Intersectionality, Marxism and class

Many involved in women’s liberation see oppression through the lens of intersectionality (Photo: Wikimedia commons)

The organisers of the UK Women’s March 2025 describe themselves as intersectional feminists.

The idea of intersectionality acknowledges how race, gender, class, sexuality and disability impact on women’s lives. This approach is a huge advance on trans exclusionary feminism and other divisive strategies.

Intersectionality emerged in the 1970s as a protest against the dominance of white, middle class feminists who assumed they could speak for all women. Black feminists analysed how the experience of racism interacted with and intensified sexism, poverty and exploitation.

Sexism and racism did not just layer on top of each other—they created a qualitatively different experience for many women. So, these thinkers described these processes as “intersecting axes” or “matrices of interlocking oppression”.

We do not lead single issue lives. The idea of intersectionality acknowledges the multiple forms of oppression that shape our lives.

Nevertheless, Marxism provides a critique of intersectionality. For us, class isn’t just another category of oppression—it has the potential to challenge the whole system that perpetuates all oppressions.

This flows from seeing that oppression isn’t “natural”, but rooted in the development of capitalism and class society. For example, anthropological evidence shows that, for the vast majority of human history, societies were organised on egalitarian lines without the subordination of women.

The idea of “race” was created to justify the slave trade during the birth of capitalism—and strengthened by justifications for colonial conquest.

Oppression serves the interests of capitalism as it divides and weakens the working class. Just think of the right’s “culture wars” strategy. They want to convince ordinary people that their problems are caused by refugees in dinghies, not billionaires in super yachts.

So, if oppression flows from the system and serves those who run it, what’s the force that has the power to smash it?

Workers occupy a unique position within capitalist society because they create the wealth and keep society running. Exploitation is horrible, but there is an interdependence between bosses and workers.

The fact of exploitation also gives workers power to take on the capitalist system, in a way that experiencing oppression does not. And class provides a—potential—material basis for unity across different oppressions.

The working class includes more women, black and brown people, LGBT+ people than any other class. And the working class as a whole has an objective interest in organising collectively to fight for a different system.

But this doesn’t mean that workers are automatically anti-racist, anti‑sexist or progressive. Socialists have to argue actively against bigoted ideas—whoever comes out with them, against whomever they are directed.

The role of class is not always obvious. Oppression affects people regardless of the class they belong to. But experiencing oppression does not automatically equip people with the will, understanding—or material interest—to challenge it. Ask Kemi Badenoch or Suella Braverman.

They suffer from sexism and racism. But their class position means they benefit from a system that perpetuates oppression. Some intersectional thinkers are critical of “Marxist reductionism”. They accuse Marxists of underplaying the importance of oppression by dismissing it as a by-product of class inequality.

There are socialists who are reductionist. But that’s not the genuine Marxist tradition. The revolutionary Vladimir Lenin argued that socialists cannot just be good trade unionists—they must be tribunes of the oppressed.

We stand in solidarity with everyone fighting oppression because they are fighting for us all.