Here are some examples of the perm!

Patterson developed a theory of Marxist feminist praxis that held that in the context of US capitalism, black women faced multiple oppressive relations that resulted in their greater exploitation under capitalism: of class, race and gender (Gore 2011; McDuffie 2011). In her essay, “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” she wrote, “(o)ver the whole land, Negro women meet this triple exploitation – as workers, as women, as Negroes” (Patterson 1936). Claudia Jones, a communist party member who worked on the Scottsboro campaign, further elaborated Patterson’s invocation of historically specific relationships to exploitation (Davies 2007). Jones saw these complex relations as locations for greater strength among workers, rather than solely sites of division to be overcome by class solidarity. “The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressive seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is enhanced” (Guy-Shefthall 1995, 108). Jones argued that Marxist feminist struggles shaped by what Patterson called the “triple exploitation” faced by black women in the US could best lead the communist movement for liberation as a whole. As an early theory of intersectional praxis, Patterson and Jones proposed a Marxist feminist politics guided by the differential sites of oppression and exploitation faced by women of color, rather than simply by women workers. In 1977, the Combahee River Collective members theorized the liberatory possibilities for this praxis: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression” (Guy Shefthall 1995).

The praxis of intersectional organizing on the left informed movements for reproductive justice and the movement for welfare rights, led by poor women of color in the United States in the 1960s (Ransby 2003). Both movements attacked ethics of women’s place in dominant regimes of heterosexuality, marriage and the family (Tillman 1970). The reproductive justice movement sought bodily autonomy for women’s reproductive decisions, and material state support to fully realize those choices (Ross and Solinger 2017). In addition, it linked reproductive justice to dismantling the carceral state that strictly policed (as it constituted) the class politics of gendered, raced and ethnicized embodiment within capitalism (Davis 1981). The welfare rights movement demanded a basic income from the US state that historically had excluded them from the postwar social wages for single mothers. These sites of praxis further pushed Marxist feminism to analyze different histories of oppression as co-constitutive in sites of reproduction and production.

In India, Australia and South Africa, indigeneity and caste as well as race shaped Marxist feminist praxis: what the All India Democratic Women’s Association called inter-sectoral organizing in the 1990s (Armstrong 2014). Marxist feminists based in South Asia theorized the centrality of landless and land-poor farmers’ unfreedom to the working class and agrarian politics of women in particular (Patnaik 2007; Ghosh 2009; Karat 2005). They argued that Marxist feminist movements should begin in rural areas, with the demands of the masses of women leading feminist politics as a whole. Whether called inter-sectoral or intersectional, these methods of organizing that emphasize acute sites of oppression have fostered land-based social movements in coalition with labor movements as a means to connect agricultural workers to the industrial proletariat (Deere and Leon 2001; Tsing 2005). Intersectional organizing actively develops movement leaders among women from oppressed communities, and seeks goals prioritized by the most dispossessed people (Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).