Polizaeoero

 from stupidpol

Liberation of women and minorities was already part of the socialist corpus of theory a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. If you read those dusty old books you'll see that it's something that was clearly taken into account. For instance, Lenin in his works talks not only about women but also about the national minorities in Russia.

So what the heck is so new about "intersectionality"? I see no new insight there. Instead, the way it functions is just to make race and gender as important as, or more important than, class. In addition, the theory has a clear influence from post-modernism which likes to play around with notions of identity. The end result seems to be, the-same-old-capitalism, but with more women CEOs, and "inclusive" of androgynous people and non-whites. So it's a sort of Benetton poster capitalism, a United Colours of Capitalism.

Whenever you push someone on this they literally never have an answer. The response is always something along the lines of describing intersectionality as simply the act of building a coalition that isn't comprised of only white men (the implication being that you want the coalition to be only white men, which would obviously be insufficient). The fact that coalition building has existed consistently for thousands of years is totally ignored. To repeat the example of the Old Left that these guys are so keen to denounce, that sort of multiracial, cross-gender support was a crucial part of their ideology -- you had Russian Slavs working closely with Latinos in Cuba and other parts of Latin America, those Cubans sending military aid to the Angolan blacks fighting European colonialism, with the Chinese on the other side of the world aiding revolutions across diverse Asian populations, all the while women were introduced to levels of equality that was often unmatched by the West.

There is nothing new about the theory of "intersectionality", it serves only as an ideological cudgel that the liberals and liberal-adjacents use to beat the left with.