Introduction

The UK has always been a country that, much like all developed economies, has relied on a migrant workforce for its economic prosperity. This element of global capitalism goes back centuries and is riddled with exploitation and injustice, which has endured until today. In very broad strokes, the pattern speaks of an economic system that is happy to allow people from less economically developed countries to enter the UK and work towards its growth for sub-par pay and benefits as long as it can ensure that the very same people remain outsiders with fewer benefits and protections than the White UK-born population. One need look no further back than the 2018 Windrush scandal to see that the present injustices and inequalities are still enduring (Gentleman, 2020; The Guardian, 2021).

Since joining the EU in 2007, Romanian and Bulgarian workers have also become part of this history of exploitation in the UK. They have gained notoriety as a population perceived as corrupt, as criminals and ‘benefit scroungers’, as diseased and dangerous for the local population. Vilified in the media, treated as second-class citizens (The Migration Observatory, 2014; McGrath, 2019), they are nevertheless crucial to the British economy, particularly due to the countless so-called ‘low-skilled’ but essential jobs that they do: care work, factory work, maintenance and cleaning, or work in agriculture and the food industry (GLAA, 2020).

This contradictory status was highlighted with painful clarity in the wake of the first COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. Migrant seasonal agricultural workers were initially forced to return to Romania, leaving British crops unpicked in the fields and British farmers in a critical situation (Harvey, 2020). Employers and even the government went to great lengths to try and offset this imbalance by recruiting British workers, many of whom had been furloughed, to work at picking the crops. Nevertheless, British authorities and employers soon discovered that British workers were unwilling to do the backbreaking work that agriculture entailed and especially for the low pay that was being offered.

It is the summer of 2022. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has resigned and two members of the British Conservative Party, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, are competing to replace him. Several short debates have been taking place, during which the two candidates presented their solutions to problems such as the ‘cost of living crisis’, the war in Ukraine and, on some rare occasions, climate change. Both have been working hard to differentiate their vision from one another. What seems to separate them is the fact that while Truss thinks lowering taxes ought to be a priority, Sunak wants to tackle inflation before tackling taxes. Meanwhile, the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, has been seen attempting to pitch the Labour Party's own ideas for addressing those problems. Central to his vision is what the Party sees as its, admittedly vague and familiar, ‘mission for economic growth’.

Ostensibly, then, all seem to favour different measures. One Conservative candidate wants to tackle inflation, the other one wants to lower taxes and the Labour Party leader wants to prioritize economic growth. But, in reality, there is very little that differentiates them. Truss and Sunak simply disagree about when to lower taxes, and I doubt they would disagree with Starmer on the idea that growth should be strong. Starmer himself has been warning against raising taxes at a time when many are struggling to pay their household bills. He has also been trying very hard to show that his party no longer subscribes to the more left-wing ideas of his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. None of them seems to question the fundamentals of the existing politicaleconomic architecture. Yet, never had the need for a radical change of system been so pressing. Inequalities are sharpening and while many cannot afford to heat their homes, supercar sales are accelerating (Neate, 2022). Climate change has become a reality, causing unprecedented numbers of floods, fires, and record temperatures. Major transformations are required. Bold ideas are needed. For, those crises cannot be solved by tinkering around the edges. They require us to think the world anew.

Such a task has become particularly difficult in an era marked by what German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1986) called the ‘exhaustion of utopian energies’. Capitalism, it seems, is the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1989).

Introduction

Reports of rape and domestic abuse towards women rarely lead to convictions. The police and the courts, which are male-dominated institutions, often fail to pay heed to the voice of women (Farris and Holeman, 2015). They either deny that the statements made by women are true or that the matter they report is of public significance. In fact, police officers often treat domestic violence as a private matter, unwilling to accept that what happens in the home should be of public concern (Farris and Holeman, 2015). A hierarchy of significance is therefore built around the private/ public split, which, as will be further explored next, also operates as basis for patriarchal domination.

But the split's implications are visible beyond relations between men and women. Take, for example, the Lawrence and Garner vs. Texas ruling in the US. While it made history by ruling that consensual sodomy does not constitute a crime, this sexual act had to take place behind closed doors, in the private sphere. Decriminalization of same-sex adult sodomy was predicated upon its privatization. Here the treatment of an act as something private appears to constitute progress for queer people. But as Jasbir Puar (2007) noted, it effectively marked an attempt to remove queerness from public sight and, consequently, to regulate it. Because the legal case involved a Black American (Tyron Garner), the ruling also contributed to the homonormativization of black male subjects and their inclusion within the ‘national body politic’ (Puar, 2007: 136). By homonormativizing queer Black subjects, then, the ruling does not so much liberate them as impose a (homo)normativity on them. In short, it further universalizes heteronormative domesticity. What such an analysis of the ruling helps shed light on, then, is not only the co-constitution of heteronormativity, capitalism, and white supremacy but the central role of the capitalist sexual division in supporting capitalist domination. It follows that in addition to imagining an alternative economic life, an intersectional utopia must also envision a world beyond the capitalist sexual division of labour.

The task of this chapter consists in envisioning the operations of radical interdependence within what Honneth (2017) called the ‘sphere of love, marriage and the family’.

Introduction

The project of emancipation has long been central to a wide range of struggles against domination. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, for example, feminists drew a lot of their inspiration (Coole, 2015) from the anti-slavery movement's demand for the ‘elimination of oppression’ (Wright, 1993) as the basis for their emancipation. Inspired by Marx's (2000e) call for ‘complete human emancipation’, the labour movement also came to adopt it as a core aspiration. Under this guise, it became closely associated with the project of emancipating society from an oppressive capitalist system – from exploitation, alienation, and the oppressive power of the bourgeoise. But from the 1970s onwards, the project fell out of favour among critics of capitalism. With the rise of so-called ‘new social movements’ and poststructuralist and post-humanist approaches, the possibility and desirability of an emancipatory project came to be questioned. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984), for example, declared the end of master narratives articulated around a collective vision for emancipation. Similarly, Anthony Giddens (1991) characterized the ‘late modern’ age partly in terms of a demise of emancipatory politics in favour of ‘life politics’, thereby marking a turn away from collective and universalizing forms of political demands and action directed at structural change.

But while ‘major sectors of the white-dominated left’ have been historically unable to articulate their emancipatory politics around a sufficiently robust analysis of interlocking systems of oppression (Dawson, 2013: 15), intersectionality theorists have continued to insist on both the possibility and desirability for such a project, emphasizing the distinctively emancipatory outlook of a theory aimed at developing a nuanced and complex account of capitalist domination (see for example Davis, 2012; Smooth, 2013; Collins, 2019). In this chapter I develop a conceptualization of emancipation based on some of the core elements of the story of intersectional capitalist domination offered in the preceding chapter. The aim consists in drawing the contours of the emancipatory project that will inform the socialist vision formulated in this book. I begin this task by explaining why emancipation is a more appropriate concept than, say, a politics of self-actualization, for capturing the essence of pluriversal intersectionality's critical outlook. I devote the rest of the chapter to exploring what a pluriversal emancipatory vision entails.

Introduction

After discrediting the Left's redistributive outlook by dismissing it – often very successfully – as economically irresponsible, the right turned to populism and devoted its attention to the culturally progressive aspect of left-wing thinking. Terms like ‘wokeness’ and ‘culture wars’ are symptomatic of the right's attempts to discredit what remains of progressive thinking in advanced capitalist societies. To understand what led to this state of affairs and where intersectionality stands in it, one must turn to neoliberalism. The latter established itself as a political-economic vision ostensibly compatible with cultural struggles for justice. For example, some neoliberal governments gave same-sex couples the right to marry. Neoliberalism, it seems, tolerates and sometimes even backs cultural struggles for justice, while contesting the value of their economic counterpart. Having successfully discredited redistributive struggles, such a ‘progressive neoliberalism’ (Fraser, 2019) eventually paved the way for a reactionary politics that set out to redress socio-economic injustices by wrapping them up in issues of identity. In a context of acute economic precarity and sharp socio-economic inequalities, for example, migrant others are blamed for the economic deprivation of autochthons. What is more, the latter do not just expect to hold exclusive rights as autochthons. They are also highly critical of any attempts to question their position of privilege, often dismissed as unreasonable, unproductive, and unacceptable instances of ‘wokeism’. Since the establishment of neoliberalism, then, one can observe ‘unproductive battles over economic versus cultural politics’ (Duggan, 2003: xix) which laid the groundwork for a right-wing populism that seeks to resolve this tension by turning cultural struggles into a reactionary form of identity politics.

Contrary to interpretations that equate it with a culture war, I would argue that intersectionality provides an immensely fruitful alternative to the kind of identity politics that have made their way into the political mainstream in many advanced capitalist societies. Intersectionality, it will be shown, does not divide but provides a framework for thinking oppression and emancipation across economic and cultural politics. To be sure, the field of intersectionality studies counts a very broad range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical scholarship. There have also been and continue to be disagreements on what exactly qualifies as intersectionality, what it aims to achieve and how it should be deployed in social research and beyond.

Introduction

Following persistent Indigenous peoples’ demands for recognition of their rights, the Canadian state introduced the Constitution Act of 1982, which recognized ‘existing aboriginal and treaty rights’ and laid the groundwork for the 1995 recognition of their ‘inherent right to self-government’ (Coulthard, 2014: 2). The move ostensibly marked a change in the relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous peoples away from the distinctively colonial denial of their right to self-determination. On the face of it, the Canadian state appears willing to put an end to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples through the constitutional recognition of their rights. A state, it seems, can exhibit enough reflexivity to transform itself and challenge its own role in domination. The extent to which it has succeeded in doing so is nevertheless debatable (Coulthard, 2014).

In fact, a core question I wish to tackle in this chapter is whether the modern liberal-capitalist state can indeed transform itself in such a way as to secure pluriversal emancipation or is condemned to acting as an organ of domination. Capitalism, it was shown, must be understood as a ‘complex and multifaceted system of domination’ (Bohrer, 2018: 64). I wish to argue here that the same can be said about a more specific, albeit just as complex, institution at the centre of capitalist domination: the modern liberal-capitalist state. As a central coordinating body within the capitalist order, the state plays a key role in securing the conditions for the system's reproduction. The question regarding the fate of the state in an intersectional socialist utopia will be answered by deploying an intersectional lens. First, though, one must be in a position to understand what the state consists of, that is, its nature. I therefore propose to engage with an old but highly relevant debate between Ralph Miliband and Nikos Poulantzas on the nature of the capitalist state. This will serve as a basis for framing the discussion of the state through the lens of other resistance knowledge projects like feminism and anti-racism. It will be argued that instead of rethinking the state, this socio-political institution must be rejected as a model for institutionalizing pluriversal emancipation. This is due to its inextricability from structures of domination.

While the year 2022 might have marked a return to ‘normal’ following a global pandemic that pretty much closed down advanced capitalist economies, it also marked the return of high inflation rates and an acute cost of living crisis, particularly in the UK. Meanwhile energy companies are accumulating record profits. To be able to deal with such inflationary pressures partly caused by exorbitant energy prices, British workers in sectors like the railways, the National Health Service, and Royal Mail chose to strike to demand a pay rise decent enough to be able to cope with the rising cost of living. As I write the conclusion of this work, the strikes are ongoing and nobody can say whether workers will succeed. What can be said with confidence, however, is that the crisis has brought into sharp relief the follies of the capitalist market. Most notable of these is not so much the fact that capitalism creates winners and losers but that some (a few) effectively benefit from the destitution of others (many). It is under such circumstances that change comes to be desired; that utopias provide us with the hope that things could be otherwise.

So how would the utopia offered in this book be expected to deal with such problems? Is a cost of living crisis even likely to exist under intersectional socialism? Before I answer those questions, let's look more closely at the underlying causes of the crisis in an advanced capitalist society like the UK. A very sharp rise in energy prices is certainly to blame for this. For, it does not only directly affect consumers of energy like the gas or electricity used to heat water, but also the businesses those consumers rely on for, say, their weekly food shopping. An increase in energy prices, therefore, leads to a more general rise in the cost of living. Individual consumers are pretty much powerless in the face of such developments. Only the energy companies and governments can choose to act to reduce the prices in question, but doing so would go against the capitalist logic of accumulation. The main role of a privatized energy company is to provide their shareholders with a return on their investment. Any measure that would likely decrease this return would be regarded as problematic.

Introduction

The lasting influence of Marxism on the critique of power and domination under capitalism has meant that it has been a lot easier to equate capitalist oppression with class oppression than with any other forms of domination. However analysing domination through the lens of pluriversal intersectionality holds the potential for significantly broadening our understanding of capitalism and, in turn, overcoming the limitations of male-and Eurocentric libertarian socialism. First, though, let me clarify what I intend to mean by the term ‘capitalism’.

While capitalism ‘is and always was about capital accumulation, or … economic growth’ (Streeck, 2016: 201), it ought to be studied as more than an economy or economic system. Wolfgang Streeck (2016) insists on treating it as a ‘society’, that is, ‘as a system of social action and a set of social institutions falling in the domain of sociological rather than today's standard economic theory’ (2016: 201). Under such a reading, the term capitalism is not so much a system of satisfaction of needs driven by the profit motive as a system with its own economic, political, and cultural spheres of action that are fundamental for its survival. Understanding capitalism in this way allows us to grasp the range of ‘extra-economic arrangements that enable the endless expansion and private appropriation of surplus value’ (Fraser, 2016: 173). Capitalism, it could be argued, has given rise to historically distinctive institutions, norms of behaviour, and ways of life that are ‘deeply interwoven with how people organize even their most personal and intimate social life’ (Streeck, 2016: 216).

What is also useful about adopting this understanding of capitalism shared by the likes of Michael Dawson (2016) and Nancy Fraser (2016), is that it allows one to bring a range of practices, institutions, and discourses within the scope of analysis that would otherwise be neglected under a predominantly economic treatment of capitalism. In turn, it ensures that the critique of power and domination is extended beyond the economic sphere. The various discussions included in this chapter will therefore be informed by the view that capitalist mechanisms of power and domination permeate forms of social action across the economic, political, and cultural spheres.

Introduction

Since its inception, socialism has been inextricably tied to the labour movement and its critique of capitalist economic relations. Under the latter's guise, socialism is expected to offer an alternative to an oppressive, alienating, and exploitative economic life. But exactly what form this alternative ought to assume has been and continues to be debated within the labour movement. This includes questions regarding the nature and role of work, what constitutes genuinely socialist property relations or a form of allocation of resources capable of upholding pluriversal emancipation. In this chapter, I tackle those debates head on. But I do so by opening up the scope of those debates to discussions found outside of the labour movement. For, as Manning Marable put it ‘the central questions confronting the Left aren't located within the Left itself but in the broader, deeper currents of social protest and struggle among nonsocialist, democratic constituencies – in the activities of trade unionists, gays and lesbians, feminists, environmentalists, people of color, and the poor’ (Marable, 1996: 278).

The task set out in this chapter shall therefore consist in bringing those ‘deeper currents of social protest’ into dialogue with socialist thought, in order to understand what they can offer the conceptualization of socialist economic relations. I begin the discussion by addressing the future of work – a debate figuring prominently within socialist thought. Here I deploy the intersectional lens to envision a counter-culture of capitalist work. This is followed by the conceptualization of a system of allocation of resources deriving from the latter counter-cultural vision and capable of institutionalizing radical interdependence. Finally, an alternative to the capitalist system of property is explored.

Collectivized emancipatory work

A central aspiration of the labour movement has been to give workers the chance to identify with their work and treat it as an outlet for selfactualization. Drawing on a critique of work akin to Karl Marx's own critique of alienation in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (2000a), this particular aspiration treats work as an essential component of human life and potential source of autonomy and pleasure. Emancipation is here achieved through ‘free labour’. Over the past few decades, however, many on the Left came to favour a vision of emancipation in which work would no longer play the leading role.