Culture Vulture

 “Intersectional Class Struggle - Theory and Practice,” by Michael Beyea Reagan, 2021

This is a somewhat labored academic exercise by a proletarian anarchist who wishes to insert a ‘new’ paradigm of class struggle against Marxism and identity liberalism.  It is not really about class struggle.  Much of this book is repetitive for those familiar with labor history, Marxist and anarchist thinking or the debates around identity.  It might be helpful to liberals who don’t understand the role of class in every struggle.  Reagan’s real purpose however is to erect a straw man – a crude Marxist who supposedly ignores the roles of racism, sexism, nationalism and the like, doing his part to echo the archaic claim that Marxism is ‘class reductionist’ or ‘determinist’ and doesn’t understand culture.  

Reagan equates economics and culture as equals, as both are material forces.  True enough, but culture ultimately serves economics – that is if you are actually paying attention to the root of social materiality.  The exploitation of women is not really about male chauvinism, it is to provide free labor in the home and cheap labor outside it.  The root of slavery and the present super exploitation of ‘people of color’ is not really about white supremacy, but about profits.  The root of indigenous genocide and destruction is about land, oil and minerals. The hostility to other countries is not really about patriotism or group cohesion, it is in order to dominate them.  These are the actual positions of the ruling class at least.  The others are positive byproducts for them.

Certainly the holders of these views, if they are workers, benefit in certain emotional and even material ways, but not as much as the capitalists.  Dubois pointed this out years ago. They can also be damaged materially, though they might not be aware of it.  At present, male chauvinism, white supremacy and nationalism are cruel and crude ideologies to enable and justify exploitation, while weakening the working-class by creating color and gender semi-castes within the working class.  Patriotism is meant to embrace a ‘national’ solidarity with the capitalists, our enemies.  All these have to be opposed in any class struggle against capital and nearly every actual socialist understands this. Certainly Marxists have been in the forefront of these fights. 

Reagan does not mention nationalism by the way, which I’ll get into later.

Reagan goes through historical examples of the special exploitation of factory girls in Lowell, Massachusetts and Bacon’s Rebellion, which united U.S. ‘white’ indentured servants and ‘black’ slaves against the wealthy, giving rise to the first divisive Black Codes. He talks about a ‘black’ union organizer in Memphis and Latino migrants in the Central Valley.  He mentions how racism and sexism have been used in the past, sometimes by unions, to privilege certain sectors of the working class.  None of this is new information.

Materialism

Reagan explores the early history of materialism through the labor theory of value, John Locke, Alex de Touqueville, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Pyotr Kropotkin and Karl Marx. With no criticisms of Proudhon or Kropotkin, he gives a lukewarm thumbs up to Marxism, while decrying its supposed crude materialist errors - which he is about to fix. He claims Marx had no theory of class (or at least one he didn’t write down) but oddly, Marxists have somehow developed an excellent theoretical class understanding.  His focus on the labor theory of value ignores Marx’s more accurate insight in Critique of the Gotha Program – that labor AND nature produce all wealth. 

Reagan’s two examples of mostly cultural phenomena are the inferior treatment of women and fascism.  Yet both have heavy material influences.  Women have had a whole history of earlier class societies in which they were second-class citizens, mostly centered on their role in village, slave, tribute and feudal social structures before they were proletarianized.  Added to this are the very material facts of child-birth, breastfeeding and resulting childcare, which made it easier for class society to relegate women to a ‘private’ sphere.  Then there is the role of physical strength in warfare, hunting and early manual labor like coal mining, construction and the like, where women were relegated to the home or village due to their smaller size or their child-care role.  They flooded into the proletariat in England when their finer motor skills came into play in textile factories, which was the position of the mill owners.

On fascism, the need of severely crisis-ridden capital for a fascist movement is obvious.  Most fascist ideas are cartoonish, absolute versions of ‘normal’ colonial, racist, sexist, geographic, violent, religious and mythical ideas promoted by capital.  But when they hit the ground and are realized, for some they result in jobs, wealth, profits, taking over businesses and land – i.e. material goods. 

The real issue is whether culture is autonomous. This is actually also the perspective of the Republican Party, which uses the ‘culture wars’ to obscure class, or the Democrats, who act like identity is their electoral strategy. It is also the position of post-modernism.  Certainly, like a bird, ideas can fly above the ground, untethered yet motivated, but eventually the bird must return to earth.  Some 'birds' fly too high towards the sun, and their wings melt off. Even Engels criticized ‘mechanistic materialism,’ which seems to be what Reagan is doing here. In fact, I’ll buy a six-pack of good beer to the first person who can cite a cultural artifact that has no material roots.

Critics of Marxism

Reagan cites Social-Democrat Eduard Bernstein as one of the first critics of Marx’s focus on the material roots of culture, i.e. base and super-structure. Bernstein complained in the 1890s that Marx’s predictions of an ‘imminent’ social revolution were unfounded and went on to develop an evolutionary and reformist agenda.  In 1917 the Bolsheviks proved him wrong.  Right now the SDP that Bernstein inspired is in a coalition government running social-capitalist Germany, which is where that particular bird landed.

Reagan goes on to attack dialectical materialism through the writings of various anarchists; talks about Marxist E.P. Thompson’s focus on the dialogue between material reality and cultural reality; references Stuart Hall’s attacks on ‘dogmatic materialism.’  Two actual examples of ‘cultural' issues that Reagan uses are the prohibitions against homosexuality and marijuana.  This is laughingly untrue, as they are rooted in material needs of capital.  Homosexuality weakens the nuclear family and the reproduction of the working class - according to the boss class. They need more workers and consumers, not sex.  Marijuana laws are used as a club against Latinos, African-Americans and Euro-American youth, hipsters and workers as part of labor discipline and the terrorist incarceration state.

Reagan cites many later varieties of Marxists and revolutionaries – Dubois, Fanon, C.L.R. James, Cedric Robinson, Silvia Federici, The Combabee River Collective - who discuss culture, racism, sexism and sometimes ‘intersectionality.’  He is aware that nearly all present applications of ‘intersectionality’ omit or ignore class, which indicates their petit-bourgeois source and duplicity, many coming out of academe.

CLASS

Marxists don’t think class is just another intersection.  Tell me if I’m wrong. It is quite significant that nearly all of Reagan’s examples come from the U.S., not a more homogeneous society like Japan where ethnicity is not so prominent and where women are the second-class citizens. Reagan avoids looking at nations that are more homogeneous, which is why his focus is exclusively on the U.S. Many colonial countries in the 1800s were not teaming with the citizens of their empires as yet, so he ignores history too.  Yet Marx still wrote extensively on the deep oppression of the Irish and the African-American slave.  At the basis of class is economics - your role in production.  Ignoring that is like ignoring farmers and food.  In a sense, class is the universal.

There is only one brief mention of classes within ethnic communities in the book.  This consists of African-American professionals, entertainers or capitalist business people; Latino store owners; Asian-American professionals, Arab or Indian proprietors – name your nationality.  Nor is there a mention of classes within the Euro-American population.  Or a citation to middle-class, upper-class or capitalist women. These omissions show the truly universal quality of the class ‘intersection’ under capitalism – which cuts across every nation; every ethnicity; every gender, every religion, every sexual orientation.  This is why they are omitted by Reagan I suspect.

If the materialism and class that Reagan thinks he understands is rooted in economic life and our role in the universal requirement of production and survival as human bodies, then class remains the foundation, the ‘mother’ of all material intersections. Nor is this argument about ‘culture’ new at all.  Within Marxism it has been perfected for years, starting with people like Gramsci.  With the development of fully developed (and even overripe) capital in some countries, pure force is less and less necessary.  Ideology, propaganda and ‘culture’ replace other forms of coercion or 'togetherness.'  This has resulted in much more attention being paid by radicals to culture, propaganda and ideas in present capitalism than in the 1800s or even early to mid-1900s.

After a typical laundry list of struggles from the Paris Commune to Black Lives Matter protests, Reagan caps off the book with a true insight.  While he can’t define class either, (!!) he does say that the class structure in the U.S. is greatly variegated, mitigating against one party leading a revolution. This is part of a diatribe against Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who he claim ran a counter-revolution in 1918.  By the way Lenin’s What Is To Be Done doesn’t use the phrase ‘vanguard party’ – something adopted later by others. At this point in history it is quite likely, and certainly true today, that no one party is developing.  But a number of different socialist organizations that actually want social revolution might arise from different parts of the class. This raises the possibility of a Left Front, which could combine these groups in an organizational way and either join them into one, keep a broad governing alliance in a workers’ democracy or filter some out.

Nevertheless what this last section reveals is that the book is really not about intersectionality but is instead a sectarian anarchist attack on Marxism. Given anarchism, even proletarian anarchism, leans heavily in an ‘idealist’ direction, the overwhelming emphasis is on culture figures.  If you are a proletarian anarchist, you will enjoy this book.  If you are an academic liberal who has an incomplete understanding of ‘intersectionality’ you may benefit.  If you are a Marxist or an independent activist you will be bored. 

P.S. - Like so many liberals, government figures, media spokespeople and imprecise leftists, Reagan continues to use terminology that asserts there are multiple 'races.'  There is only one race, the human one.

P.P.S. - A Left Front has grown massively in Argentina, led by Trotskyists.  The left coalition in Chile just won an election, of which the Communist Party was part.  These efforts mirror the failed efforts of Syriza and Podemos in Europe several years ago, but presages a more revolutionary unity of the whole Left.  Latin American leftists are certainly light-years ahead of the Left in the U.S.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 14 year archive, with these terms:  “Towards Freedom - The Case Against Race Reductionism” (Reed); “Mistaken Identity”(Haider); “A Marxist Education”(Au); “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight” (Zizek); “The Populists Guide to 2020”(Ball); “White Trash” or the word “Marx.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 14, 2021