisis go away. The idea that the economic system does have an autonomy that neither a SYRIZA nor a (god-forbid!) ULA government could tame, is too threatening for some. These ontological questions are not merely abstract, but profoundly political, imo.

I’m running out of time (and energy) and as usual, what started out as a brief note is metastatizing into a monster, so the rest will have to be in the form of notes:

In relation to proposition 2 “The class-struggle is not the same from all social locations, and therefore something like intersectionality is necessary to allow a deeper theorisation of class.” I mostly agree but two things:

1) The issue at question here is not “something like intersectionality”, but the specific form of intersectionality being proposed here which denies ontological dualism and the distinction between relations of domination and exploitation.

2) also there is a hidden presupposition here, which actually goes to the heart of the matter. The problem at issue here is the problem of representation [...]. But to problematise representation presupposes a project of commons or collectivity. After all, the market fundamentalist can easily accept the proliferation of multiple identities (so long as these are safely reduced to consumer choice and the individuals con cerned have the money to pay…) without seeing any problem of representation, for the simple reason that for them the market solves the social issue, hence the creation of a collectivity or commons is a non-problem. To problematise representationalism then presupposes some vision of the composition or recomposition of a collectivity across the lines of gender, race, etc. The liberal or universalist presupposition is of a universal collectivity that includes all political citizens regardless of wealth, rank or privilege. The perspective of class recomposition takes the class as the collectivity for recomposition, in the left libertarian formulation, in a manner not mediated by the interposition of representational class figures, such as the idealised “worker” or other class figure, which, as agreed, necessarily acquires by stealthy default the dominant “norm” attributes of being implicitly white, male, heterosexual and so on.

In relation to proposition 3. “Like class, neither gender nor race can be reduced to identity.”. I would say, a) my article does not reduce the domain of subjectification merely to “identity”. Oppression is more than the sum total of intersubjective relations, there are the forces exercised by social institutions and the state, also – hence for e.g. the distinction often made between racial prejudice and racism proper. However the object/target or “surface on which relations of power are inscribed” remains the whole individual. Whereas relations of exploitation can operate, machinic-fashion, through cricuits of sub-individual (or “dividual” as Lazzarato, following D&G in the Anti-Oedipus, puts it). b) the attempt to draw equivalences or analogies between class, race and gender do not stand up to even the most basic scrutiny. Flippantly put, the appendage of “war” to all three terms demonstrates this fairly transparently. But further than that, that McKinnon quote is frankly bizzare. Truly her world is upside down – production as “consequence” of capitalism? srsly? – McKinnon is no more a Marxism than I am a tap-dancing Dalek. c) Class is not a structure, it is a contradiction of capital. Capital is a real abstraction – we can analyse its accumulation and how its cycle of self-reproduction contradicts with our own. But if there is a similar real abstraction that is to gender or race what capital is to class, I would be interested to hear it.

Basta for now.

Just a small thing in relation to the last paragraph, I’m pretty convinced intersectionality is impossible, at least for now. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t try to achieve it, but I wouldn’t dismiss theories that *fail* to incorporate intersectionality anywhere nearly as quickly as those that *choose not* to incorporate it.

Also, you’re bang on about the pragmatic need.

Class is material, it is the relationship to the means of production – that means of production has two elements, raw materials and labour power. Patriarchy and colonialism exist as ideological justifications for the appropriation of the future labour power and raw materials in the interests of capital. Colonialism works to give ideological justification to land grabs, patriarchy to give power over future labour units.

Class is different and sits outside the kyriachial framework which primarily operates ideologically.