Against Intersectionality: A Warning to Young Communists
In the last few years communists have struggled against the bourgeois academic onslaught of identity politics, with us, the CPGB-ML, going so far as to pass a motion at the last congress making open advocacy of identity politics grounds for expulsion. The reasoning of this is simple: identity politics is bourgeois and divides groups of people, particularly workers, through dichotomy, pitching black people against white people, men against women, able bodied people against disabled people, etc.
This dualistic dead end does not unify workers on common ground, namely that of class, and by extension socialism. Furthermore, it lends itself to leaving the common enemy of workers, the bourgeoisie, utterly unscathed. In fact it merely operates as a means of deflecting the blows of working people away from capitalism and instead leads them to the path of entrenching chauvinism, prejudice and cannibalising their own class, rather than uniting it upon economic lines.
The further danger with identity politics, including intersectionality, is that, whilst utterly depending on bourgeois content (i.e. the prevailing capitalist cultural and academic concepts and ideological framework), it all too often dons the garments of socialist form, yet obscures, relegates or outright discards class.
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