Feminism is the New Marxism

For much of the twentieth century, the world looked back on history wearing the fashionable, trendy, and somewhat inexpensive Marxist lenses. The idea that we could explain every conflict, economic system, or social interaction with two little words - "class struggle" - was pretty amazing. However, today we largely speak in the past tense as Marxism has been successfully challenged by new ideas and social theories in the 21st century. Recently, intersectional feminism has been used as a replacement to Marxism, and it quite incredibly manages to accurately explain... everything.

Firstly, let's recap the previous winner of How To Understand The World. Karl Marx's Das Capital and The Communist Manifesto quite literally changed history. In a frenzy of chain-losing and production-claiming, the twentieth century was largely shaped by a series of socialist and communist revolutions that permanently impacted international relationships and multiple wars. However Marxism is far more than the basis for autocratic regimes and impressive beards. It allows us to take a wide-lense look at society throughout history and understand how humans went from tiny agricultural communities to huge capitalist cities. Marxism tells us that humans have forever existed in a state of class struggle, and this tension has caused an inevitable progression forward into new and better societies. For example, several hundreds of years ago we had a system of masters and slaves. These two classes were in constant tension as the masters - who controlled capital and production - sought to get the most out of their slaves for as little as possible, while the slaves demanded more rights and benefits. As time went on, this system was no longer viable due to the built up tension between the demands of the two classes. So, society evolved into feudalism, where kings and lords continued to be the dominant class, but the peasantry were given more freedom and more autonomy. Again, the same tension between demands built, and society morphed into capitalism. Marx predicted that after capitalism, the next natural progression would be socialism, then communism; the latter being the ultimate goal of total equality where class tension was diluted until at last abolished.

Of course, the pure theory has never been properly tested, so we still can't know if Marx really did get it right. However this idea of class tension has since been applied to all areas of society, with many philosophers and sociologists claiming that Marxism can explain all history. However, intersectional feminism seems to poke holes in Marxist theory.

Intersectional feminism refers to feminism which acknowledges that there are multiple different layers of oppression in society, and many, many ways a single person may be oppressed or privileged. A woman has less privilege than a man, but a white woman may have more privilege than a black man depending on their circumstance, especially if she is wealthy while he is poor, or if she is cisgender while he is non binary. It understands that every person is born into a pre-existing set of standards and expectations that to a large degree, influence the courses of their lives. Of course we are all autonomous beings, but if you grow up solely under the media portrayal, traditional and social expectations of being east Asian, you will likely come to embody those and subconsciously allow those expectations to affect your life.

So what we see is a complex society full of thousands of different combinations of power and disadvantage, resulting in an uneven and convoluted social landscape, where everyone is starting from a slightly different leg-up. But when we go back to Marx's class struggle, it becomes very difficult to understand how there can only be a singular, all powerful tension that propels and entire society forward. There definitely is a distinction between those who have power over the means of production and those who are disadvantaged, and it does tent to correlate to race, sexuality, or gender identity. The bourgeoisie are often white, cisgender, able bodied etc. while the proletariat often include power minorities. However within each "class" are hundreds of tensions between different intersections of oppression, and it is very easy for a member of the proletariat to have much more privilege and power than a bourgeoisie, no matter how little control they have over production. Recently in America, wealthy, powerful black men have been systematically oppressed by proletariat white people due to the violence and police brutality. This tension has existed for many generations, yet has not necessarily caused a social progression to toward the dialectic.

Similarly, the proxy wars of the Cold War are better explained by understanding the racial rather than class tensions between the east and west, indicated by the unwillingness of the West to recognise any communist eastern bloc country as "white"; whiteness has always been an indication of power rather than race. If we accept a "jagged line" as the landscape of privilege in society as intersectional feminism supports, then the idea that two classes with a clear distinction of power are the predominant actors in creating social tension doesn't superimpose on that metaphorical diagram.

Many aspects of Marxism are still legitimate, but viewing history solely through a Marxist lense focuses only on two classes and two levels of power, when in fact we have hundreds and thousands of individual and often unique combinations of power that shape society independently of control over production.

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Hannah