Commentary

Socialists today should reject the kind of neutrality that conservatives praise Nathan Glazer for. But we shouldn’t confuse that neutrality with empirical rigor. Erik Olin Wright was confident enough in his political commitments to put them under the microscope. We should be, too.

It is only the left who talk about neoliberalism. Our opponents don’t use the concept so we are not engaging with them when we speak a different language. At best, because the term has been used in so many different ways, we almost always need to re-trace our steps to establish what exactly we mean by neoliberalism. Worse, the term lends itself to mirror-image inversions of the facile libertarian mantra that the market is good and the state bad. Ultimately, the term neoliberalism is misleading – not a tool but an obstacle to working out how the world works and how it changes. Nor does it help us identify what we should do.

During the EU referendum in the UK in 2016, although Brexit was championed mainly by the right, there was a significant left-wing argument for withdrawal, termed Lexit. Yet today, we are none the wiser of what a coherent Lexit approach might look like. Lexiters from the Socialist Workers Party and the left-wing newspaper, Morning Star, all maintain that a withdrawal from the EU must include a withdrawal from all its institutions including the single market and customs union. But rather than offer a positive vision, Lexiteers instead to point to the damage that leaving the EU will do to global capitalism in the long run. Academics that supported Brexit from the left have put forward ideas that would give us some idea of what a Lexit would look like. The results of these have been, quite frankly, embarrassing. A collection of ‘ideas’ and ‘recommendations’ are put forward that merely re-enforce the nationalism of the Brexit vote itself.

In sociology today, especially exemplified by the rise of analytical sociology, Merton’s middle range dominates. But should it? Marx probably would have viewed much of middle rage theory as residing at “the level of appearances” with deeper hidden causes. But that is not to say that appearances are inconsequential. Even things that are caused themselves carry their own weight in the world. It is just to say that Marxism argues that any particular thing cannot be fully explained without analyzing the hidden social reality behind that thing. General theory’s challenge for sociologists is to put seemingly isolated social processes into a broader whole or structure. Marxism identifies structures, processes, and mechanisms that matter for a wide range of more particular social questions. This includes revolutions, racial formation, bureaucratic organizations, the division of housework, and so on.

As the word intersectionality falls from the lips of Hillary Clinton and increasingly is normalized and sanitized, we should be clear about its radical moorings. In fact, the idea did not begin in the academy but in struggle. Last year marked the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective, a Radical Black Lesbian Collective. The concepts of “simultaneity” and “intersectional feminism” capture Combahee's grounding in the radical Black feminist tradition. As Barbara Smith, one of the co-founders of the Collective pointed out (pdf), "simultaneity" is the signature contribution of Black feminism. That is, race, class, gender, sexuality are in play at the same time. They intersect. They operate simultaneously.