(en) Britain, A Class Struggle Anarchist Analysis of Privilege Theory ? from the Women's Caucus of the Anarchist Federation

Aims and definitions ---- The purpose of this paper is to outline a class struggle 
anarchist analysis of Privilege Theory. Many of us feel ?privilege? is a useful term for 
discussing oppressions that go beyond economic class. It can help us to understand how 
these oppressions affect our social relations and the intersections of our struggles 
within the economic working class. It is written by members of the women?s caucus of the 
Anarchist Federation. It does not represent all our views and is part of an ongoing 
discussion within the federation. ---- What do we mean ? and what do we not mean ? by 
privilege? Privilege implies that wherever there is a system of oppression (such as 
capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity) there is an oppressed group 
and also a privileged group, who benefit from the oppressions that this system puts in 
place[1].

The privileged group do not have to be active supporters of the system of oppression, or 
even aware of it, in order to benefit from it. They benefit from being viewed as the norm, 
and providing for their needs being seen as what is naturally done, while the oppressed 
group is considered the ?other?, and their needs are ?special considerations?. Sometimes 
the privileged group benefits from the system in obvious, material ways, such as when 
women are expected to do most or all of the housework, and male partners benefit from 
their unpaid labour.

At other times the benefits are more subtle and invisible, and involve certain pressures 
being taken off a privileged group and focused on others, for example black and Asian 
youths being 28% more likely to be stopped and searched by the police than white 
youths[2]. The point here is not that police harassment doesn?t happen to white youths, 
or that being working class or a white European immigrant doesn?t also mean you?re more 
likely to face harassment; the point is that a disproportionate number of black and Asian 
people are targeted in comparison to white people, and the result of this is that, if you 
are carrying drugs, and you are white, then all other things being equal you are much more 
likely to get away with it than if you were black. In the UK, white people are also less 
likely to be arrested or jailed, or to be the victim of a personal crime[3]. Black people 
currently face even greater unemployment in the UK than they do in the USA[4].

The point of quoting this is not to suggest we want a society in which people of all races 
and ethnicities face equal disadvantage ? we want to create a society in which nobody 
faces these disadvantages. But part of getting there is acknowledging how systems of 
oppression work, which means recognising that, if black and ethnic minority groups are 
more likely to face these disadvantages, then by simple maths white people are less likely 
to face them, and that means they have an advantage, a privilege, including the privilege 
of not needing to be aware of the extent of the problem.

A privileged group may also, in some ways, be oppressed by the expectations of the system 
that privileges them, for example men under patriarchy are expected to not show weakness 
or emotion, and are mistrusted as carers. However, men are not oppressed by patriarchy for 
being men, they are oppressed in these ways because it is necessary in order to maintain 
women?s oppression. For women to see themselves as weak, irrational and suited only to 
caring roles, they must believe that men are stronger, less emotional and incapable of 
caring for those who need it; for these reasons, men showing weakness, emotion and a 
capacity for caring labour are punished by patriarchy for letting the side down and giving 
women the opportunity to challenge their oppression.

It makes sense that where there is an oppressed group, there is a privileged group, 
because systems of oppression wouldn?t last long if nobody benefited from them. It is 
crucial to understand that members of the privileged group of any of these systems may 
also be oppressed by any of the others, and this is what allows struggles to be divided 
and revolutionary activity crushed. We are divided, socially and politically, by a lack of 
awareness of our privileges, and how they are used to set our interests against each other 
and break our solidarity.

The term ?privilege? has a complex relationship with class struggle, and to understand 
why, we need to look at some of the differences and confusions between economic and social 
class. Social class describes the cultural identities of working class, middle class and 
upper class. These identities, much like those built on gender or race, are socially 
constructed, created by a society based on its prejudices and expectations of people in 
those categories. Economic class is different. It describes the economic working and 
ruling classes, as defined by Marx. It functions through capitalism, and is based on the 
ownership of material resources, regardless of your personal identity or social status. 
This is why a wealthy, knighted capitalist like Alan Sugar can describe himself as a 
?working class boy made good?. He is clearly not working class if we look at it 
economically, but he clings to that social identity in the belief that it in some way 
justifies or excuses the exploitation within his business empire. He confuses social and 
economic class in order to identify himself with an oppressed group (the social working 
class) and so deny his own significant privilege (as part of the economic ruling class). 
Being part of the ruling class of capitalism makes it impossible to support struggles 
against that system. This is because, unlike any other privileged group, the ruling class 
are directly responsible for the very exploitation they would be claiming to oppose.

This doesn't make economic class a "primary" oppression, or the others "secondary", but it 
does mean that resistance in economic class struggle takes different forms and has 
slightly different aims to struggles based on cultural identities. For example, we aim to 
end capitalism through a revolution in which the working class seize the means of 
production from the ruling class, and create an anarchist communist society in which there 
is no ruling class. For the other struggles mentioned, this doesn't quite work the same 
way - we can't force men to give up their maleness, or white people to give up their 
whiteness, or send them all to the guillotine and reclaim their power and privilege as if 
it were a resource that they were hoarding. Instead we need to take apart and understand 
the systems that tend to concentrate power and resources in the hands of the culturally 
privileged and question the very concepts of gender, sexuality, race etc. that are used to 
build the identities that divide us.

A large part of the resentment of the term "privilege" within class struggle movements 
comes from trying to make a direct comparison with ruling class privilege, when this 
doesn't quite work. Somebody born into a family who owns a chain of supermarkets or 
factories can, when they inherit their fortune, forgo it. They can collectivise their 
empire and give it to the workers, go and work in it themselves for the same share of the 
profits as everybody else. Capitalists can, if they choose, give up their privilege. This 
makes it OK for us to think of them as bad people if they don't, and justified in taking 
it from them by force in a revolutionary situation. Men, white people, straight people, 
cisgendered people etc., can't give up their privilege - no matter how much they may want 
to. It is forced on them by a system they cannot opt out of, or choose to stop benefiting 
from. This comparison with ruling class privilege makes many feel as if they're being 
accused of hoarding something they're not entitled to, and that they're being blamed for 
this, or asked to feel guilty or undergo some kind of endless penance to be given 
absolution for their privilege. This is not the case. Guilt isn't useful; awareness and 
thoughtful action are. If you take nothing else away from this document, take this: You 
are not responsible for the system that gives you your privilege, only for how you respond 
to it. The privileged (apart from the ruling class) have a vital role to play in the 
struggle against the systems that privilege them - it's just not a leadership role.

Answering objections to privilege

So if they didn?t choose it and there?s nothing they can do about it, why describe people 
as ?Privileged?? Isn?t it enough to talk about racism, sexism, homophobia etc. without 
having to call white, male and straight people something that offends them? If it?s just 
the terminology you object to, be aware that radical black activists, feminists, queer 
activists and disabled activists widely use the term privilege. Oppressed groups need to 
lead the struggles to end their oppressions, and that means these oppressed groups get to 
define the struggle and the terms we use to talk about it. It is, on one level, simply not 
up to class struggle groups made up of a majority of white males to tell people of colour 
and women what words are useful in the struggles against white supremacy and patriarchy. 
If you dislike the term but agree with the concept, then it would show practical 
solidarity to leave your personal discomfort out of the argument, accept that the 
terminology has been chosen, and start using the same term as those at the forefront of 
these struggles.

Another common objection to the concept of privilege is that it makes a cultural status 
out of the lack of an oppression. You could say that not facing systematic prejudice for 
your skin colour isn?t a privilege, it?s how things should be for everyone. To face racism 
is the aberration. To not face it should be the default experience. The problem is, if not 
experiencing oppression is the default experience, then experiencing the oppression puts 
you outside the default experience, in a special category, which in turn makes a lot of 
the oppression invisible. To talk about privilege reveals what is normal to those without 
the oppression, yet cannot be taken for granted by those with it. To talk about homophobia 
alone may reveal the existence of prejudices ? stereotypes about how gay men and lesbian 
women behave, perhaps, or violence targeted against people for their sexuality. It?s 
unusual to find an anarchist who won?t condemn these things. To talk about straight 
privilege, however, shows the other side of the system, the invisible side: what behaviour 
is considered ?typical? for straight people? There isn?t one ? straight isn?t treated like 
a sexual category, it is treated like the absence of ?gay?. You don?t have to worry about 
whether you come across as ?too straight? when you?re going to a job interview, or whether 
your straight friends will think you?re denying your straightness if you don?t dress or 
talk straight enough, or whether your gay friends will be uncomfortable if you take them 
to a straight club, or if they?ll embarrass you by saying something ignorant about getting 
hit on by somebody of the opposite sex. This analysis goes beyond worries about 
discrimination or prejudice to the very heart of what we consider normal and neutral, what 
we consider different and other, what needs explaining, what?s taken as read ? the 
prejudices in favour of being straight aren?t recognisable as prejudices, because they?re 
built into our very perceptions of what is the default way to be.

It?s useful to see this, because when we look at oppressions in isolation, we tend to 
attribute them to personal or societal prejudice, a homophobic law that can be repealed, a 
racial discrimination that can be legislated against. Alone, terms like ?racism?, 
?sexism?, ?ablism? don?t describe how oppression is woven into the fabric of a society and 
a normal part of life rather than an easily isolated stain on society that can be removed 
without trace, leaving the fabric intact.[5]

Privilege theory is systematic. It explains why removing prejudice and discrimination 
isn?t enough to remove oppression. It shows how society itself needs to be ordered 
differently. When people talk about being ?colour-blind? in relation to race, they think 
it means they?re not racist, but it usually means that they think they can safely ignore 
differences of background and life experience due to race, and expect that the priorities 
and world views of everybody should be the same as those of white people, which they 
consider to be ?normal?. It means they think they don?t have to listen to people who are 
trying to explain why a situation is different for them. They want difference to go away, 
so that everybody can be equal, yet by trying to ignore difference they are reinforcing 
it. Recognising privilege means recognising that differences of experience exist which we 
may not be aware of. It means being willing to listen when people tell us about how their 
experience differs from ours. It means trying to conceive of a new ?normal? that we can 
bring about through a differently structured society, instead of erasing experiences that 
don?t fit into our privileged concept of ?normal?.


Intersectionality and Kyriarchy

Kyriarchy is the concept of combined systems of oppression, the idea that capitalism, 
patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, theocracy and other 
systems that we don?t necessarily have names for, are all connected, influencing and 
supporting each other. The word ?kyriarchy? is also a handy verbal shortcut that saves 
having to list all the systems of oppression every time you want to explain this concept. 
It means everybody who?s fighting oppression of any kind is fighting the same war, we 
just fight it on a myriad of different fronts.

Intersectionality is the idea that we are all privileged by some of these systems and 
oppressed by others, and that, because those systems affect one another, our oppressions 
and privileges intersect. This means that we each experience oppression in ways specific 
to our particular combinations of class, gender, race, sexuality, disability, age etc. [6] [7]

Class struggle analyses tend to mark out capitalism as separate from the other systems in 
kyriarchy. As explained above, capitalism operates differently from systems of oppression 
based on identity or culture, but it would be too simplistic to dismiss these oppressions 
as secondary or as mere aspects of capitalism. Patriarchy, in particular, existed long 
before modern industrial capitalism and, there?s evidence to suggest, before the invention 
of money itself[8], and it?s not difficult to imagine a post-capitalist society in which 
oppressive gender roles still hold true[9]. As anarchists are opposed to all systems of 
oppression, we recognise that fighting capitalism alone is not enough, and that other 
oppressions won?t melt away ?after the revolution?. If we want a post-revolutionary 
society free of all oppression, we need all the oppressed to have an equal role in 
creating it, and that means listening to experiences of oppression that we don?t share and 
working to understand how each system operates: in isolation, in relation to capitalism 
and other systems of oppression and as part of kyriarchy.[10]

We're used to talking about sexism or racism as divisive of the working class. Kyriarchy 
allows us to get away from the primacy of class while keeping it very much in the picture. 
Just as sexism and racism divide class struggle, capitalism and racism divide gender 
struggles, and sexism and capitalism divide race struggles. All systems of oppression 
divide the struggles against all the other systems that they intersect with. This is 
because we find our loyalties divided by our own particular combinations of privilege and 
oppression, and we prioritise the struggles we see as primary to the detriment of others, 
and to the detriment of solidarity. This is why the Anarchist Federation's 3rd Aim & 
Principle[11] cautions against cross-class alliances, but we should be avoiding campaigns 
that forward the cause of any oppressed group against the interests of any other - not 
just class. That doesn't mean that every campaign has to forward the cause of every single 
struggle equally, but it does mean that we need to be aware of how our privileges can 
blind us to the oppressions we could be ignorantly walking all over in our campaigns. We 
have to consider a whole lot more than class struggle when we think about whether a 
campaign is moving us forwards or backwards as anarchists. Being able to analyse and point 
out how systems of oppression intersect is vital, as hitting these systems of oppression 
at their intersections can be our most effective way of uniting struggles and building 
solidarity across a number of ideological fronts.

Some examples:

In the early 1800s, there were several strikes of male textile workers against women being 
employed at their factories because their poorer pay allowed them to undercut male 
workers[12]. The intersection of capitalism and patriarchy meant that women were oppressed 
by capitalists as both workers and women (being exploited for lower pay than men), and by 
men as both women and workers (kept in the domestic sphere, doing even lower paid work). 
When changing conditions (mechanisation) made it too difficult to restrict women to their 
traditional work roles, unions finally saw reason and campaigned across the intersection, 
allowing women to join the unions and campaigning for their pay to be raised.

From the 70s to the present day, certain strands of radical feminism have refused to 
accept the validity of trans* struggles, keeping trans women out of women?s spaces (see 
the controversies over Radfem 2012 and some of the workshops at Women Up North 2012 over 
their ?women born women? policies). The outcome of this is as above: the most oppressed 
get the shitty end of both sticks (in this case cisnormativity and patriarchy), with 
feminism, the movement that is supposed to be at the forefront of fighting the oppression 
that affects both parties (patriarchy) failing at one of its sharpest intersections. This 
also led to the fracturing of the feminist movement and stagnation of theory through 
failure to communicate with trans* activists, whose priorities and struggles have such a 
massive crossover with feminism. One positive that?s come out of these recent examples is 
the joining together of feminist and trans* activist groups to challenge the entry policy 
of Radfem 2012. This is leading to more communication, solidarity and the possibility of 
joint actions between these groups.

The above examples mean that thinking about our privileges and oppressions is essential 
for organising together, for recognising where other struggles intersect with our own and 
what our role should be in those situations, where our experiences will be useful and 
where they will be disruptive, where we should be listening carefully and where we can 
contribute constructively. Acknowledging privilege in this situation means acknowledging 
that it?s not just the responsibility of the oppressed group to challenge the system that 
oppresses them, it?s everybody?s responsibility, because being part of a privileged group 
doesn?t make you neutral, it means you?re facing an advantage. That said, when we join 
the struggle against our own advantages we need to remember that it isn?t about duty or 
guilt or altruism, because all our struggles are all connected. The more we can make 
alliances over the oppressions that have been used to divide us, the more we can unite 
against the forces that exploit us all. None of us can do it alone.

The myth of the ?Oppression Olympics?

The parallels that are drawn between the Black and women's movements can always turn into 
an 11-plus: who is more exploited? Our purpose here is not parallels. We are seeking to 
describe that complex interweaving of forces which is the working class; we are seeking to 
break down the power relations among us on which is based the hierarchical rule of 
international capital. For no man can represent us as women any more than whites can speak 
about and themselves end the Black experience. Nor do we seek to convince men of our 
feminism. Ultimately they will be "convinced" by our power. We offer them what we offer 
the most privileged women: power over their enemies. The price is an end to their 
privilege over us.[13]

To say that somebody has white privilege isn?t to suggest that they can?t also have a 
whole host of other oppressions. To say that somebody suffers oppression by patriarchy 
doesn?t mean they can?t also have a lot of other privileges. There is no points system for 
working out how privileged or oppressed you are in relation to somebody else, and no point 
in trying to do so. The only way that privilege or oppression makes your contributions to 
a struggle more or less valid is through that struggle's relevance to your lived experience.

A black, disabled working class lesbian may not necessarily have had a harder life than a 
white, able-bodied working class straight cis-man, but she will have a much greater 
understanding of the intersections between class, race, disability, gender and sexuality. 
The point isn?t that, as the most oppressed in the room, she should lead the discussion, 
it?s that her experience gives her insights he won?t have on the relevant points of 
struggle, the demands that will be most effective, the bosses who represent the biggest 
problem, the best places and times to hold meetings or how to phrase a callout for a mass 
meeting so that it will appeal to a wider range of people, ways of dealing with issues 
that will very probably not occur to anybody whose oppression is along fewer 
intersections. He should be listening to her, not because she is more oppressed than him 
(though she may well be), but because it is vital to the struggle that she is heard, and 
because the prejudices that society has conditioned into us, and that still affect the 
most socially aware of us, continue to make it more difficult for her to be heard, for us 
to hear her.

Some would argue that governments, public bodies and corporations have been known to use 
arguments like these to put forward or promote particular people into positions of power 
or responsibility, either as a well-meaning attempt to ensure that oppressed groups are 
represented or as a cynical exercise in tokenism to improve their public image. This 
serves the state and capital by encouraging people to believe that they are represented, 
and that their most effective opportunities for change will come through supporting or 
petitioning these representatives. This is what we mean by cross-class alliances in the 
3rd A&P, and obviously we oppose the idea that, for instance, a woman Prime Minister, will 
be likely to do anything more for working class women than a male Prime Minister will do 
for working class men. It should be remembered that privilege theory is not a movement in 
itself but an analysis used by a diverse range of movements, liberal and radical, 
reformist and revolutionary. By the same token, the rhetoric of solidarity and class unity 
is used by leftists to gain power for themselves, even as we use those same concepts to 
fight the power structures they use. The fact that some people will use the idea of 
privilege to promote themselves as community leaders and reformist electoral candidates 
doesn't mean that that's the core reasoning or inevitable outcome of privilege theory. For 
us, as class struggle anarchists, the identities imposed on us by kyriarchy and the 
politics that go with them are about uniting in struggle against all oppression, not 
entrenching social constructs, congratulating ourselves on how aware we are, claiming 
special rights according to our background or biology, and certainly not creating ranked 
hierarchies of the most oppressed to put forward for tokenistic positions of power.

In the AF, we already acknowledge in our Aims and Principles the necessity of autonomous 
struggle for people in oppressed groups; but rather than analyse why this is necessary, we 
only warn against cross-class alliances within their struggles. The unspoken reason why it 
is necessary for them to organise independently is privilege. Any reason you can think of 
why it might be necessary, is down to privilege: the possible presence of abusers, the 
potential of experiences of oppression being misunderstood, mistrusted, dismissed, or 
requiring a huge amount of explanation before they are accepted and the meeting can move 
onto actions around them, even internalised feelings of inferiority are triggered by our 
own awareness of the presence of members of the privileged group. This may not be their 
fault, but it is due to the existence of systems that privilege them. The reason we need 
to organise autonomously is that we need to be free of the presence of privilege to speak 
freely. After speaking freely, we can identify and work to change the conditions that 
prevented us from doing so before ? breaking down the influence of those systems on 
ourselves and lessening the privilege of others in their relations with us ? but the 
speaking freely has to come first.

To equate talk of ?privilege? with liberalism, electoralism and cross-class struggles is 
to deny oppressed groups the space and the language to identify their experiences of 
oppression and so effectively organise against the systems that oppress them. If we 
acknowledge that these organising spaces are necessary, and that it is possible for them 
to function without engaging in liberalism and cross-class struggles, then we must 
acknowledge that privilege theory does not, of necessity, lead to liberalism and 
cross-class struggles. It may do so when it is used by liberals and reformists, but not 
when used by revolutionary class struggle anarchists. Privilege theory doesn't come with 
compulsory liberalism any more than the idea of class struggle comes with compulsory Leninism.

The class struggle analysis of privilege

This may all seem, at first, to make class struggle just one struggle among many, but the 
unique way in which ruling class privilege operates provides an overarching context for 
all the other systems. While any system can be used as a ?context? for any other, 
depending on which intersections we?re looking at, capitalism is particularly important 
because those privileged within it have overt control over resources rather than just a 
default cultural status of normalcy. They are necessarily active oppressors, and cannot be 
passive or unwilling recipients of the benefits of others? oppression. The ruling class 
and the working class have opposing interests, while the privileged and oppressed groups 
of other systems only have differing interests, which differ less as the influence of 
those systems is reduced.

This doesn?t make economic class a primary oppression, or the others secondary, because 
our oppressions and privileges intersect. If women?s issues were considered secondary to 
class issues, this would imply that working class men's issues were more important than 
those of working class women. Economic class is not so much the primary struggle as the 
all-encompassing struggle. Issues that only face queer people in the ruling class (such as 
a member of an aristocratic family having to remain in the closet and marry for the sake 
of the family line) are not secondary to our concerns, but completely irrelevant, because 
they are among the few oppressions that truly will melt away after the revolution, when 
there is no ruling class to enforce them on itself. We may condemn racism, sexism, 
homophobia and general snobbery shown by members of the ruling class to one another, but 
we don?t have common cause in struggle with those suffering these, even those with whom we 
share a cultural identity, because they remain our direct and active oppressors.

When we try to apply this across other intersections than economic class, we don?t see 
concerns that are irrelevant to all but the privileged group, but we do find that the 
limited perspective of privileged activists gives campaigns an overly narrow focus. For 
instance, overwhelmingly white, middle class feminist organisations of the 60s and 70s 
have been criticised by women of colour and disabled women for focusing solely on the 
legalisation of abortion at a time when Puerto-Rican women and disabled women faced forced 
sterilisation, and many women lacked access to essential services during pregnancy and 
childbirth. Although the availability of abortion certainly wasn?t irrelevant to these 
women, the campaigns failed to also consider the affordability of abortion, and completely 
ignored the concerns of women being denied the right to have a child. Most feminist groups 
now tend to talk about ?reproductive rights? rather than ?abortion rights?, and demand 
free or affordable family planning services that include abortion, contraception, sexual 
health screening, antenatal and post-natal care, issues relevant to women of all 
backgrounds.[14]

We have to challenge ourselves to look out for campaigns that, due to the privilege of 
those who initiate them, lack awareness of how an issue differs across intersections. We 
need to broaden out our own campaigns to include the perspectives of all those affected by 
the issues we cover. This will allow us to bring more issues together, gather greater 
solidarity, fight more oppressions and build a movement that can challenge the whole of 
kyriarchy, which is the only way to ever defeat any part of it, including capitalism.

[1] ?A common form of blindness to privilege is that women and people of color are often 
described as being treated unequally, but men and whites are not. This is logically 
impossible. Unequal simply means ?not equal,? which describes both those who receive less 
than their fair share and those who receive more. But there can?t be a short end of the 
stick without a long end, because it?s the longness of the long end that makes the short 
end short. To pretend otherwise makes privilege and those who receive it invisible.? Allan 
G. Johnson, Privilege, Power and Difference (2006).

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16552489, 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/jun/12/police-stop-and-search-black-people (statistics 
not available for Scotland)

[3] http://www.justice.gov.uk/downloads/statistics/mojstats/stats-race-cjs-2010.pdf

[4] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/13/black-people-unemployed-britain-us

[5] ?While it is important that individuals work to transform their consciousness, 
striving to be anti-racist, it is important for us to remember that the struggle to end 
white supremacy is a struggle to change a system, a structure?For our efforts to end white 
supremacy to be truly effective, individual struggle to change consciousness must be 
fundamentally linked to collective effort to transform those structures that reinforce and 
perpetuate white supremacy.? bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995

[6] 
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-settingthere- 
is/

[7] Intersectionality as a term and an idea has been developed by, among others: Kimberle 
Williams Crenshaw, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Leslie McCall, if you 
are interested in further reading.

[8] Graeber?s ?Debt: The First 5,000 Years? suggests that young women were used in some 
pre-money societies as an early form of currency or debt tally.

[9] See the chapter with all the beautiful and sexually available 
house-keeping-cleaning-serving women in William Morris? utopia News from Nowhere.

[10] One anarchist analysis of intersectionality: 
http://libcom.org/library/refusing-waitanarchism- intersectionality.

[11] ?We believe that fighting systems of oppression that divide the working class, such 
as racism and sexism, is essential to class struggle. Anarchist-Communism cannot be 
achieved while these inequalities still exist. In order to be effective in our various 
struggles against oppression, both within society and within the working class, we at 
times need to organise independently as people who are oppressed according to gender, 
sexuality, ethnicity or ability. We do this as working class people, as cross-class 
movements hide real class differences and achieve little for us. Full emancipation cannot 
be achieved without the abolition of capitalism.? 
http://www.afed.org.uk/organisation/aims-and-principles.html

[12] See Chapter 7 of The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British 
Working Class by Anna Clark.

[13] Selma James, ?Sex, Race and Class? 1975

[14] Links to these examples are on these posts at the Angry Black Woman blog: 
http://theangryblackwoman.com/2010/02/26/reproductive-justice-linkspam-a-starting-point/, 
http://theangryblackwoman.com/2008/04/14/poc-and-the-politics-of-medical-research