The dialectical matrix of class, gender, race

Abstract

Is gender oppression a structurally necessary feature of capitalism? Is discrimination based on race in-built into the reproduction of racial capitalism? By assessing wider contributions within and between Marxism Feminism and Black Marxism, this paper seeks to address the multiple oppressions of class, patriarchy, and race. Intersectional and dual-systems theorising establishes an analytical differentiation of patriarchy and capitalism, or capitalism and racism, as spheres in an external relation. We argue that this external theorising is at odds with Marx’s dialectics that avoids binary separations in its method of abstraction. As a result, we seek to revitalise dialectically understandings of class, gender, and race through a philosophy of internal relations, as a movement of internally related antagonisms comprising a social totality. Through an excursus on Marx’s conceptualisation of primitive accumulation, we draw on arguments that distinguish the logical and historical presuppositions of capital alongside highlighting elements that capital incorporates, internalises, and transforms as its results. This focus on logical and historical questions in relation to the origins of capital through conditions of primitive accumulation and its ongoing reproduction affirms patriarchal and racial oppressions as living dialectically in internal relation to capital.