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    Critica IS [ Volume 42 - Number 2 - ae Article ot Creel Seco Theoretical Foundations of an othe Ashort) 2014 . rinrund coin Anti-Racist Queer Feminist sspephcoutfeurasfertsonsar Box ta ose081990799 Historical Materialism erssagepubcom SAGE David Camfield University of Manitoba, Canada Abstract Bringing together Karl Marx's key intellectual contributions and the best of contemporary anti- racist (critical race) queer feminism is a promising direction for critical social theory. Important. studies exist that use this approach. However, its theoretical foundations have not been adequately clarified or elucidated; this article attempts to do so. The proposed anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism rethinks Marx's materialist conception of history and theory of the capitalist mode of production through the more expansive conceptions of social reality offered by anti- racist queer feminism while simultaneously reworking the latter contributions through Marx's critical materialism and particular attention to historical specificity and social form. Keywords Marx, Marxism, historical materialism, feminism, anti-racism, theory, sociology Introduction This article proposes that bringing together Karl Marx’s key intellectual contributions and the best of contemporary anti-racist (or critical race) queer feminism is a promising direction for critical social theory. The aim of this move is a sublation that simultaneously preserves and changes these elements in order to produce an anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism (I will also refer to this as reconstructed historical materialism).! The essential reason for bringing together these two bodies of thought in this manner is that each has generated vitally important insights while also being restricted in its explanatory power because of limitations that can be remedied with comple- mentary knowledge offered by the other. The proposed theory would rethink Marx’s path-breaking ‘materialist conception of history and powerful theory of the capitalist mode of production through the more expansive conceptions of social reality offered by anti-racist queer feminism while Corresponding author: David Camfield, Labour Studies Program, University of Manitoba, 114 Isbiscer Building, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2, ‘Canada, Email: david.camfeld@umanitoba.ca Gritical Sociology 42(2) simultaneously reworking these latter contributions through Marx’s critical materialism and par- ticular attention to historical specificity and social form. Important reconstructed historical materialist studies exist (e.g. Banerji, 1995, 2000, 2005; Brenner, 200( ‘ederici, 2004; Gilmore, 2007; Hennessy, 2000; Kinsman and Gentile, 2010; MeNally, 2006; Roediger, 2008; Sears, 2003). However, not much has been written about such an approach itself (exceptions include Banerji, 1995, 2005; Ferguson, 2008; Hennessy, 2000, 2006) and its theoretical foundations have not been adequately clarified or elucidated. This is the task that this article attempts, without claiming to offer the only possible social-theoretical basis for an anti- racist queer feminist historical materialism. ‘There has been relatively little dialogue between rigorously Marxist researchers and non- Marxist anti-racist feminist scholars in recent years.” As a result, ideas considered central to one of these intellectual communities are not always well understood by members of the other. This unfortunate situation informs the shape of this article, which proceeds by excavating what I take to be the most important contributions to social theory of Marx and anti-racist queer feminism, explaining the merits of each, suggesting why these ought to be rethought through each other and discussing some of the implications of doing so. The Best Marx ‘Marx’s theoretical work is a massive unfinished effort containing mistaken notions, unresolved tensions and lacunae as well as brilliant original intellectual breakthroughs and promising but undeveloped insights.’ It has long been difficult to consider Marx’s intellectual contributions out- side of how these have been understood by self-declared Marxists of various persuasions, and so a very brief discussion of Marxism is necessary. Most Marxist social theory has not in fact built on Marx’s key conceptual accomplishments, which it has therefore often obscured. As Simon Clarke (1991: ix) has put it: Marx laid the foundations of a critical social theory but, contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, he did not provide an all-encompassing world view. Marx marked out a critical project, which was to understand and to transform society from the standpoint of the activity and aspirations of concrete human individuals. Itis not that there is nothing of value in the social theory written by Marxists since Marx, but much of this has not illuminated his ‘foundations of a critical social theory’. Considered in terms of social theory, the most influential line of descent from Marx has been orthodox Marxism (or orthodox historical materialism). This offers precisely the kind of ‘all- ‘encompassing world view’ that Clarke rightly notes Marx did not attempt to produce. Its origins lie in the appropriation of some of Marx’s ideas in the late 1800s by European working-class move- ments that ‘harboured a majority orthodoxy as far removed from his problematic as vulgar Darwinism was from the paths opened up by Darwin’ (Bensaid, 2002: 261). Orthodox Marxism ‘was indelibly stamped by the ‘sensibility and the collective mentality of the period, saturated with scientism, dominated by monist materialism and the ideas of progress and evolution that derived from the natural sciences’ (Haupt, 1982: 281). This kind of social theory was later defended by Lenin (who partially broke from it after 1914 [Lowy, 1976]) and expounded by many other Russian writers. It became the official state ideology of the USSR, China and other ‘Communist’ states, and thereby shaped the worldview of theoreticians and activists globally. In addition, versions of it were also articulated by anti-Stalinist Marxists such as Ernest Mandel (Bensaid, 2009) and by late 20th-century socialist-feminism (Camfield, 2002). What the many variants of orthodox Marxism have in common is a failure, to varying degrees, to grasp Marx’s critical social theory. T Comfield 291 ‘What, then, is the “best Marx’ that ought to be part of the sublation needed to generate an anti- racist feminist queer historical materialism? My contention is that Marx’s crucial contributions to critical social theory are a new materialism, a novel attention to historical specificity and social form, a materialist conception of history, and a theory of the capitalist mode of production. These do not necessarily exhaust what Marx offers, but they are his paramount contributions. Of course, there is also much in Marx’s thought that deserves to be discarded A New Materialism® Feminist theorist Dorothy Smith (1987: 122-3) demonstrates a clear understanding of Marx’s materialism as: an ontology that first shifts us out of the discourse among texts as a place to start.... What is there to be investigated are the ongoing actual activities of real people ... The distinctive stance of Marx's materialism is the assertion that consciousness is inseparable from the individual ... This conception is of the social as existing in and only in actual people’s actual activities and practices, where the terms ‘individual,’ ‘activity,’ and ‘practice’ are taken to include the ‘subjective side’ or consciousness. This ‘social materialism of practice’ (Osborne, 2005: 26) is a starting point for a theory of human social activity. It does not merely invert an idealist elevation of ideas (or discourse) over matter in the manner of earlier and some later materialist philosophies (including many Marxisms). Rather, it rejects the dualism of material and ideal altogether and asserts the unity of consciousness and human individuals. Social existence and social consciousness are seen as an internally-related ensemble. Within that unity, there is a hierarchy of determination: bodies are prior to or determi nate of thought. ‘Starting from the standpoint of objects, of the non-conceptual, materialist critique resists all idealist moves to absorb the object into concepts’ (McNally, 2001: 74). This does not entail the dominance of ahistorical materiality, since “The world of objects is the world of objective fuman activity’, although ‘the objective world? is not reducible to ‘humankind and its history’ (McNally, 2001: 74). At the centre of this social ontology is human labour, the practical activity of members of the species in relationship with other members and with the rest of nature. Human beings produce and reproduce society, making history, though not, as Marx famously put it, ‘under circum- stances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and trans- mitted from the past’ (Marx, 1968: 97). Here Marx offers a concept of agency, a historical conception of human subjectivity.’ Labour in this broad sense is understood as conscious, social and inescapably linguistic (Marx and Engels, 1970: 51). As a consequence of being conscious, intersubjective and linguistic, labour entails the creation of meanings; in other words, it is always a cultural phenomenon. This social ontology involves a rejection of abstract notions of individ- ual and society in favour of a concept of social individuals (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 91). If individuals are ‘irreducibly social’ (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 93) and therefore historical, society is a dynamic ‘set of relationships that links individuals” (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 96, emphasis added) in time. Connected to this ontology is an epistemology which is a version of scientific realism, ‘the idea that the objects of scientific thought are real structures, mechanisms or relations ontologically irreducible to, normally out of phase with and perhaps in opposition to the phenomenal forms, Appearances or events they generate’ (Bhaskar, 1989: 134). Marx’s realism is not a naive one, although it is open to misreading as such (Ollman, 1976: 39). It is a realism that never loses sight of the historicity of knowledge as always a social product (Bhaskar, 1989: 136). er] aw Critical Sociology 42(2) Marx’s materialism is an attractive alternative to the linguistic idealism and Nietzscheanism that influence much anti-racist queer feminism. It acknowledges the biological dimension of the human species, and that therefore humans have biological life-requirements, without making the error of treating human social activity as determined by biology. How biological needs are satisfied is seen as a matter of social organization, not biological imperative. This materialism is compatible with the idea that there are emergent properties, such as the social characteristics of the human species, ‘which are not explicable according to the laws that operate at a prior level, inthis case human biol- ogy (Noonan, 2012). It is consistent with excellent recent work in natural and social sciences (c.g. Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Fine, 2010; Fuentes, 2012; Lewontin, 2000) that rejects biological deter- minism, shows how patriarchy, racism and heterosexism influence research and demonstrates that human bodies are always social and historical. Marx’s theory is quite unlike social theories that understand societies as if they were languages, such as post-structuralist deconstructionism. As David McNally (2001: 73, 74) has argued in a detailed critique of Jacques Derrida in the spirit of Marx, deconstruction’s ‘linguistification of life” and “hostility to all talk of origins or foundations which set limits to conceptual thought leaves deconstruction endlessly circuiting within the sphere of disembodied ideas. And it renders its cri- tique of idealism empty and tedious’. Marx’s materialism does not make the mistake of theorizing societies as if they were languages. Doing so fails to grasp that societies do not change in the ways that languages do. Changes in language ‘are usually not the result of conscious activity designed to bring about these changes’ (Markus, 1986: 35), although such activity does occur. They usually “arise in the course of the productive application of given linguistic rules in spontaneous, unre- flected ways’. Thus, in the development of language ‘we find no progression, merely change’. There are no general trends that characterize languages or ‘explain the history of even one lan- guage’ (Markus, 1986: 35). Understandably, then, a theory that models society on language per- ceives ‘history merely as becoming, as pure change” (Markus, 1986: 39); ‘within its framework the question about the “causal mechanisms” of historical change cannot even be formulated’ (Markus, 1986: 39). This is a crucial question for those who believe that people are ‘active and conscious co-creators of their own history’, ‘not merely observers or suffering participants of the historical process as a fated flux of events” (Markus, 1986: 39). This social ontology is also an alternative to those that bear the stamp of Frederick Nietzsche, whether directly or by way of Weber, Foucault or other Nietzschean writers.’ Leftist Nietzscheans like Foucault have interpreted Nietzsche allegorically, ‘which eliminates any social meaning or context’ (Rehmann, 2007: 192) from the ideas of this anti-democratic, radical-aristocratic reac- tionary (Losurdo, 2002; McNally, 2001: 15-44; Rehman, 2007). In contemporary Nietzschean social thought, power is central, in a manner that is derived from an idealist metaphysics of the will to power: ‘The world is the will to power — and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also this will to power ~ and nothing besides’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 550, emphasis in original). This inspires Foucault’s (1979: 192) studies of ‘procedures that constitute the individual as effect and object of power, as effect and object of knowledge’. Nietzschean approaches to power and gov- ernmentality have been appealing to some anti-racist feminists, some of whom have used them in insightful studies (e.g. Thobani, 2007). However, because ‘Foucault takes power as his point of departure’ instead of ‘grounding power in social subjectivity’ (Kerr, 1999: 177), ‘rather than con- ceiving of power in terms of the different, antagonistic forms of social relations which constitute its differentia specifica, power appears to become the self-expanding subject, or system’ (p. 182). This causes difficulties for understanding human agency. Although at times Foucault suggests that subjects are not simply effects of power-knowledge, these gestures and qualifications do not amount to another coherent conception of the subject (Dews, 1987: 161-92). Marx’s social ontol- ogy avoids these problems, and is compatible with the study of relations of oppression aeross the Camfield 293 full range of social institutions and locations. It is also free of the baggage of Nietzsche’s assump- tion about the universality of domination, which is contradicted by evidence of the existence of egalitarian-communal foraging societies for thousands of years (Darmangeat, 2012; Endicott, 1999; Lee and Daly, 1987). A Focus on Historical Specificity and Social Form Marx demonstrates a profound attention to the historical character of socio-material phenomena with a method of critique that aims to discover their conditions of possibility. This method is more than a concern to show that a phenomenon is social, not natural; it poses the question of why a social phenomenon exists as it does, in a particular determinate social form or mode of existence (Sayer, 1987: 126-37). One consequence of this is a rejection of transhistorical abstractions in theory, except with self conscious and carefully-specified limitations. Thus general concepts like production, family and state are of very limited use. The alternative to transhistorical abstractions are determinate concepts that aim to grasp a phenomenon’s mode of existence. For example, Marx (1891) writes that “A. cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton, Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little eapital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.” Capital is “a social relation of production’, Another consequence is an alertness to the mistaken habit of retrospectively projecting forms of social organization and modes of thought that are specific to one society onto earlier societies. This contribution of Marx’s is of much value today because of the influence of beliefs that falsely essentialize and/or universalize varieties of human thought, action and social organization that are the produets of historically-specific social relations. These include common conceptions of aggression, race (Fuentes, 2012), gender (Fine, 2010) and capitalism (Wood, 2002). This focus ean also remedy the unfortunate tendency of some post-colonial theory to treat Orientalism as “the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind’ rather than ‘a thor- oughly modern phenomenon’ (Al-’Azm, 1984: 351). ‘A Materialist Conception of History We find in Marx a distinctive theory of how, in class-divided societies, the central drivers of fun- damental social change over time are social production and class struggles that arise from how production is organized. As Karl Korsch (1938: 230) claims, Marx ‘relate[s} all aspects of the life process of society to economics", But Marx’s understanding of “economics” is entirely different from how that term is generally understood today. It is emphatically not centred on technology or markets, Instead, the key concern is the social relations involved in processes of producing the means of human life (Sayer, 1987). Analyzing the ‘relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers’ (Marx, 1981: 927) and the relations between members of the dominant class is of central importance. In explaining trajectories of historical change, Marx gives primacy to developments in the sphere of social production. Sometimes he uses the concept of base and superstructure as a meta- hor to illuminate the relationship between production and other spheres of society. However, this is not an indispensible feature of Marx's theory, and its value is questioned by some proponents of historical materialism (c.g. Wood, 1995: 49-75). As his thought evolves, the materialist conception of history is explicitly defended as a method for open historical inquiry into complex societies, not a general theory of social evolution (Bensaid, 2002: 9-35; Sayer and Corrigan, 1983). Marx (1877) explicitly came to repudiate such an interpretation of it, inveighing against the ‘universal passport a 294 Gritical Sociology 42(2) of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super- historical’. In addition, his ‘earlier notions of the progressiveness of colonialism’ were ‘replaced by a harsh and unremitting condemnation’ and ‘his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction’ (Anderson, 2010: 242, 244). Here Marx offers an approach that has often been misunderstood, in no small part due to how it has often been interpreted by Marxists. It has generated enormous discussion. The primacy of pro- duction is challenged by other materialist sociologies; itis often argued (e.g. Mann, 1986) that no social process can be said to be generally more influential than any others in explaining how socie- ties change across time. Yet the case for giving the social production of the means of life more explanatory weight than, say, military power is quite simple. As Rosemary Hennessy (2000: 10) suggests: ‘What is needed for living individuals to continue to be, to keep on keeping on, is that they produce what is needed to survive. The fundamental material reality of human life is the requirement that humans. produce the means to meet their needs in order to survive and continue living. People cannot gain access to the means of life outside of social relations that organize that access. Crucially, in class-divided societies access to the means of life is mediated by how the dominant class extracts a surplus from the direct producers (whether they are independent producers, slaves or wage-workers). Thus social production has a privileged role in conditioning historical change in human societies. Shed of inessential weaknesses,!” this is a powerful theory of historical change that appreciates the role of oppressed and exploited people in making history. The materialist conception of history provides both a challenge to accounts that flatter capitalism and imperialism and a non-teleological alternative to theory that questions the very possibility of understanding how societies change over time, seeing history as ruled by ‘the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance’ (Nietzsche, as cited in Foucault, 1977: 155) and positing ‘our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference’ (Foucault, 1977: 155). Thoughtful ongoing debates among historical materialists about the theory itself and its application to major historical processes and events, such as the development of capitalism in the US and the US Civil War, are an indication of the fruitfulness of Marx’s approach. A Theory of Capitalism ‘The bulk of Marx’s intellectual efforts went into his never-completed theory of the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. This applies the materialist conception of history in an effort to theo- rize the specific features of a mode of production based on the accumulation of capital by compet- ing commodity producers who usually employ wage-labour. Capitalism, Marx argues, is distinguished by capital's unique totalizing drive to expand both in scale, geographically, and in depth, permeating ever-deeper into societies it dominates." The alienation of workers (Musto, 2010) and commodity fetishism (Rubin, 1972) are also peculiar features of capitalism. This theory is incomplete, imperfect and arguably one-sided (Lebowitz, 2002). It is also indis- pensable for understanding the modern world. This is because it grasps as no other theory does that capitalism is a particular way of organizing social production that has inherent properties. These include the pattem of uneven and combined economic development that continues to underpin imperialist domination (Callinicos, 2009), a tendency to fall into crises that state action is unable to eliminate (McNally, 2011), and drives to ecological crisis (Kovel, 2007) and commodification (MeNally, 2006). Camfield - 295 The Crucial Contributions of Anti-ra¢ Regrettably, theorists who work with these ideas of Marx’s have not often brought them into dia- logue with anti-racist feminism, understood following Mohanty (2003: 253) as ‘a feminist perspec- tive that encodes race and opposition to racism as central to its definition’. Some of the strongest anti-racist feminist theorizing simultaneously scrutinizes the operations of gender, race, settler- colonialism and sexuality; at its best, class too is integrated into the analysis, This current of social theory originates mainly outside academia, within social movement organizations of women of colour in the 1970s, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, though it also has historical antecedents (Collins, 2000: 1-13). In the 1970s, activists who sometimes identified themselves as “Third World women’ developed concepts such as “triple jeopardy’ as a way to theo- rize ‘three systems of oppression: sexism, racism, and capitalism or imperialism’ (Aguilar, 2012). Lesbian feminists within this movement enriched such analysis by incorporating the dimension of heterosexism (e.g. Combahee River Collective, 1983), leading to the conclusion that ‘Only a syn- thesis of class, race, gender and sexuality can lead us forward” (Amos and Parmar, 1984: 18) Contemporary anti-racist queer feminism is, knowingly or unknowingly, indebted to this earlier work (Aguilar, 2012), while often developing it in ways that are quite different from the move- ‘ment-based theorizing of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, engagement with Marx or Marxism is much less common today, and the concems animating the Combahee River Collective's state- ment (1983) are quite unlike those of, for instance, Ferguson (2004)’s queer of colour analysis. To avoid circularity and to emphasize the importance of anti-racist queer feminists’ contributions to those who would build on Marx, in discussing these contributions I will not refer to the small num- ber of anti-racist feminists who are clearly also Marxists. At points I will cite authors who are not generally identified as anti-racist queer feminists per se but rather as critical race theorists or theo- tists of gender or sexuality; this is justified by the former’s use of their work. Anti-racist queer feminism offers two vital contributions to social theory: a social ontology of oppression and an understanding that forms of oppression operate simultaneously in social pro- cesses. This, I suggest, is the best of anti-racist queer feminism; as with Marx, there is also much to be discarded." it Queer Femi A Social Ontology of Oppression Anti-racist queer feminism grasps the extent to which contemporary societies (and many which have existed historically) have been socially organized both extensively and intensively by social relations other than class ~ those of gender, race and sexuality — as well as by class. These social relations are not epiphenomena. Where they exist (race, unlike the others, is often treated as unique to modernity e.g. Mills, 2003: 154]), social reality is constituted by them at the same time as itis constituted by class. The substance of anti-racist queer feminism’s contribution here challenges all theories that tread them as ‘add-ons’, in other words all theories whose basic coordinates are defined without them, including Marx’s, ‘What Charles Mills argues about race is also true of gender and sexuality: these social relations are not ‘eternal, unchanging, necessary” but rather have a ‘contingently deep reality that structures our particular social universe, having a social objectivity and causal significance that arise out of our particular history’ (Mills, 1998: 48, emphasis in original). Racial identity can be seen as ‘a function of one’s location on a racialized social terrain’ (Taylor, 2009: 188). Race, Mills (2003 168) notes, “unlike class ... roots itself in the biological, insofar as its identifiers move us to invest the physical with social significance’. Thus ‘it is on the body that race is inscribed’; with racism ‘political domination becomes incarnated ... biologized/naturalized’. If we follow Connell (2002: 296 Critical Sociology 42(2) 10) and understand gender as ‘the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive arena, and the set of practices (governed by this structure) that bring reproductive distinctions between bodies into social processes’,!$ then gender too is a social construction that generally becomes rooted in the biological and naturalized. Similarly, sexuality is also a social construction that becomes rooted in the biological and naturalized. Jeffrey Weeks (2010: 7-8) argues that what is understood today as “sexuality” is an historical construction, which brings together a host of different biological and mental possibilities, and cultural forms — gender identity, bodily differ- ences, reproductive capacities, needs, desires, fantasies, erotic practices, institutions and values — which need not be linked together, and in other cultures have not been’. This is a fundamentally important theoretical contribution. Anti-racist queer feminism makes it possible to comprehend features of social reality that are opaque to many theories, Marx’s included. “If we were to give Marx and Engels the benefit of the doubt’, Mills (2003: 151) suggests, ‘at best there was no perception on their part that the peculiar situation of people of colour required any conceptual modifications of their theory.’ The same is true of women and queers for Marx. Unlike liberal and much Marxist analysis, the best anti-racist queer feminism never reduces forms of oppression to ideology, a recurring error implicit in the claim of one Marxist critic of Mills that ‘it is capitalism, not white supremacy, that is a structural system of oppression’ (Cole, 2009: 258, emphasis in original). Anti-racist queer feminism’s social ontology of oppression relentlessly

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