Adding an excerpt from Women, Race, and Class by Angela Davis:

While both the Socialist party and the IWW admitted women to their ranks and encouraged them to become leaders and agitators, only the IWW embraced a complementary policy of forthright struggle against racism. Under the leadership of Daniel DeLeon, the Socialist party did not acknowledge the unique oppression of Black people. Although the majority of Black people were agricultural workers—sharecroppers, tenant farmers and farm laborers—the Socialists argued that only the proletarians were relevant to their movement. Even the outstanding leader Eugene Debs argued that Black people required no overall defense of their rights to be equal and free as a group. Since the Socialists’ overriding concern was the struggle between capital and labor, so Debs maintained, “we have nothing special to offer the Negro.” As for the International Workers of the World, their main goal was to organize the wage-earning class and to develop revolutionary, socialist class consciousness. Unlike the Socialist party, however, the IWW focused explicit attention on the special problems of Black people. According to Mary White Ovington,

(t)here are two organizations in this country that have shown they do care about full rights for the Negro. The first is the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.… The second organization that attacks Negro segregation is the Industrial Workers of the World.… The IWW has stood with the Negro.

Helen Holman was a Black Socialist, a leading spokesperson in the campaign to defend her imprisoned party leader, Kate Richards O’Hare. As a Black woman, however, Helen Holman was a rarity within the ranks of the Socialist party. Prior to World War II, the numbers of Black women working in industry were negligible. As a consequence, they were all but ignored by Socialist party recruiters. The Socialists’ posture of negligence vis-à-vis Black women was one of the unfortunate legacies the Communist party would have to overcome.

According to the Communist leader and historian, William Z. Foster, “during the early 1920’s, the Party … was neglectful of the particular demands of Negro women in industry.” Over the next decade, however, Communists came to recognize the centrality of racism in U.S. society. They developed a serious theory of Black Liberation and forged a consistent activist record in the overall struggle against racism.

When intersectional issues are not recognized, they are not prioritized, and the collective ends up siding with the oppressor class simply through neglect rather than by design. Intersectional feminism seeks to rectify this by weighing different systems of oppression together in order to get a picture of how individuals are affected by social and political relationships. Communists adapting this theory view these systems as class systems, ie: men are a higher class than women, white is a higher class than the various nonwhite classes, in the West being christian is a higher class than muslim, abled vs disabled, etc. The systemic oppression of disabled people can be pretty horrifying, and if you see how differently they’re treated by default, you start to see something that looks suspiciously like labor-based classism.

Another example from Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue by Leslie Feinberg:

So how can gender expression be mandated by edict and enforced by law? Isn’t that like trying to handcuff a pool of mercury? It’s true that human self-expression is diverse and is often expressed in ambiguous or contradictory ways. And what degree of gender expression is considered “acceptable” can depend on your social situation, your race and nationality, your class, and whether you live in an urban or rural environment.

But no one can deny that rigid gender education begins early on in life—from pink and blue color-coding of infant outfits to genderlabeling toys and games. And those who overstep these arbitrary borders are punished. Severely. When the steel handcuffs tighten, it is human bones that crack. No one knows how many trans lives have been lost to police brutality and street-corner bashing. The lives of trans people are so depreciated in this society that many murders go unreported. And those of us who have survived are deeply scarred by daily run-ins with hate, discrimination, and violence.

Trans people are still literally social outlaws. And that’s why I am willing at times, publicly, to reduce the totality of my self-expression to descriptions like masculine female, butch, bulldagger, drag king, cross-dresser. These terms describe outlaw status. And I hold my head up proudly in that police lineup. The word outlaw is not hyperbolic. I have been locked up in jail by cops because I was wearing a suit and tie. Was my clothing really a crime? Is it a “man’s” suit if I am wearing it? At what point — from field to rack — is fiber assigned a sex?

The reality of why I was arrested was as cold as the cell’s cement floor: I am considered a masculine female. That’s a gender violation. My feminine drag queen sisters were in nearby cells, busted for wearing “women’s” clothing. The cells that we were thrown into had the same design of bars and concrete. But when we — gay drag kings and drag queens — were thrown into them, the cops referred to the cells as bull’s tanks and queen’s tanks. The cells were named after our crimes: gender transgression.

@American_Communist22@lemmygrad.ml