Degrowth: An Environmental Ideology With Good Intentions, Bad Politics

By Collin Chambers

Republished from Liberation School.

The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself.

Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle.

Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected.

The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself.

The Connections between Thomas Malthus and Degrowth

Thomas Malthus was an aristocratic political-economist who did much of his work before the development of industrial-scale agriculture. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that in every geographic region there are particular resource limits or “carrying capacities” [4]. Malthus’ so-called “law of population” says that unchecked population growth will outstrip this carrying capacity that eventually leads to a “natural check” in the form of massive deaths from starvation and disease to bring the population back under the carrying capacity. Malthus blamed poor people for “unchecked” population growth and argued against policies to alleviate people from abject poverty because it delayed the inevitable: the “natural check” of overpopulation. Rising wages, Malthus said, led to workers having more children and thereby creating overpopulation. He blamed workers themselves for economic crises, with a convenient argument against rising wages. Marx rebuffed Malthus’ erroneous theories, clarifying that “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” and that crises were caused by capital, not by workers [5]. (This is also a point on which he diverged from Darwin, who adopted Malthus’ ideas of population).

Much of this same Malthusian discourse continues to exist today as an explanation for problems such as environmental degradation and poverty. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the production of increasingly higher crop/food yields proved much of Malthus’ theories incorrect.

Malthusianism focuses on “overpopulation” as a main cause of environmental degradation. Degrowth actually reproduces this faulty notion through the proposition that once resources and wealth are equally redistributed (which degrowth rightly wants to do), there must be some “check” on population because, as population grows without any added economic growth, people will eventually have access to fewer and fewer resources. For instance, Giorgos Kallis, another major proponent of the movement, says that “degrowth envisions radically reducing the surplus” and advocates so-called “self-limitations” where there are “collective decisions to refrain from pursuing all that could be pursued” [6]. Rather than the typical Malthusian “natural” external limits, degrowth goes a step further: it calls for a collective enforcement of the internalization of Malthusian ideas of limits and constraints.

The target of degrowth, Kallis declares, is “not just capitalism, but also productivism” [7]. Proponents of degrowth argue that any type of “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist growth or socialist does not make a difference” [8]. In doing so they artificially equate the two antagonistic systems and abstract away from the qualitative differences between socialist and capitalist growth. Kallis justifies this claim by arguing that if we did not change consumption levels in a post-carbon energy regime, then nothing would really change in terms of environmental destruction because “the manufacturing of renewable energies requires lots of earth materials. And the fact that they cost more than fossil fuels might have something to do with their lower energy returns and higher land requirements” [9]. Thus, degrowth does not really have an ecological theory of capitalism, but an ecological theory of accumulation. For degrowth, any type of accumulation is bad and requires increased “material throughput.”

False equivalences between different social systems

But do proponents of degrowth know what accumulation entails? Accumulation simply means reinvesting the surplus back into production (either to expand or repair existing means of production). The accumulation of a surplus is necessary in any society. In his discussions of the reproduction schemas in the second volume of Capital, for instance, Marx writes that there has to be some sort of accumulation in order to reproduce existing society, to replace and repair fixed capital like machinery and roads, societal infrastructures, to care for those who can’t work, and so on. There also has to be surpluses for, say, pandemics and droughts.

The difference is that accumulation under socialism is guided by the workers themselves who collectively determine what and how much surplus to produce and how to use it. Under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, without a plan, and purely in the interests of private profit. Under socialism, accumulation benefits society as a whole, including even the ecosystems we inhabit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially grow green productive forces to build more (and better) schools, public transportation, etc.? Shouldn’t socialists in the U.S. strive to repair the underdevelopment of imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonized world? While there are sufficient surpluses of, say, housing in the U.S., there are certainly not surpluses of housing in the entire world.

Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced. Whom exactly are we telling to “self-limit” what we consume and live at a time when most workers in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and accumulating more and more debt? Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s while prices have increased over 500 percent. Who exactly is supposed to limit themselves, and to what? Isn’t the problem that the masses are limited by capitalism?

Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people [10]. Stated simply, by focusing so much on the consumption habits of workers within capitalism and so little on the conditions and relations of production, proponents of degrowth end up reproducing Malthusian ideas of “natural limits.” 

We must analytically evaluate production and show how production “produces consumption” itself [11]. The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by “personal” choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we “choose” to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable (if it exists at all), jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work, and the rents around major industries tend to be unaffordable for our class.

Then there is planned obsolescence, such as when commodities like cell phones are produced to break every two years. When capitalism is overthrown and replaced with socialism, we can produce things that are “built to last” because our aim is to satisfy society’s needs and not private profit. Indeed, Marx argues that capitalist production in itself is wasteful, even in its “competitive-stage:”

“Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” [12].

Degrowth is antithetical to Marxism

Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits.

Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. 

The same can be said about degrowth solutions to the problems the capitalist agricultural system creates. Proponents of degrowth propose small scale (both urban and rural) methods of agriculture production to replace industrial-scale agriculture. They, in fact, glorify and romanticize “peasant economies.” 

Despite the problems of capitalist industrial agriculture, there are two main benefits of industrial-scale agriculture. First, it has drastically increased yields. At the present moment, there is enough food produced to feed 11 billion people. Second, industrial farming has thoroughly decreased the backbreaking labor needed for agricultural and food production. In 1790, 90 percent of the U.S. workforce labored on farms. In 1900, it was 35 percent At the present moment, only one percent of the U.S. workforce works on farms [14]. 

Certainly, in any just society we would want to spread out food production more evenly amongst the population. But getting rid of industrial-scale agriculture and reverting to small-scale peasant and small landowner agriculture would require massive numbers of workers to go back to the land and perform backbreaking agricultural work. Such a transformation would inevitably reduce agricultural yield substantially, increasing the possibility of food insecurity and hunger among vast swathes of the population. And what would we do with the commodities and infrastructure we’d have to destroy to create such plots of land? Moreover, such a vision necessitates the redistribution of land from private ownership of large landholders. Is this achieved through revolution or through governmental reforms? In either case, if we’re struggling to reclaim land then why not broaden our horizons and redistribute land in the interests of the environment and the people, including Indigenous and other oppressed nations in the U.S.?

Degrowth is, furthermore, idealist and divorced from the material reality within which U.S. workers currently live. Matt Huber, a Marxist environmental geographer, argues that a “truly humane society must commit to relieving the masses from agricultural labor,” and that we cannot act as if “small-scale agricultural systems are much of a ‘material basis’ for a society beyond industrial capitalism” [15]. This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world.

Additionally, we shouldn’t forgo modern technologies that already exist just because they are “large scale” or because they currently contribute to environmental degradation within capitalist society. Doing so would in effect produce more ecological waste!

In an important piece on capitalism and ecology, Ernest Mandel writes: “it is simply not true that modern industrial technology is inevitably geared towards destroying the environmental balance. The progress of the exact sciences opens up a very wide range of technical possibilities” [16]. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists have to distinguish between instruments of production and their use under capitalism.

Degrowth and building the class struggle

In the U.S., degrowth remains an ideology that is relatively socially isolated but gaining influence among environmentalists and some on the left. It’s an ideology of guilt rather than revolutionary action. The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less. Imagine, for example, canvassing and talking to people in working-class neighborhoods, trying to get them on board with a degrowth political platform. How do degrowth proponents think workers in oppressed neighborhoods respond if they were told they needed to consume less to fight climate change? Many of us already wait as long as possible in the winter to turn on our heat! As organizers, we would not get the time of day, and we wouldn’t even believe ourselves. Can you imagine organizing homeless and unemployed workers around a program of less consumption? Degrowth is an ideology fit for the privileged, and if they want to consume less, they should.

From the perspective of the practical class struggle, degrowth is particularly problematic. Degrowth has a rhetorical strategy problem. In an unequal country such as the U.S., is the discourse of less and “self-limitation” realistic and inspiring? Is this tactic energizing, does it speak to the needs of the exploited and oppressed, can it mobilize people into action?

Rather than limit everything, we actually need to grow certain sectors such as green infrastructures and technologies. Our class doesn’t need a political platform that calls on us to give up the little pleasures we might have–if any at all–for the sake of the environment. Our class needs a political platform that states clearly what the real problem is and how we can solve it to make life will better.

Degrowth takes a non-class approach towards consumption and production. It is true that some of the more privileged sectors of the working class, particularly in imperialist countries, consume excessively and wastefully. Degrowth, however, fails to account for the class that takes wasteful consumption to almost unimaginable levels and the system that produces these production and consumption patterns. An increasing portion of the labor of the working class is wasted on supporting the consumption habits of the numerically small capitalist class. No amount of preaching self-limiting morality is going to convince the capitalist class to consume less, expropriate less, or oppress less. Once we can get rid of the parasitic imperialists, then human needs and desires can be met through a planned economy led by the working class.

Thus, the solution to these multifaceted and compounding environmental crises is not “degrowth”, but rather, as Mandel formulates it, “controlled and planned growth:”

“Such growth would need to be in the service of clearly defined priorities that have nothing to do with the demands of private profit…rationally controlled by human beings… The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine…

“Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’” [17].

References

[1]“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’ Therefore save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.” Marx, Karl. (1867/1976).CapitalVol 1(New York: Penguin Books), 742.
[2] Hansen, Bue Rübner. (2021). “The kaleidoscope of Ccatastrophe: On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm.”Viewpoint Magazine, April 14.Availablehere.
[3] Hickel, Jason. (2019). “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,”Real-World Economics Review87, no. 19: 54-68. “Throughput” is the flow of energy and materials through a system.
[4] Malthus, Thomas R. (1789/2007).An essay on the principle of population(New York: Dover).
[5]Marx,Capital, 784.
[6] Kallis, Giorgos. (2018).In defense of degrowth: Opinions and manifestos(UK: Uneven Earth Press), 22, 21.
[7] Ibid., 24.
[8] Kallis, Giorgos. (2019). “Capitalism, socialism, degrowth: A rejoinder.”Capitalism Nature Socialism30, no. 2: 189.
[9] Ibid., 194.
[10] See Phillips, Leigh. (2015).Austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defense of growth, progress, industry and stuff(Washington: Zero Books).
[11] See Karl, Marx. 1993.Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rought draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 90-98.
[12] Marx, Karl. (1991.)CapitalVol 3 (New York: Penguin), 180.
[13] Kallis,In defense of degrowth,21.
[14] The World Bank. (2021), “Employment in agriculture (% total employment) (model ILO estimate),” January 29. Availablehere.
[15] Huber, Matt. (2018). “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces.’” InMaterialism and the critique of energy, ed. B.R. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Chicago: MCM’ Press), 517.
[16] Mandel, Ernest. (2020). “Ernest Mandel on Marxism and ecology: ‘The dialectic of growth.’”Monthly Review, June 17. Availablehere.
[17] Ibid.

Racism on College Campuses: Understanding It and How to Fight Back

By Collin Chambers

“Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capitalism”

- George L. Jackson, 1971

White supremacy and settler colonialism have always undergirded US society from its very origins and foundations. Since the election of Trump in 2016, however, the systems of white supremacy and settler colonialism have taken off their “progressive neoliberal” (Fraser 2017) masks. This is evident through the increasing blatant acts of white nationalism and hate crimes. For instance, the rate and frequency of hate crimes on college campuses continue to rise (Bauer-Wolf 2019). To give a recent concrete and on-going example, towards the end of the Fall 2019 semester Syracuse University campus went through “two weeks of hate” as one student put it (McMahon 2019). In a 13-day period, there were 12 acts of racist hate-crimes. This series of racist graffiti has emboldened white supremacists on campus, which has recently culminated in a white nationalist manifesto being “airdropped” to individuals at a university library, the same one shared by the gunman in the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. The Syracuse University Administration claims this is a myth, but it is a proven fact that the white supremacist manifesto was circulated and viewed within a Greek-life online platform/blog. 

In direct response to these events a POC-led group emerged. #NotAgainSU occupied the Barnes Center, a brand-new $50 million student/gym/wellness center for seven days and seven nights. Though it is a self-described “nameless and faceless” group, there is group of around 15 students who can be characterized as the leadership. From my understanding, and from discussions with those more enmeshed in the group, two-thirds of the 15 can be classified as more liberal and rooted in identity politics, and thus understand racism from this lens. I think the dominance of the more liberal-minded is shown through the list of 18 demands that the group wants met by the administration. I highlight the leadership because the leadership of any organization, group, or movement plays the determining role in characterizing the type of politics the organization has. The theoretical-political framework used to understand oppressions based on identity, like race, determines the politics and effectiveness in challenging/overthrowing structures of power. I do not intend for the essay to be a sectarian/outsider critique of #NotAgainSU—when there are direct actions/spontaneous protest against reactionary structures of power a revolutionary must participate despite any political-ideological limitations to the action/protest. I simply wish to offer what I think is the most efficient (i.e., most revolutionary) theoretical-political framework to deploy to understand racism in contemporary global capitalism. How we understand the world shapes how we act upon it. Identity politics is limiting in the sense that is “an integral part of the dominant ideology; it makes opposition impossible” (Haider 2018, 40). Identity politics needs to be left behind. Below, I offer my thoughts on what type of politics and strategy is necessary to productively fight against racism. 

Following the Geographer, Raju Das (2012), I do indeed privilege class in this analysis, but “do so in a manner in which race and gender are taken very seriously.” Class is, as Das says, “the dominant social relation” (Das 2012, 31), it cuts across all forms of social difference. Thus, in relation to the question of race, an anti-racist working-class politics and strategy needs to be developed and perpetuated. In this essay I argue in order to struggle against the structures of racism there needs to be an anti-racist working-class politic that is global in scope. This means centering imperialism. I emphasize imperialism because all imperialist wars are predicated and justified through racialized logics (both ideological and economical). Imperialist war and racism are inherently linked—one cannot exist without the other (see Du Bois 1933). As Andrea Smith (2012, 69) says nicely: “For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war.” I will first do this—though unpopular it may be in our post-structural times—by re-emphasizing the centrality of class. Then, I will offer a brief historical materialist understanding of racism in the age of imperialism (I do indeed argue that imperialism still exists, but that we are in a new unipolar era). Additionally, going against much “post-colonial” thought I emphasize the need to use the nation-state as a form of sovereignty that can fight against racism. With this understanding of racism, I will argue that Asad Haider’s (2018, 111) idea of “insurgent universalism,” which says: “I fight for my own liberation precisely because I fight for that of the stranger,” is a useful strategy/method to fight racism. 

Re-centering Class to Fight Racism

The current political economic situation necessitates for a return to more traditional conceptions of class. Living and growing up in a social formation dominated by the capitalist mode of production, we are not taught or trained to think in class terms i.e., to have class consciousness. If class is mentioned at all it is usually deployed to point out an individual’s identity and status i.e., in the non-Marxist sense. Class is typically thought of as either based on income or status/identity i.e., if someone is blue collared or white collared. It is a common misconception to think of class as just another identity that exists along the different axes and vectors of oppression. In popular parlance, when one talks about a working-class identity one commonly conceives of a white male with a hardhat working on the construction site. While a white male in a hardhat is indeed within the working class, this view is problematic in two senses. First, it ignores how labor/the working class has increasingly been feminized and racialized (Sanmiguel-Valderrama 2007). Secondly, by treating “the working-class” as just another identity alongside gender and race is faulty from a Marxist perspective which sees class as one’s objective relationship to the means of production (see Heideman 2019 for more on all of this). This objective conception of class simply means that on one side there exists the capitalist class which owns and controls the means of production, and on the other side the working class who own nothing but their ability to work and who work within a workplace that is controlled and dominated by the capitalist class. Class from this perspective is understood as a social relation of power (Zweig 2005). 

Obviously, in the capitalist mode of production, capitalists have a lot of “power to” (Glassman 2003). Capital has the power to appropriate surplus product, dictate what is produced within the production process and how, and by what pace. However, as Glassman (2003, 682) points out nicely, “[c]apitalists are not the only actors who can exercise ‘power to.’ Workers, though less empowered than capitalists because of their specific positions within processes of surplus value production and appropriation, also possess structural power in their collective ability to provide or withhold labor.” The inert power workers have exists at all times, even in eras of global working-class defeat and retreat, workers can shut the production and labor process down. In relation to the question of racism, the working class can use their power to fight racism through their latent power and ability to stop the production process. In order to end “extra-economic”-based oppressions the power of capital must be struggled against by with the latent power the working-class has (Heideman 2019; Wood 2002). For example, stopping production (i.e., striking) can be deployed as a method to fight against racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. 

Raju Das (2012, 31) lays out clearly the power class analysis and a class perspective can provide for social movements: 

Class analysis necessarily says that: class is the most important cause, and condition for, major global problems…and that workers and semi-proletarians who suffer from these problems have the power to fundamentally transcend the system to solve these problems. Class analysis includes in it the idea of the possibility and the necessity of abolition of class and its replacement with optimal direct-democratic control on the part of the proletariat and semi-proletarian workers over society’s resources and political affairs, at local, national and global scale. Class is about power, which is rooted in the control over productive forces including labor. Class analysis articulates and performs this power.

As the reader can see, Marxists point out the objective nature of class out at nauseam (e.g., Foley 2018; Heideman 2019), but they have done so within the confines of the nation-state scale of the United States and tend to ignore or downplay global scale race relations, in particular the race relations involved in contemporary imperialism. 

A Historical Materialist Understanding of Racism in the Age of Imperialism

Even within the anti-Marxist early 2000s Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) argued that we still need the historical materialist method to understand racism. Historical materialism is Marx’s method of understanding historical and contemporary social formations. This method seeks to explicate what is historically specific about a dominant mode of production within a particular social formation (Ollman 1993). It is a common misconception that Marx ignored race, gender and other forms of oppression, but this is certainly false especially if one examines his more historical work (see Anderson 2010 79-114 for Marx’s writings on race, slavery, and US Civil War). A mode of production can be briefly defined as the “complex unity” (Althusser 2014) between the productive forces (i.e., means of production and labor-power) and relations of production, which Bettelheim (1975, 55) defines as a “system of positions assigned to agents of production in relation to the principal means of production.” Non-economistic Marxists like Lenin, Mao, etc., emphasize that the relations of production play the determining role in shaping the mode of production (Althusser 2014). On top of the mode of production arises a political and cultural superstructure that works in dialectical relation/tension with the economic base (mode of production). Social change occurs do this dialectical relation with the economic base (see Marx 1979). This historical materialist method allows us to see the historically specific form racism takes on in particular modes of production, and even within different forms of the capitalist mode of production. Understanding the specific forms racism takes in particular historical is essential if one wants to successfully struggle against racism. Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002, 282) points out that 

Capitalism will always have a working class, and it will always produce underclasses, whatever their extra-economic identity. It can adopt to changing conditions by changing the meaning of race and ethnicity, so that one group can displace another at the bottom of the ladder (as Hispanic groups have in some cases replaced African-Americans); or the boundaries of racial categories can, if necessary, be redrawn.

This othered “underclass” that Wood points to can exist on many different scales and not just within the nation-state scale of the Unites States. In the era of imperialism and global capitalism, the underclass are the oppressed nationalities who are struggling for self-determination against the global imperialist class camp (i.e., the US, Europe, and Japan). This will be explored more below. First, I must lay out how to understand racism as a historical materialist i.e., how it functions within the “complex social whole” (McNally 2017). 

In Black Marxism Cedric Robinson (1983) critiqued Eurocentric Marxists for ignoring the Black Radical Tradition, and for not paying close enough attention to how logics of racism structures capitalism itself. Robinson emphasizes that ideas of race and otherness is culturally ingrained in European Civilization itself and thus precedes the development of the capitalist mode of production and in turn structures it. However, the form racism changes within different modes of production. Racism adapts “to the political and material exigencies of the moment” as Robinson (1983, 66) himself says. Thus, we must understand the “political and material exigencies” of the unipolar imperialist era (Becker and Puryear 2015). To help through this the relations of production need be thought of in a non-economistic way. The relations of production are traditionally thought of as class relations (see above). However, in order to think of race as being integral to the social whole of the capitalist mode of production is to consider race relations as being a component of the relations of production that help reproduce capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression on an extended scale (see also Bhattacharya 2017).  When the capitalist mode of emerges on the historical scene it emerges in an already existing racialized European social formation. At first it incorporates the existing racial relations and ideologies, but as the capitalist mode of production becomes the dominant mode of production in the social formation it totally transforms them to serve the interest of capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression because capital is “coercive relation” and bends all social relations to its will (Marx 1990, 425). Capitalism and the new race relations/ideologies that develop become inseparable from each other and cannot function without each other (see also McNally 2017). Understanding racism (and also sexism, heteronormativity, etc) as existing within the relations of production themselves allows one to understand the “distributions of power throughout a structure” along different forms of oppression such as race. (Gilmore 2002, 17). 

In order to explicate this historical-materialist view we turn to W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois (1933) is able to show clearly the particular form racial relations of production take on in the monopoly/imperialist era of the capitalist mode of production. Here he lays out two material factors that produce and reproduce racism within the white labor movement during this particular form of the capitalist mode of production (monopoly/imperialist). Firstly, he talks about the development of a labor aristocracy that began to emerge in the monopoly era of capitalism and through the class struggle itself. In this era, Du Bois (1933, 6) says that “a new class of technical engineers and managers has arisen forming a working-class aristocracy” who “have deposits in savable banks and small holdings in stocks and bonds.” These kind of investments and material vested interests in the capitalist system give rise to “capitalistic ideology” which is ingrained in the heads labor aristocracy. Du Bois (1933, 6-7) says that these “engineers and the saving better-paid workers form a new petty bourgeois class, whose interests are bound up with those of the capitalists and antagonistic to those of common labor.” This labor aristocracy is a direct consequence of monopoly/imperialist phase of capitalism.

Secondly, in the era of monopoly capitalism (i.e., imperialism) we see “the extension of the world market” through “imperial expanding industry” which has produced a “world-wide new proletariat of colored workers.” The capitalists are able to bribe “the white worker by high wages, visions of wealth and opportunity” to fight militarily, politically, and economically against colored workers across the world, i.e., to serve the interests of the imperialist-capitalist class. As Du Bois (1933, 7) says: “Soldiers and sailors from the white workers are used to keep ‘darkies’ in their ‘places.’ Imperialist war and racism are inseparable and are two sides of the same coin and are produced and reproduced by global imperialist class camp. The othered underclass in the monopoly/imperialist era of capitalism is indeed the oppressed nationalities across the world (and within the US) who are constantly targeted by the global imperialist class camp. To make this more concrete, the police departments that terrorize, murder, and target people of color in the US purchase weapon surpluses from the US military! This displays clearly a direct connection between people of color within the US nation-state and oppresses nationalities that US imperialism oppresses. 

Marx and Engels (1978, 474, my emphasis) say in the Manifesto: “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with clash antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” Thinking about racism in this sense, as being a part of the relations of production helps us see that racism is an integral part in reproducing the capitalist system as a whole. Racism has been so completely transformed and integrated by the capitalist mode of production that one cannot imagine ending racism without struggling against the capitalist system. Mao said: “Racism is a product of colonialism and imperialism. Only by overthrowing the capitalist class and destroying colonialism and imperialism [can complete emancipation be won]” (quoted in Kelley 2008, 100-101) Additionally, because “[w]age-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers,” racism plays a fundamental role in maintaining the class power of capital by continuing to divide workers along racial lines (Marx and Engels 1978, 483). At least for me, it is clear that racism does not just exist in air in the superstructure but is produced and reproduced in the mode of production itself. If the structural and root causes of racism are superseded, then overtime—through more political struggle—so will all micro-forms of racism (e.g., racist language).

The Nation-State still matters! Imperialism still exists!

From many different theoretical frameworks/positions the nation-state is seen as inherently problematic for being racist and perpetuating settler colonialism (e.g., A. Smith 2012; Anthias 2018). “Post-colonial” scholars who emphasize decolonization argue that decolonization is impossible within the confines of the nation-state as it is a colonial European invention. Even scholars focused on solving climate change are critical and skeptical of the nation-state in regards to creating a global post-carbon energy regime, and for obvious and important reasons (see Mann and Wainwright 2019). Additionally, many argue that imperialism, understood from the Leninist tradition, no longer exists in the contemporary post-Soviet world. For example, Hardt and Negri (2000, 9), who many draw from, say: 

we think it is important to note that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist. This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority.

This is only half correct. We are indeed living in world where there is no longer the type of inter-imperialist rivalry that characterized the WWI and WWII eras, but that does not mean in any sense that we are living in a “postimperialist” world where the nation-state no longer matters. Rather, we are currently just in a new phase of imperialism, namely a unipolar era of imperialism (see Becker and Puryear 2015), in which the United States is the global hegemonic leader. Since the collapse of the former USSR, the United States has become the hegemonic leader on a global scale. In this era every newly independent nationalist country has to play by the rules that the United States has set through so-called international political-economic apparatuses. Countries have to try to arise in a global political economic system dominated by the interests of the United States. This creates serious limits for what specific countries can do. Cuba, for example, has chosen to maintain its socialist political economic system at the continued expense of the embargo enforced by the US. Evo Morales was just overthrown by a coup that was funded and supported by the United States for being a leader who does not want to play by the rules that the United States enforces through different “international” political/economic apparatuses. The development of the UN, NATO, EU, etc., does not mark an end of nation-state rule and “toward a new notion of global order.” The UN is an “international” organization that, in the last instance, represents and perpetuates the interests of the US, western Europe, and Japan. 

Nation-states still matter for global capital. The rules and regulations needed for continued capital accumulation are largely enforced by nation-states themselves, not a decentralized Empire. In addition, the nation-state still matters in regard to resisting imperialism and racism, especially in the imperial core of the United States. Nation-states and the apparatuses of nation-states can be seized and used for successfully struggling against imperialism and racism. The faulty idea that we are living in a decentralized global Empire makes it seem that capitalism so ubiquitous and penetrating it cannot be directly opposed, that there are no alternatives. 

Kelley and Betsy (2008) in a chapter titled “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution” shows how oppressed nations constructed political solidarity with each other that functioned on an international scale, but was also made possible because one oppressed nation was able to take power on the nation-state scale, and used the power gained from doing so to spread anti-racist working-class power outside its own nation-state. In the 1960s the Black Nationalist movement in the United States had close political-ideological ties with the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Zedong and other Maoists more specifically. It is commonly known that the Black Panthers would sell Mao’s book of quotations i.e., “the little red book” to fund themselves, but this is only the surface appearance of the connection Maoists in China had with the Black Panthers and groups like Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). As Kelley and Betsy (2008, 103) point out, Maoism was not exported from China to the Black Nationalist movement. Rather, “[m]ost black radicals of the late 1950s and early 1960s discovered China by way of anti- colonial struggles in Africa and the Cuban revolution.” The example of national liberation/communist struggles taking state power on the nation-scale inspired oppressed nationalities within the United States. Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought provided the theoretical foundations on which to view nationalism relatively. Nationalism from the oppressor nation is reactionary, but nationalism from oppressed nations is revolutionary and necessary. Revolutionary nationalism of an oppressed nation is “proletarian in content, national in form” as Harry Haywood (1978) says. In fact, the RAM argued that black nationalism “‘is really internationalism.’ Only by demolishing white nationalism and white power can liberation be achieved for everyone. Not only will national boundaries be eliminated with the ‘‘dictatorship of the Black Underclass,’’ but ‘‘the need for nationalism in its aggressive form will be eliminated’’ (Kelley and Betsy 2008, 115-116). 

Conclusion: Towards an Anti-Racist Working-Class Strategy

Asad Haider (2018, 61) tells the story about Harry Haywood’s critique of the CPUSA as it became increasingly conservative in the post-World War II years. Throughout the first half of the 20th century the CPUSA was at the forefront of anti-racist/black liberation struggles both politically and theoretically (see Kelley 2002). However, as the CPUSA became more conservative, the Party “distanced itself from the project of black liberation,” and white chauvinism increased within the Party. Haider (2018, 61) points out that the Party had previously been able to combat white chauvinism and racism effectively “through mass antiracist organizing: by joining different people and disparate demands in a common struggle.” After this practice ceased, the “party launched what Haywood called a ‘phony war against white chauvinism’…In Haywood’s analysis, this phony war only ended up strengthening the foundations of white chauvinism, now uprooted from its structural foundations and seen a free-floating set of ideas” (Haider 2018, 61). Harry Haywood argued that a better strategy to fight white chauvinism in the party is to reaffirm the “division of labor among communists in relation to the national question. This division of labor, long ago established in our party and the international communist movement, places main responsibility for combatting white chauvinism on the white comrades, with Blacks having main responsibility for combating narrow nationalist deviations” (Haywood quoted in Haider 2018, 61-62). 

A “phony war” (i.e., one that plays into the logics of the dominant ideology and structures) against racism must be avoided. Given what has been said above, the strategy I propose to fight racism, imperialism, and capitalism is to perpetuate what Asad Haider (2018, 108-114) calls “insurgent universalism.” Insurgent universalism “says we are not passive victims but active agents of a politics that demands freedom for everyone” (Haider 2018, 109). It is a universality that “necessarily confronts and opposes capitalism” (Haider 2018, 113). It is a universality that “is created and recreated in the act of insurgency, which does not demand emancipation solely for those who share my identity but for everyone; it says no one will be enslaved” (Haider 2018, 113). The working class can use its power within the realm of production to not only struggle against capital in the economic sense, but also against all “extra-economic” oppressions that exist within the global imperialist-capitalist social whole. We need to fight for the strangers who are being targeted by the global imperialist class camp. We may not know “the other” that is being targeted by US imperialism, we may even have some preconceived notions of that “other” through the media ideological state apparatus (e.g., demonization), however, and despite this we must principally be against any form of US intervention in sovereign nations. Being anti-racist means being anti-imperialist at the same time! Self-determination for all oppressed nationalities!

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A Time Machine to the 1970s to Save Us: Towards a Socialist Feminism

By Collin Chambers

The Marxist Feminist Kathi Weeks (2014, xi) suggests that "we are now at a point when the standard critiques of 1970s feminism can be approached as orthodoxies of their own need of unsettling". Feminism, Weeks (2014, ix) says, has a rather "exceptional relationship to its historical traditions. It is as if the clocks in the world of feminist theory run at a faster rate than those in other theoretical domains." Marxist theorists treat Marx as if he were still living, using his work done in 19th century to understand contemporary contradictions of capital accumulation (just read any of David Harvey's work). By contrast, feminist theory treats the theories produced in the 1970s with almost scorn and "as if it were the distant past, over and done." Since the cultural turn in the social sciences and humanities Marxism has been pushed aside. The work of Foucault and Judith Butler (and others) have come to dominate contemporary feminist thought which focuses on discourse and language as if it exists in air and separate from any material determinants i.e., the mode of production. However, as of late-and especially since the financial crisis of 2007/8-there has been a resurgence of Marxism in general and a renewed interest in feminist theoretical formulations from the 1970s within feminist theory in particular (e.g., Barrett 1980/2014; Benzanson and Luxton 2006; Bhattacharya 2017). This renewed and refreshed focus on Marxism within feminism is rooted in what Bhattacharya (2017) calls Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and this where I think the future of feminist thought is going towards (and should if we are serious about changing the oppressive world in which we live).

SRT theorists do not want to simply critique the sexist and patriarchal world we live in, but they want to change it and act upon their critiques politically. In this essay I argue that SRT is the most efficient way to understand oppression based on identity within a social formation that is dominated by the capitalist mode of production (which is most of the world). Additionally, I argue, since we are going back to the 1970s, we need to take Althusser's (2014) work on the reproduction of capitalism and ideology seriously again. I will do this first by first exploring the methodological and theoretical differences between intersectionality theorists and SRT. Then, I will to attempt to provide a historical-materialist conception of how oppressive ideologies get embedded into the capitalist mode of production to the degree that they become essential to the functioning and reproduction of that system (Sumner 1979). Finally, I offer some thoughts on how we can apply SRT to real political praxis.

Intersectionality and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT)

Intersectional thought has become so incorporated and ingrained into contemporary feminist though that Naomi Zack states that intersectionality "a leading feminist paradigm" (as cited in Nash 2008, 89). Intersectionality has a "theoretical dominance" of understanding and "conceptualizing identity" (Nash 2008. 89). Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989 139), who coined the term intersectionality, defines it as taking seriously and understanding the "multidimensionality of marginalized subjects." It has become so entrenched in feminist thought that Nash (2008, 89) even calls it a "buzzword" that academics use to show that they are not abstracting away from difference even if their studies merely mention difference rather than seriously engage with it. Though there are similarities between intersectionality, originally coined by Crenshaw (1993), and SRT there are some key methodological and theoretical differences that have real political implications. As Bhattacharya (2017, 17) says: "what we theoretically determine has strategic import in the lived experience of our world." One key difference is that Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is rooted in Marxist understandings of social formations (i.e., historical materialism) and intersectionality does not. This may seem knit-picky considering that perhaps SRT and intersectionality have similar political goals in emancipating oppressed peoples, but as we will see there is clear division between the two in regards to how they understand root cause to oppression (intersectional theorists tend to not deal with "root causes") (Nash 2008).

While class is an important aspect for intersectional theorists, it is simply one of the many "vectors" and "lines" of difference that intersect externally with each other and thus not any more important than race, gender, sexuality, etc. For example, Helma Lutz claims that there are "fourteen lines of difference," while Charlotte Bunch suggests that "social differences run along 'sixteen vectors" (as cited in McNally 2017, 96). The problem with intersectionality for SRT theorists is that intersectional theorists do not connect "interlocking and mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality" back to the material base on which they arise from (Nash 2008, 89). It is as if these different "mutually reinforcing vectors" exist in air independently from any material determinants (determinant in the last instance). SRT takes the role modes of production play in social formations seriously.

Within intersectionality itself there has been critiques and modifications of the notion of separate preconstituted identities that externally relate with other most notably from Black Feminism and others (e.g., Kaur Dhamoon 2011; Nash 2008; Razack 1998). However, as McNally (2017, 96) points out: "these modifications continue to be plagued by the ontological atomism inherent in the founding formulations of intersectionality theory: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other." Theoretically formulating identity in this fashion limits the possibilities for political solidarity across difference. What is the alternative then? Through Patricia Hill Collins' understanding of interlocking systems of oppression being a "part of a single, historically created system," David McNally argues for a "dialectical organicism" understanding of oppression, which "sees a diverse and complex social whole as constitutive of every part, and each part as reciprocally constitutive of every other" (as citied in McNally 2017, 106; 100). Althusser (1969/1996) calls this "overdetermination." Understanding oppression in McNally's dialectical and historical materialist fashion one sees oppression in relation to totality and in relation to the social whole that capitalist mode of production creates, rather than in in fragments as postmodernist and poststructuralist thinking emphasizes. Why this is beneficial not only theoretically, but politically will be explored below.

If read in a certain fashion, McNally's understanding of oppression in relation to capitalism and social reproduction may be looked at with a critical eye by certain feminist thinkers. For example, Gayle S Rubin (2011, 37) acknowledges that "since no wage is paid for housework, the labor of women in the home contributes to the ultimate quantity of surplus value realized by the capitalist." However, Rubin continues: "to explain women's usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another. It is precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and the oppression of women." Rubin points out that women are systematically oppressed in social formations that can by no means be called capitalist or contain any signs of the capitalist mode of production and its relations. For example, foot binding in feudal China, or chastity belts cannot be explained in relation to capitalism or the reproduction of capitalism. However, I am not talking about capitalism per se, but rather the total system that the capitalist mode of production creates to ensure continued reproduction. The capitalist mode of production did not produce sexism, racism, heteronormativity, etc. In fact, the capitalist mode of production emerged from within sexist and racist social relations. However, the logics of capital accumulation have taken over them and transformed them to such a degree that it has made oppression of particular identities central and integral to the system's reproduction and has also changed these relations to the degree that these forms of oppression take on a historically specific character to the capitalist mode of production itself (more on this below). The social whole (i.e., the combination of the base and superstructure) that capitalism creates relies upon racist, sexist, heteronormative, ableist ideologies to sustain itself and reproduce itself.

This expanded notion of social reproduction that exists within SRT will help us better conceptualize and understand how each kind of particular oppression is ingrained in this complex web of the social whole created by the capitalist mode of production. Each particular mode of production creates its own particular complex web of social relations. As Rubin (2011, 39) states: "The realm of human sex, gender, and procreation has been subjected to, and changed by, relentless social activity for millennia. Sex as we know it-gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood-is itself a social product." Additionally, the conceptualization sex/gender system, that Rubin (2011, 40) calls for to replace the term patriarchy, "is the product of the specific social relations which organize it." This means we can't fight heteronormativity without also fighting racism, ableism, etc., at the same time as they are all systematically integrated and connected all at once.

All of this has implications for intersectional theory because to be related systematically (i.e., a part of the social whole that a mode of production creates) involves more than simply intersection. Lines or vectors that intersect can do so at random and haphazardly. Systems cannot. Thus, with SRT: "These relations [of oppression] do not need to be brought into intersection because each is already inside the other, co-constituting one another to their very core. Rather than standing at intersections, we stand in the river of life, where multiple creeks and streams have converged into a complex, pulsating system" (McNally 2017, 107).

Before we go any further, we must clarify what is SRT exactly. In a general sense it is about understanding that the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process" (Luxton 2006, 36). This theoretically vindicates the equal importance of different and variegated types of work that exists in a particular social formation. Work that is done in the home, childrearing, work of care, etc. is equal and just as important to the functioning of the capitalist system as the work done in a factory, in academia, restaurants, etc. As Marx (275, my emphasis) says: "The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced." And this is done through social reproduction. Work that occurs outside production. Social reproduction as defined by Brenner and Laslett (1991, 314) is:

the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally. It involves various kinds of socially necessary work-mental, physical, and emotional-aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined means for maintaining and reproducing population. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children is accomplished, how care of the elderly and infirm is provided, and how sexuality is socially constructed.

Thus, this necessarily changes and expands orthodox Marx's notion of class. The traditional notion of class for Marxists can be defined by a person's objective relationship to the means of production (technology, machines, tools, factories, land, etc). One group of people own and control the means of production (the capitalist class), and another own nothing but their own labor-power which they are forced to sell to a capitalist, so they can earn a wage to purchase- through the capitalist market-their means of subsistence (the working class). For SRT this traditional conceptualization of class is correct, but not adequate and complete enough if we want to take the labor that is done outside the workplace as fundamental in reproduction of the capitalist system in general. Thus, the working class "must be perceived as everyone in the producing class who has in their lifetime participated in the totality of reproduction of society-irrespective of whether that labor has been paid for by capital or remained unpaid" (Bhattacharya 2017, 89).

This reconceptualization of class for Social Reproduction Theory helps us "restore a sense of the social totality to class," and through this we can "immediately begin to reframe the arena for class struggle" (Bhattacharya 2017, 90). Capital can extract more surplus-value from the unpaid-or under-paid in the case of domestic workers-labor that is done in the household. Capital is able to extract more surplus-value from the realm of social reproduction because the value of labor-power is defined by the value of the bundle of commodities necessary for the worker to come back to work the next day. This "sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker's replacement i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market" (Marx 1990, 275). If part of the reproduction of labor-power (i.e., the worker) relies upon the unpaid or underpaid domestic labor, which is done historically by women, the value of labor-power consequently remains low because that bundle of commodities necessary for the worker to reproduce his/her/their self does not have to include child-rearing, cleaning, cooking, care work, etc., thus, capital can pay the worker less and make increased surplus-value. Thus, through the SRT framework we can consider the struggle for better conditions within the realm of social reproduction as a class struggle as well rather than as simply a gender or woman's issue by itself.

Gender and Sexual Ideology, Capitalism, and Althusser

In the first volume of Capital Marx goes at length about the difference between the formal and real subsumption (or in other translations subjection) of labor under capital. Capital is a "coercive relation;" it forces all social relations to bend to its will. Capital first emerges in already-existing material and social relations which are mostly feudal, such as particular types of division of labor, a particular level of development of productive forces, gender relations, sexual relations, etc. As Marx (1990, 425) says: "At first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history." In the historical development of capitalism in England, capital finds the labor-process in its undeveloped handicraft form where workers have a degree of power in regard to the pace and type of work that is being done. However, "the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value" (Marx 1990, 425). Thus, the labor process has to be revolutionized to match the demands and logics of capital accumulation. The real subsumption of labor under capital occurs when "[i]t is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker" (Marx 1990, 425). The production process completely controlled and dominated by capital can dictate the pace of work and the type of work that is done by individual workers. As Marx would say, dead labor (machines, technology) under capitalism suck the blood of living labor-power like a vampire. I argue that a similar process occurs to other social relations such as gender, sexuality, and race once capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production in a particular social formation. While I do not have enough room in this essay to explore how each social relation gets transformed in detail, I will use Barrett's (1980/2014) work (and others) to help us think through the role ideology, and in particular gender ideology play in sustaining the capitalist system itself and how it has been so transformed by the capitalist mode of production that they both cannot function as they currently do without each other.

Alan Sears (2017, 185) argues that "[g]endered norms are not simply a discourse but a set of everyday practices framed by a matrix of power relations that structure production and reproduction in capitalist societies." Ideas about masculinity do not just emerge from nowhere, they exist and are produced in particular historical epochs. It is historically specific to the capitalist mode production that production and social reproduction (work and life) occur in different spaces (though these spaces can be "porous" as some point out). The different lived experiences between this spatial division of labor between care/social reproductive labor, historically and contemporarily occupied by women, and wage-labor creates variegated ideas and understandings about the world (Smith 1990). In relation to this we can also see how "the formation of identities around erotic preferences (such as 'lesbian')" are a "product of capitalist social organization" (Sears 2017, 173). John D'Emilio (1992, 8) offers a compelling argument that capitalism created the material foundations for the rise of a homosexual identity:

Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity-an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction to the one's own sex (see also Morton 2001 for a similar argument in relation to the Closet)

Can we not see here how capitalism emerges within a given set of gender and sexual relations and fundamentally changes them to serve its own needs i.e., formally subsumes them and constructs new ideologies around them? Michele Barrett (1980/2014) argues that there is an "integral connection between ideology and the relations of production." The classical view of "relations of production" are simply defined by class relations. Barrett says this is inadequate if we want to construct a historical materialist theory of the ideology of gender, sex, race, etc. Gender "ideology has played an important part in the historical construction of the capitalist division of labor and in the reproduction of labor power" (Barrett 1980/2014, 98). In addition, "[r]elations of production reflect and embody the outcome of struggles: over the division of labour, the length of the working day, the costs of reproduction" (Barrett 1980/2014, 99, my emphasis). If we take seriously Barrett's arguments about how gender ideology is a part of the relations of production and that they play a fundamental role in reproducing the capitalist system in general, then we must engage with Althusser's ideas about ideology and its apparatuses because Althusser (2014, 209- 217) argues that the relations of production play the determining role, "in the last instance," in characterizing a social formation. I want to turn to Althusser here because I think his concept the Ideological State Apparatuses can help schematically see and understand how the gender and sexual ideology that is embedded in the relations of production are reproduced and how they can be struggled over and thus changed to benefit oppressed groups under the capitalist mode or production.

Althusser (2001; 2014) complicates the orthodox Marxist theory of the state by differentiating two apparatuses where a ruling class consolidates and perpetuates its class power-the Repressive and Ideological State apparatuses respectively (RSA and ISA). The Repressive State Apparatuses, like the army, police, the courts, the prisons, function mostly though violence and the Ideological State Apparatuses function mainly through ideology (the ruling class' ideology):

the ISAs 'function' massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of 'the ruling class'.

It is largely within the ISAs where the relations of production are reproduced "behind a 'shield' provided by the repressive State apparatus" (Althusser 2001, 101). Examples of the ISAs are: Churches, the family, schools, law, communications (press, radio, television, etc), political ISA ("the political system, including the different Parties"), the cultural ISA ("Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.") (see Althusser 2001, 96). One may question the ISAs by saying how can the state be involved in matters that are "private" like the family, churches, literature, the Arts, sports, etc? Althusser states (2001, 97):

The distinction between the public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its 'authority.' The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is 'above the law': the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are 'public' or 'private'. What matters is how they function. Private institutions can perfectly well 'function' as Ideological State Apparatuses.

Althusser does not mean the state owns the ISAs in any legal sense. He means that the ideology of the ruling class (which holds state power) runs throughout the different ISAs to reproduce the relations of production and thus the capitalist system as a whole. The ISAs do not reproduce the relations of production in any "functionalist" as some accuse Althusser as being (e.g., Barrett 1980/2014, amongst many others). Quite the contrary, Althusser (2014, 218-219, my emphasis) stresses that:

the dominant ideology is never…exempt from class struggle. […] the reproduction of the dominant ideology is not simple repetition, simple reproduction. It is not even automatic, which is to say mechanical…The combat for the reproduction of the dominant ideology is a combat that is never over; it has to be taken up again and again, and always under the law of the class struggle" (Althusser 2014, 219, my emphasis) [1]

One can see that change is possible both within the confines of the capitalist mode of production and even wholesale change of the mode of production if the political and material conditions allow it.

Synthesizing Barrett's and Althusser's ideas about ideology and the relations of production can be fruitful for oppressed groups under the capitalist mode of production. Even though Althusser did not necessarily theorize about gender, sex, race in any meaningful way or length, we can extend his notion of the ruling ideology that exists within each ISA as being composed of ideologies/discourses about gender, sex, race, ability, etc. With Social Reproduction Theory's expanded notion of class and class politics, we can conceptualize how oppressed groups can struggle politically to change their material and discursive relations i.e., by forcing a change in the dominant ideology in a particular Ideological State Apparatus. We can see this abstract claim if we look historically to the 1960s. The Women's and Civil Rights movements were movements that radically changed the dominant ideology that existed in the family ISA, the cultural ISA, etc. The movements from the 1960s (and other historical eras) can be broadly conceived as class struggles within the Ideological State Apparatuses. It is useful to think of class struggle in this broad conception because it can unite many people with largely different lived experience against the most organized class to ever exist in human history: capital.

Though these ideological changes within particular ISAs are important and do improve the lot of oppressed groups, as long as the capitalist mode of production exists these changes are limiting in two senses. One, the ideological changes get re-incorporated (i.e., appropriated) to the logics of capital accumulation and the production of surplus-value (i.e., capitalist profit from the exploitation of labor-power within the production process). Second, certain people within oppressed groups will always be silenced, excluded, etc., because complete "inclusion" (in quotations for the lack of a better word) and equality is impossible in a capitalist society where power relations are an ingrained structural feature. Capitalism is a class-based society and thus inherently unequal, exploitative, and oppressive.

I must mention in passing that these ideological struggles cannot be thought of as separate or divorced from their material bases. New ideas/ideologies do not just emerge from air, they are tied to the development of the productive forces:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution [(i.e., class struggle within the Ideological State Apparatuses)] (Marx 1970, 21).

Some scholars associate the move from Fordist standardized production techniques to more flexible, just-in-time production as being the material condition that undergirds the cultural shifts in the western capitalist counties to "postmodern" capitalism, a capitalism that is more "inclusive" to difference. It is a capitalism where women, and people of color can be CEOs, where there is an emphasis on "diversity" and "multiculturalism" (see for example Harvey 1989; Morton 2001). So-called multiculturalism becomes integrated into the logics of capital accumulation in postmodern capitalism. Everything from "coming out of the closet" to oppressed culture becomes commodified. One can enjoy postmodern capitalism if one can afford it. As the productive forces develop and change, so do the ideas/ideologies that correspond to them. The material conditions exist to sustain a socialist (and eventually communist) society, where poverty is eradicated and society in general can struggle to put an end to oppressions that exist in relation to identity in a real meaningful way rather than in a generic fashion as is the case in capitalist social formations. What is blocking this from happening is the capitalist class ideology that permeates through the Ideological State Apparatuses. This is where a range of political and social struggles can (and must) unite to end sexism, racism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.

Conclusion

In this essay I argued that Social Reproduction Theory is the best way to understand oppression based on identity and that we have to once again take feminist arguments originally produced in the 1970s seriously again. Through SRT's understanding of oppression and its broader conceptualization of class we can better act upon on our world to change it. We have theorized enough about how bad the world is, it is time to change it; this was emphasized in the 1970s.

Cinzia Arruzza (2017, 196) urges that "diversity must become our weapon, rather than an obstacle or something that divides us." We must build solidarity amongst ourselves if we are going to win and create a better world. However, the current political forms we have cannot do this type a work. We need a multinational communist party that is led by women, LGBTQ, and people of color that intervenes in a range of struggles based on exploitation and oppression and connect how each struggle/oppression connects to the broader social whole and totality of the capitalist mode of production. Not everyone sees their group-based oppression/struggles as class struggle. This is not necessary, but a political party that is involved in a multitude of struggles can overcome this problem. Arruzza argues that "[i]n lived reality, class, race, and gender inequality are not experienced as separate and compartmentalized phenomena that intersect in an external way: their separation is merely the outcome of an analytical thought process, which should not be mistaken as a reflection of experience" (Arruzza 2017, 195). Taking a time machine back to resurrect the Marxist feminism of the 1970s (that tended to ignore difference and suffered from essentialism at times) and to put it in conversation with a nuanced and contemporary Social Reproduction Theory can provide a theoretical and political plane of analysis that is useful for activists involved in many different struggles.

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Notes

[1] I am quoting Althusser at length here out of necessity. There are plenty of misconceptions of Althusser's work in the social sciences and humanities in general and in Marxist circles in particular.