Understanding class relations and fiscal redistributions requires an intersectional approach-- any attempt to revise welfare programs under a capitalist society will always relegate identity and social reproduction to a secondary role.

In her essay “What’s Radical about [Feminist] Radical Political Economy,” Jennifer Cohen highlights attention to processes of social reproduction and care provision that include unpaid work (2018). Her comprehensive account enables me to focus on another distinct, though related, issue: the conceptualization of collective identity and conflict—more pointedly, Whose identity? Which conflict? Here, I part ways with Marxist feminism. Feminist scholars coming from the Marxian tradition tend to analyze processes of social reproduction in class-centric terms, describing employers as the primary beneficiaries of family commitments that lower the cost of producing labor power. This was built into the early Wages for Housework slogan and comes through very clearly in Sylvia Federici’s account of the transition to capitalism in Europe, depicting capitalists as inventors of patriarchal practices such as witch hunts (2004). Fast-forwarding to the US economy today, Katherine Moos provides detailed estimates of the changing distribution of the costs of social reproduction between employers and workers (2021). The riveting polemic titled The Care Manifesto points its most accusatory finger at capitalism, with little attention to the precapitalist antecedents of patriarchal institutions (Chatzidakis et al. 2020; Folbre 2021a). None of these accounts ignore nondirectly-class-related issues: sexism, racism, colonialism, and homophobia often enter the narratives. Yet these phenomena are typically subsidiary to economic analysis of capitalist dynamics, and their relevance derives largely from the ways in which they impede the development of class consciousness. The common derogation of the term “identity politics” on the left implies that it is a form of false consciousness (for an inspired polemic on this topic, see Walters 2018). Marxist economists generally insist that the concept of exploitation should be reserved for class dynamics alone (Chibber and Veneziani 2021). As I argue in my recent book, The Rise and Decline of Patriarchal Systems (2021b), a more nuanced picture of collective conflict has long been visible in the Marxian theory of collective conflict, deeply embedded in a term that Marx devised, and Lenin often deployed: the “aristocracy of labor.” Andre Gunder Frank (1967) elaborated in detail on the tensions between rich countries and poor ones overlaying the class divisions within them. As the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright made plain in 1968, professional/managerial workers often find themselves in contradictory class locations. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, first published in 1983, argued that racial capitalism extracted economic value from the racial/ethnic identity of subordinated groups (2005). The term “racial capitalism” obviously raises the same question as “patriarchal capitalism”; movement from a single-system to a dual-systems label implies a new ranking of priorities. It hardly seems incidental that African American and Latinx women were among the first to challenge such ranking, introducing the term “intersectionality” to picture the coexistence of many different dimensions of group-based inequality (Crenshaw 1990; Collins 1990, 2019; Romero 2017). This approach is closely linked to critical race theory, which explicitly analyzes racebased exploitation. Yet it also invites consideration of a variety of forms of inequality. Kimberlé Crenshaw (2015) notes that intersectionality is an “analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power.” It reaches beyond race/ethnicity, gender, and class to socially assigned identities based on categories such as sexual orientation and citizenship. Most radical economists Folbre 193 have been slower than sociologists to move beyond a class-centric analysis, perhaps because the Marxian definition of exploitation focuses on the extraction of surplus value in wage employment (relative lack of diversity in the economics profession may also be relevant). However, critical race theory is deeply embedded in the stratification economics approach developed by William Darity (2022) and others. Also, traces of intersectionality are evident in the pages of the Review of Radical Political Economics even before the year 2000. For instance, Evelyn Nakano Glynn (1985) explored “racial ethnic women’s labor,” and Randy Albelda (1985) described labor market segregation by both gender and race. Rhonda Williams (1987) explored dynamic interactions of class and race (1987). Robert Cherry (1991) examined tensions between corporate profitability created by “struggles against patriarchy and Jim Crow.” Rhonda Gottlieb (1984) and Julie Matthaei (1995) outlined radical analyses of sexuality. More recently, explicit critiques of heteronormativity have been published (Nguyen 2023). Articles like these set the stage for a major paradigm shift.