I was in a Chapters bookstore not long ago and noticed a problem: no, I am not talking about the fact that what used to be a bookstore with a large number of gift items has now turned into a gift store with a large number of books.
I am talking about an interesting section of books called “Culture and community.” This was divided into four parts with the following labels: “Black Voices,” “Gender,” “LGBTQ+,” and “Indigenous.”
It is this sort of thing that makes conservatives bleat that liberals run everything. But this is like complaining women run the world because there is a preponderance of females leading the feminist movement.
No, the real problem is there is no section on class. And this, briefly, is the problem with much progressive politics.
The supposed liberal hegemony that conservatives complain about is nothing which in fact threatens them very much. What is truly thrust into the shadows, as if there is a quiet understanding amongst all good people that the neocons are right in saying Marx and everything connected to him is both outdated and hopelessly wrong, is a class-based understanding of our current situations.
I would not simplify history in the manner of a vulgar Marxism and reduce it to a mere playing out of property relations. But whereas there is little or no inherent power accruing to race, gender, sex, or sexual orientation, there is power inherent in the control or ownership of the means of production. In other words, such power as men have had over women, for example, has been based not so much on some inherent power in being a male, as that men have managed to have more property rights than women in many times and places.
It would be a mistake to get into a competition between a class-based analysis and these other types of analysis. In struggling with each other, advocates of all kinds for oppressed and marginalized people would only weaken each other and strengthen the oppressors. So my point is not to decrease the attention paid to current ways of understanding injustice. Rather, I would attach an understanding of class to these issues.
For is not class power central, perhaps even essential, in the oppression of various groups? Consider some of the following observations.
A key factor in the oppression of women, historically, has been in making it difficult or impossible for them to own property. Materially, they have been dependent on fathers and husbands. In societies where they can get the same jobs as men, they often get less pay. In other words, control of the means of production is restricted in their case.
Indigenous people in North America were opened to oppression largely by losing their land: that is, their means of production. In the late 19th century the buffalo of Western Canada were opened up to massive over hunting by white people, causing literal starvation amongst the indigenous people of that region.
A common incentive for sexual and gender nonconformists of all types to stay in the closet is fear of job loss or harassment on the job. Yet again, a threat to one’s means of production (keep in mind that employees do not own the means of production to begin with) is a key factor in maintaining injustice.
African people not only lost control of their means of production when removed from their land and forcibly exiled: they could not own property in North America and became literally the means of production for others in becoming slaves.