Collectivism’s Progress: From Marxism to Race and Gender Intersectionality

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

My latest article on the website of the Future of Freedom Foundation is on, “Collectivism’s Progress: From Marxism to Race and Gender Intersectionality.”

In spite of the great improvements in the human condition around the world over the last thirty years due to degrees of market oriented freedoms, too many on “the left” continue to condemn the market system of freedom of choice and open competition that has made possible the betterment of literally hundreds of millions of people.

After licking their wounds and sulking in the academic corners following the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist planning ideal, political and cultural progressives have once again aggressively taken the public and policy stage. Their “faith-based” belief that capitalism is unjust and immoral has mutated from the rhetoric and categories of Marxian class conflict to an new notion of “exploitation”: race and gender “oppression” by all white male misogynists who use the capitalist system to abuse all types of minorities and “people of color.”

The latest framework is “intersectionality” which highlights gradations of oppression, discrimination and abuse based on overlapping instances of harmful “white privilege.” The common cry is that no other group or person can fully feel the “hurt” experienced by oppressed or “marginalized” subgroups of the abused, and that all oppressed groups must be united in solidarity against the common enemy of privileged “whiteness.”

The old Marxism submerged and confined the individual to the “social class” to which he was assigned. Now the individual is defined and confined within the gender and race to which he belongs, and the particular granular “intersectional” subgroup to which he has been assigned by the ideological gurus of this new collectivism. 

What is needed is a rediscovery and rededication to the philosophical and political individualism and free market capitalism that is the only antidote to this latest threat to human liberty and a free society.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/collectivisms-progress-marxism-race-gender-intersectionality/

Best,

Richard