Division of people through their identities fails to dismantle the system — affs claims on their individualized, compounded oppression instills capitalistic tendencies used to move up on the economic latter.

Crenshaw (1989) used the metaphor of a crossroads to develop the notion of intersectionality. One road denotes race, another denotes gender, and so on, and they all intersect. This framework is helpful for seeing how distinct axes of oppression compound others (Haider, 2018:7). But ultimately, intersectionality is a scaled-up version of IP. The intersecting roads of single oppressions are all built on sandy surfaces of subjectivity. As an idealist and empiricist framework, IP cannot answer: What is objectively common to the experience of all oppressed groups? Pursuing the roads metaphor, what explains the nature of the surface on which different roads of identity intersect and without which there cannot be roads? What explains whether any road is causally (not morally) more important than another, and how/why they intersect?

The main limitation of IP, including in its intersectionalist incarnation, as a theoretical vehicle for the fight for social justice, stems from it ignoring the alternative theory that social oppression is caused fundamentally by class exploitation and its defense by the state. This theory entails several inter-related aspects. (1) While capital is indifferent to the nature of concrete labor, labor is not, because some kinds of labor are “dirty” (e.g., scavenging) and/or require back-breaking manual exertion. The capitalist system uses oppressed groups to get this sort of work done: The “lowest castes” (Dalits) do stinking, scavenging work in India; racialized immigrants do hard manual work (e.g., strawberry picking) in rich countries. (2) Capitalist employers super-exploit oppressed groups by paying them wages below those paid to others and justify this in terms of their purported inferior status–as if a black man or woman possesses less than one unit of labor power of average quality. (3) Similarly, capitalism’s political system denies these groups access to a social wage (government benefits) and/or full democratic rights, because they are seen as unworthy—as if a racialized immigrant possesses less than a unit of citizenship. Now, these mechanisms (see points 1–3) lead to a major consequence: Dividing common people on the basis of identities undermines their ability to fight both class-exploitation and the state power supporting it, as also efforts to obtain material and other concessions promoting social justice. Consequently, working people themselves use IP to compete for resources and jobs in a society, one where the economic realm is effectively beyond their democratic control. Moreover, as Du Bois (1935) would say, they also use IP as a psychological compensation for their suffering.

IP is thus practically “averse” to a serious consideration of objective class relations and to class politics. To the extent that IP considers class at all, its consideration takes four forms, none conducive to the fight for social justice. Firstly, IP, including intersectionalism, sees class idealistically as classism with cultural- social prejudice against working-class people (or “the poor”) treated as parallel to racism and sexism. This reduces class to an identity category. Secondly, IP’s occasional attention to class’s material dimension manifests in its silence about the relations of property and production and consequently in its concern with distribution only because it sees class in terms of some people having less income or fewer use values than others.