How should the Left understand racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism? And how do these categories relate to class?
Some view the problem as ideological: the ruling class uses bigotry as a distraction to divide the working class. If our anger is misdirected towards marginalised groups, those in power escape our notice, and therefore accountability. This is undoubtedly true: yesterday’s “welfare queens” and today’s “men in women’s bathrooms”, conjured virtually from thin air, absorb public attention. Meanwhile, the real scammers (crypto bros and AI boosters) and creeps (the Epstein clique) move freely through the heights of authority.
But there are also limits to this approach. It does not explain why these specific moral panics circulate, and why only at certain times. If all you need is a distraction, why do trans women and kids attract most of the attention, rather than, say, trans men? Why are we seeing a panic-driven transphobia now, rather than the commonplace transphobia of the 2000s?
Secondly, the ideological approach explains division, but not disparity. Sewing factional hatred among the working class will cause friction, but this does not account for the underinvestment and over-policing in marginalised communities. There is, of course, a real effort to push the trans community out of public life, but this only advances because the right mechanisms are available. Some wish to push capitalists out of public life too, but those efforts are rarely successful.
Another response, then, is to understand the systemic nature of oppression. This model goes a step further to read injustice as a result of institutional injury and historic intervention. Racism, to use an obvious example, might describe the ongoing effects of colonisation which cleaved Māori communities from their lands, culture, and means of subsistence – then link these to unequal rates of poverty and life expectancy.
On closer inspection, more questions arise. Which systems are at play, and how do they interact? Do racism and capitalism converge, or move in different circuits? Does capitalism produce racism, or the other way around?
These questions are neither meaningless nor purely abstract – they lie at the heart of our strategy. All too often these systems are seen as separable: capitalism and racism intersect and both must be opposed, but on different terms. As a result, we find ourselves often starting from a place where anti-colonialism is somehow outside “union business”, for example.
What’s missing here is an understanding that social relations are not independent parts which occasionally collide like so many atoms, but – as the term suggests – are fundamentally relational. In the words of the Marxist scholar Himani Bannerji, they can only “come into being in and through each other.” While racism and capitalism may have separate components and functions, like the heart and the lungs they cannot be disarticulated.
I argue in this piece that Social Reproduction Theory (SRT), a rising field in Marxist theory, provides us with a useful way to understand oppression in the present.
Beyond the Economy and Back
Knowing that systems of oppression are co-produced (not just intersectional) is a helpful heuristic, but the harder task is explaining how this relationship breaks down on a concrete level, and where the belief in their separation comes from.
One major obstacle for Marxists is the modern view of the economy as a sterile field of stock markets, taxes, trade agreements, monetary policy, and employment figures. In other words, a view of human activity as a set of data points and transactions, rather than personal interactions and relationships.
Marxists who harp on about the economy then, are sometimes accused of reintroducing those rigid structures and overriding questions of, say, sexism and culture. For some Marxists – known as class reductionists – this is unfortunately the intent.
This view of the economy, however, is both un-Marxist and ahistorical. Pure “economics” is a fairly new invention arising from the late 19th century, when it replaced the original term “political economy” – a properly interdisciplinary field. And even then its impersonal assumptions were not simply accepted. Many forget that Marx’s central work Capital was subtitled A Critique of Political Economy, exposing the “hidden abode” where “the secret of profit making” is discovered to be exploited human labour.
Moving in closer, we might notice that our word for “economy” comes from the Greek oikonomia (meaning “household management”) which describes the stewardship of resources in one’s immediate living environment. And it’s here that Marxist-feminists investigated an “abode” which is more hidden still: the home where the essential requirement for the economy – the worker – is produced in the first place.
If workers produce all value in the economy, then the reproductive labour of washing sheets, cooking dinner, mopping floors, bandaging wounds, growing vegetables, changing nappies, dressing kids, driving grandparents, packing lunches, and cleaning kitchens is indispensable to capitalism, yet disavowed. As philosopher Nancy Fraser puts it, since at least the industrial era capitalist societies have:
separated the work of social reproduction from that of economic production. Associating the first with women and the second with men, they have remunerated ‘reproductive’ activities in the coin of ‘love’ and ‘virtue,’ while compensating ‘productive work’ in that of money.
In reality, those two kinds of work are clearly inseparable. This is the key insight of Social Reproduction Theory: the circuits of production and reproduction are linked in one constant, fluid process. Since capital needs to keep people returning to work, and as cheaply as possible, it must regulate life both within and without the workplace.
So it’s not that Marxists reduce every problem to the economy. Rather, we recognise economics as a far more capacious, personal category than the one we’re often taught – siloed and drained of life.
Class Struggle Reimagined
But we move too fast if we take the home as our starting point of social reproduction. There are a whole number of ways a working class gets replenished: in prisons, retirement homes, barracks, and through immigration. An individual may also cycle through a whole network of life-making institutions throughout a given week, such as a school, marae, and doctor’s office. For Lise Vogel, who made a groundbreaking contribution to SRT in her 1983 work Marxism and the Oppression of Women, “the actual working out of a specific class-society’s forms of reproduction of labour-power is a matter for historical investigation – and, in the present, for political intervention as well.”
This view opens up a more diverse understanding of social reproduction, and prompts us to recalibrate its connection to oppression. So let’s take a step back to observe SRT’s central contribution.
The point of confrontation between labour and capital is often occupied by the wage: capitalists need to drive down wages to ensure steady profits, while workers need to increase wages to satisfy their needs. For obvious reasons, this encounter is staged at the point of production. Workers negotiate for better pay and strike when talks break down.
But for capitalism, the purpose of the wage is in fact twofold. The first is to purchase a certain amount of labour power (our capacity to labour), seen in the conflict above. The second is to reproduce workers, both daily and generationally. Which raises the question: what do they need in order to be reproduced?
The answer lies at the heart of our problem. From capital’s perspective, all that’s needed is to “reproduce the muscles, nerves, bones and brains of existing workers, and to bring new workers into being.” Anything the worker consumes “over and above that minimum for his own pleasure is seen as unproductive consumption” (Marx in Capital vol. 1).
From the worker’s perspective, just the opposite is true. She strives to raise her standard of living as high as possible through comprehensive healthcare, worthwhile education, safe housing, and reliable transport – all of which is made possible, in one form or another, through production.
What a worker needs to survive is therefore not fixed, but determined by class struggle. Getting the worker to accept a lower standard of living lowers the baseline for wages and reduces the input costs required to reproduce her life outside the workplace. Any time the capitalist class can relinquish these obligations by encouraging gig work, externalising care responsibilities onto families, and withholding climate protections, it triumphs.
From this vantage, we can see how capital submits vast areas of social and cultural life to the logic of exchange. And as the antagonism between capital and labour deepens, as we see today, the stronger this submission becomes.
Conclusion
How does this link to oppression?
It would be a mistake to imagine that capital achieves this task without respect to gender, race, sexuality, and ability. We have already seen how it entrenches sexist notions of care work to exploit women in the home.
Capital is most able to advance this project in communities and geographies that have been already dismissed and dispossessed, without the resources to mount a successful defence. This is what the activist-scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organised abandonment”: a restructuring, on the part of the ruling class, of what we care about and who we care about. Which populations, regions, and services are considered essential to economic growth, and which are considered irrelevant – to be tossed out of our decision-making and our calculations.
It should be no surprise, in this framework, that Black and Brown migrants become constant targets of divestment and corporate predation. For capital, they merely represent the possibility of fungible labour washing in and out like so much flotsam and jetsam.
Race, here, functions as a mediator of class struggle. While on one hand NZ First’s anti-migrant rhetoric threatens to destabilise the New Zealand-India Free Trade Agreement, on the other it provides a stopbank to aspirations of providing Indian migrants with anything like long-term stability or access to the full breadth of social support. Just listen to Shane Jones admit to using his “butter chicken tsunami” comment to prevent the possibility of migrants “clogging our services”.
It’s sometimes noted in SRT spaces that a “politics of redistribution” cannot be separated from a “politics of recognition.” It would be incredibly difficult to fight for material equity, such as ending migrant exploitation, if we refuse to respect cultural differences. The reverse, then, must also be true: a “politics of prejudice” cannot be severed from a “politics of disparity.” Lowering the social value of certain groups of people prepares lowering their economic status. As Gilmore likes to remind us, “capitalism requires inequality, and racism enshrines it”. To that list we can add sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism.
To return to our opening division, it becomes clear that the “ideological” and “systemic” approaches to oppression are in fact deeply interwoven. With this lens, we can see that rejecting the disgusting rhetoric advanced by the likes of Shane Jones, Andrew Tate, JK Rowling, and others is not simply an issue of culture, but an issue of class.
Banner image: Part of a poster created by Lotta Femminista per il salario al lavoro domestico di Padova (feminist struggle for wages for housework group of Padua) for International Women’s Day March 8th, 1973. Image credit: Lotta Femminista per il salario al lavoro domestico di Padova
References
Bannerji, Himani. Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism, Women’s Press, 2020.
Bhattacharya, Tithi, editor. ““How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class.” Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, Pluto Press, 2017, pp. 68–93
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation, edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, Verso 2022.
Fraser, Nancy. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” New Left Review, vol. 86, no. 86, 2014, pp. 55–72.
Fraser, Nancy. “Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism.” Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, Pluto Press, 2017, pp. 21–36.
Lewis, Holly. The Politics of Everybody: Feminism, Queer Theory, and Marxism at the Intersection. NBN International, 2016.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes, vol. 1, Penguin, 1976.
McNally, David. “Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory.” Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, edited by Tithi Bhattacharya, Pluto Press, 2017, pp. 94–111.
