Intersectionality, Materialism, and the Worker

I. The Useful Version of Intersectionality

Intersectionality has a legitimate use when it is treated as a legal and material diagnostic tool. At its strongest, it identifies cases where institutions fail to see a pattern of harm because their categories are too simple, too separate, or too rigidly applied.

In this limited sense, intersectionality names something real. Institutions can fail people in ways that are not visible when categories are treated only in isolation or as simple additions to one another. A person may occupy a social and institutional position that is not reducible to any single category, and the harm they experience may arise through the interaction of those categories rather than through one alone.

The point is not merely that one should look at Black men and white women separately and then compare them with Black women. The problem is more precise than that. If a Black woman is classified only as a Black person and only as a woman, then an institution may conclude that no discrimination has occurred unless it can show discrimination against Black people as a whole or women as a whole. If Black men are not facing the same treatment, and white women are not facing the same treatment, the specific pattern affecting Black women can disappear from view.

Intersectionality identifies that failure of classification. A Black woman is not simply the mechanical addition of “Black” and “woman” as two separate categories. Black women can occupy a specific social and institutional position that produces specific stereotypes, vulnerabilities, and forms of treatment. There are stereotypes of Black people, and there are stereotypes of women, but there are also stereotypes of Black women that do not appear by simply combining the other two sets. The category can have emergent features of its own.

Used in this way, intersectionality remains compatible with materialist analysis. It does not require identity to become sacred. It does not require politics to be organised around subjective recognition. It asks whether law, employment, education, housing, policing, healthcare, or welfare systems are producing harms that single-axis analysis fails to detect.

This is also why the original legal use of intersectionality is much stronger than many of its later cultural forms. Its point was not that every identity must become the centre of political life, but that institutions can misrecognise real patterns of discrimination if their categories are too crude. If the law can only see race discrimination and sex discrimination as separate routes, then it may fail to see a case where the actual harm arises through a specific combined position.

That is compatible with materialist analysis. A materialist framework should be able to identify where classifications interact, where institutional outcomes are uneven, and where apparently neutral systems generate patterned harm. The question is not whether intersectionality can diagnose real problems. It can.

The harder question is what happens next.

II. From Diagnosis to Implementation

This makes intersectionality a possible tool within material socialist analysis, not the foundation of material socialism itself. The difficulty begins when intersectionality moves from diagnosis to implementation.

At the diagnostic stage, intersectionality can tell us where to look. It can show that a group is being missed, that an institutional rule may have uneven effects, or that a harm is not being captured by the categories currently used. In that role, it remains close to material analysis because it is still asking about structures, outcomes, and mechanisms.

The problem is that intersectionality has already narrowed the field of attention. It has identified a particular group, a particular harm, and a particular institutional point at which that harm becomes visible. That narrowing may be useful for diagnosis, because without it the pattern might remain hidden. But when the analysis moves into implementation, the same narrowing can become a limitation. If the problem is not deliberately brought back up to the societal level, the solution tends to remain at the level where the harm was identified, and from there it often narrows further.

What begins as a structural claim can therefore become an individualised remedy. The analysis may begin with institutions, but the practical demand is frequently pushed downward onto individual cases, individual interactions, and individual workers. Instead of asking what social infrastructure is missing, what institutional capacity has collapsed, or what collective provision would be required, the solution becomes personalised adjustment inside institutions that lack the material capacity to resolve the problem.

This is the central weakness. Intersectionality can identify that a person or group is being failed by a structure, but it does not necessarily identify the correct solution space. Once the focus remains fixed on the immediate point of harm, the institution nearest to that harm becomes responsible for correcting it, even when the causes lie elsewhere. The result is that schools, hospitals, workplaces, universities, housing offices, and welfare systems are asked to compensate locally for failures produced by wider social arrangements.

The inversion is striking. A theory that presents itself as structural can become individualist in practice. It may speak in the language of power, hierarchy, and institutions, but its implementation frequently centres the individual subject and the immediate worker who encounters them.

The problem is not that the individual does not matter. The problem is that the individual becomes the site where a wider system failure is supposed to be corrected.

III. The School Example

The problem becomes clearer in the case of school behaviour.

Suppose boys in a particular group — Group A — are disproportionately excluded from school. That disparity should not be ignored. It may indicate unequal treatment by teachers, a behaviour system that escalates some pupils more quickly than others, unmet SEND, family stress, poverty, trauma, weak community institutions, poor youth provision, school alienation, or a breakdown of trust between schools and parents.

A materialist analysis should investigate all of this. It should ask where the pattern is produced, which institutions are failing, and what would actually change the conditions that lead to exclusion. It should not assume that the disparity proves racism in a simple sense, but neither should it dismiss the disparity as meaningless. Disproportionate outcomes are diagnostic signals. They tell us where explanation is required.

However, if an intersectional analysis is turned directly into school implementation, it often produces a different kind of response. The disparity becomes centred on the individual child inside the classroom. The school then attempts to respond through behaviour plans, exit cards, contextual adjustments, restorative conversations, differentiated sanctions, or bespoke expectations. On paper this appears humane, because it recognises that the child may be carrying pressures the ordinary behaviour system does not see.

In practice, this can mean that the classroom teacher is no longer implementing a common behaviour policy at all. They are being asked to manage several private behavioural regimes inside one room while also teaching. The formal language may be inclusion, trauma-informed practice, equity, or contextual safeguarding, but the operational reality is that the classroom has been individualised.

There are two ways this usually breaks down. In the first, the teacher anticipates the contextual exception and softens the ordinary consequence in the moment. This may avoid immediate conflict, but it teaches the pupil and the class that the rule is negotiable. In the second, the teacher applies the behaviour policy, but the pupil then escalates to a senior member of staff, a pastoral lead, or another authority above the teacher. If that decision is then reversed or softened, the teacher is publicly undermined. The pupil learns that the classroom teacher is not the real authority; the real authority is whoever can be appealed to after the fact.

Both routes damage the same structure. The first weakens the rule before it is applied. The second weakens the teacher after it is applied. In both cases, the classroom stops being governed by a stable common order and becomes a site of negotiation between the pupil, the teacher, the parent, and the management structure above the teacher.

That matters because a classroom is not simply a collection of individual needs. It is a shared institutional space. It depends on common rules, predictable consequences, teacher authority, and the ability of pupils to learn under stable conditions. If the teacher must continuously calculate which rule applies to which child under which contextual exception, while also anticipating whether their decision will be reversed by senior leadership, then the classroom stops functioning as a classroom in the ordinary sense.

This is not because teachers are unwilling to care. It is because classroom teaching has material constraints. One adult cannot simultaneously deliver curriculum, maintain order, protect anxious pupils, support lower-attaining pupils, manage SEND needs, interpret trauma, negotiate parental expectations, second-guess senior leadership, and run multiple behaviour systems without the ordinary structure of the classroom beginning to break down.

IV. The Worker as Shock Absorber

At this point the material burden has shifted.

The child may be vulnerable. The system may have failed them. But the teacher is made responsible for absorbing the failure.

This is the hidden structure of many well-intentioned inclusion policies. Poverty, weak family support, underfunded SEND provision, collapsed youth services, poor alternative provision, unstable housing, local disorder, and institutional anxiety about exclusion all arrive in the classroom as a problem the teacher is expected to manage. The wider social failure is not resolved. It is displaced onto classroom labour.

That displacement is often missed because the moral focus rests on the vulnerable child. But the teacher is also a worker. Teaching assistants are workers. Their time, authority, attention, emotional energy, safety, and workload are material conditions too. A politics that notices the vulnerability of the pupil but not the labour conditions of the teacher is not materialist. It is selective compassion mediated through institutional denial.

The management chain matters here because the teacher is not merely being asked to show compassion. They are being subordinated inside their own workplace. If a pupil can bypass the teacher’s authority by escalating to a senior member of staff, and if that escalation routinely results in the teacher’s decision being reinterpreted, softened, or reversed, then the school has effectively transferred power away from the classroom worker while leaving that worker responsible for maintaining order. The teacher carries the risk, but loses the authority required to manage it.

This also damages pupils who are not the direct focus of the intervention. Well-behaved pupils lose learning time. SEND pupils who need calm lose the stable environment they require. Children with anxiety lose predictability. Lower-attaining pupils lose the teacher attention they need. Other boys in Group A who are behaving well may also suffer if classrooms become less orderly and learning time is degraded. Even the disruptive child is often not helped, because being allowed to remain in a setting they cannot currently cope with is not the same as being properly supported.

The problem is not that difficult children should be abandoned. The problem is that mainstream classrooms are being asked to perform work that belongs to properly funded alternative provision, specialist SEND support, family intervention, youth services, mental health provision, and community institutions. When those institutions are missing, the rhetoric of inclusion can become a way of hiding their absence.

In that sense, the school example reveals the wider political problem. The state fails to provide the institutions required for children who are not currently classroom-ready, senior leadership is pressured to keep the child inside mainstream provision, and the classroom teacher is then treated as the point at which the contradiction must be resolved.

That is not inclusion. It is abandonment by other means.

V. What a Socialist Response Would Look Like

A socialist response would begin from a different premise.

It would not deny the disparity. It would not pretend that Group A boys, or any other group, are unaffected by institutional treatment, poverty, family conditions, racism, school culture, or local deprivation. But it would also refuse the idea that the solution is to individualise the classroom or make the teacher absorb the consequences of a broken social order.

The first distinction would be between pupils who are classroom-ready and pupils who are not currently classroom-ready. This is not a moral distinction between good and bad children. It is an institutional distinction about the conditions under which education can happen. A child who cannot operate inside the ordinary classroom still deserves education, structure, protection, and development. But pretending that they can be educated effectively in a mainstream classroom by giving them a personalised exception regime often fails both the child and the class.

A serious system would therefore build the missing provision. It would fund high-quality alternative provision, not as a dumping ground, but as a real educational route with skilled staff, smaller ratios, therapeutic support where needed, vocational options, academic continuity, and reintegration pathways where possible. It would rebuild youth centres, sports clubs, mentoring programmes, family support institutions, local mental health services, and serious SEND assessment. It would provide schools with internal support units that are properly staffed and genuinely educational rather than improvised holding rooms.

It would also audit behaviour systems to ensure that rules are being applied consistently. If the same behaviour is punished more harshly when performed by one group than another, that is a real institutional problem. If a behaviour policy escalates pupils too quickly toward exclusion when a different structure would preserve order without producing the same damage, that should be examined. But those audits should occur at the level of institutional design, not through a demand that classroom teachers perform live sociological adjudication while teaching.

The classroom itself should remain governed by common rules. Those rules should be clear, predictable, and backed by senior leadership. If they are wrong, they should be changed openly. If they are right, teachers should be supported in applying them. What should not happen is the creation of unofficial exception regimes that undermine the teacher while leaving the underlying social problem untouched.

The socialist answer is therefore not identity-sensitive leniency. It is collective provision. It is not the multiplication of bespoke classroom plans. It is the rebuilding of institutions that make children capable of participating in classrooms in the first place.

VI. The General Problem With Intersectional Implementation

The school case is not an isolated example. It reveals a more general weakness in intersectionality when it is taken beyond diagnosis.

The pattern is familiar. A structural disadvantage is identified. The institution lacks the material capacity to resolve it. The proposed solution then becomes recognition, exception-management, sensitivity training, individual accommodation, casework, or personalised treatment. The burden is placed on the frontline worker closest to the damage.

This can happen in schools, hospitals, universities, housing offices, workplaces, welfare systems, policing, and local government. The terms vary, but the structure is similar. The system has produced a vulnerable subject, but instead of rebuilding the conditions around that subject, institutions ask workers to compensate through flexibility, recognition, emotional labour, or discretionary adjustment.

In this way, intersectionality can become anti-worker while speaking the language of structural oppression. It identifies real vulnerability, but it does not always ask who is being made responsible for managing that vulnerability. It sees the harmed individual, but not always the labour process through which the harm is supposedly being repaired.

This is where the liberal tendency can enter. Intersectionality may be restated in materialist language, but once implementation is organised around the specific individual in front of the institution, it tends to reproduce liberal individualism. The individual subject becomes the centre of the remedy. The institution becomes responsible for recognising and accommodating that subject. The worker becomes the mediator. The wider social structure remains largely intact.

The problem is therefore not that intersectionality notices too much. It is that, when generalised, it often sees too narrowly. It identifies the wounded point in the system, then mistakes the nearest worker for the solution.

VII. The Missing Ecological View

The deeper limitation is that intersectionality often lacks an ecological view of institutions.

An institution is not simply a place where individual harms are recognised and corrected. It is a system with its own conditions of functioning. A school requires order, authority, trust, routine, shared expectations, and collective learning time. A hospital requires triage, professional judgement, workflow, limited resources, and the ability to prioritise under pressure. A workplace requires production, coordination, discipline, safety, and a division of labour. A welfare system requires rules, evidence, process, and administrative capacity.

If every structural harm is translated into individualised exception within those systems, the institution itself begins to lose coherence. This does not produce justice. It produces instability, resentment, hidden discretion, informal hierarchy, and exhaustion among the workers asked to manage the contradictions.

The irony is that this often harms vulnerable people too. A classroom with unstable authority does not become more emancipatory. A hospital overwhelmed by personalised expectations does not become more caring. A workplace where every structural problem is handled through interpersonal accommodation does not become more socialist. In each case, the common institutional conditions that make support possible are weakened.

A materialist politics must therefore ask not only who is harmed, but what institutional form is required to repair the harm without destroying the conditions of the institution itself. This is the ecological question. Intersectionality is often good at identifying the first part. It is much weaker at answering the second.

That weakness matters because systems do not become just by multiplying exceptions. They become just when their underlying structures are organised so that ordinary participation is possible without constant personalised negotiation.

VIII. What Intersectionality Can Still Do

None of this means intersectionality should be discarded entirely.

Its value is strongest at the diagnostic stage. It can show where existing categories miss a pattern. It can reveal that an apparently neutral system has uneven effects. It can force institutions to ask whether the people they are failing are being failed in a specific and patterned way. In that limited sense, it remains useful.

But a materialist politics should not allow intersectionality to become the implementation logic of the whole system. The moment diagnosis becomes personalised remedy, the danger begins. The task is not to dissolve common rules, nor to ask workers to compensate for structural failure, nor to treat each institutional interaction as a site where historical injustice must be corrected through discretion.

The task is to identify the mechanism and build the institution capable of addressing it.

If the problem is unequal treatment, enforce procedural equality. If the problem is poverty, reduce poverty. If the problem is SEND, build SEND capacity. If the problem is family breakdown, rebuild family support. If the problem is community collapse, rebuild youth and communal institutions. If the problem is racist application of rules, audit and discipline the institution. If the problem is that a child is not classroom-ready, build proper provision rather than pretending the ordinary classroom can absorb everything.

That is the materialist distinction. Intersectionality may help identify who is being failed, but it does not by itself tell us where the solution belongs, and for that reason it should not become the organising centre of a material socialist politics.

IX. Conclusion: Diagnosis Is Not a Programme

The central claim of this essay is not that intersectionality is false, useless, or always liberal. In a limited legal and diagnostic sense, it can identify real institutional blind spots. It can show how harms are missed when categories are analysed separately. It can force institutions to look more carefully at the interaction between race, sex, class, disability, migration status, and other material positions.

The problem begins when intersectionality is generalised into an implementation logic. At that point it tends to move from structure to individual, from institution to interaction, from collective provision to personalised adjustment, and from material repair to recognition management. Even when restated in materialist language, it often unfolds toward liberal individualism because its practical focus becomes the specific subject and their immediate treatment by the institution.

The school example makes the mechanism visible. A real disparity in exclusion may reveal a serious problem. But if the response is to individualise classroom behaviour, weaken common rules, and make teachers absorb the failures of SEND provision, youth services, family support, alternative provision, housing, and community infrastructure, then the analysis has not solved the problem. It has moved the problem onto the worker.

A materialist socialist politics should therefore use intersectionality cautiously. It should treat disparities as diagnostic signals, not as instructions to dissolve institutional ecology. It should ask which structures produce the harm, not which frontline worker must compensate for it. It should preserve common rules where they are necessary, audit institutions where they fail, and rebuild the public and communal infrastructure that allows people to participate in shared institutions in the first place.

Intersectionality notices wounds that should not be ignored. Its limitation is that, when moved from diagnosis into implementation, it appears especially vulnerable to narrowing the solution space around the immediate institution, the individual case, and the nearest worker. If that tendency is not carefully resisted, a framework that begins as structural analysis can end as liberal individualism in structural vocabulary.

Author’s Note

I was hesitant to publish this piece, because I am not especially well read in this area. It was written after watching an excellent Novara Media interview in which Ash Sarkar spoke to Kimberlé Crenshaw about intersectionality, identity politics, class, race, and the limits of contemporary left politics.

Before watching that interview, I probably would have dismissed intersectionality too quickly. To me, it would have sounded like another part of the language of the Woke Left: abstract, liberal, identity-centred, and removed from material politics. What the interview showed, however, is that there is a stronger version of intersectionality than that. Ash, in particular, does a good job of drawing out the material and structural usefulness of the concept. When intersectionality is used to show that institutions can miss specific harms because their categories are too crude, it can be a useful diagnostic tool.

However, by the end of the conversation, a divergence becomes visible. Ash repeatedly tries to hold together race, class, deprivation, social infrastructure, community breakdown, and collective provision. Crenshaw, by contrast, often pulls the argument back toward the danger of not foregrounding race. That difference matters because it shows the tension this essay has tried to theorise: intersectionality may be useful for identifying where a system is failing, but it can become much weaker when it is treated as the organising centre of political strategy.

One disagreement in the interview is especially important. Ash makes a point about collective provision, rising living standards, and the possibility that anti-racist outcomes can be produced through universal material improvement. Crenshaw appears to treat this as close to a return to colour-blind politics. I think that is unfair. It is possible to support a rising-boats approach while still using intersectional analysis to identify where particular boats are not rising, or are rising more slowly, or are being held down by specific institutional mechanisms.

The distinction matters. If all boats are rising and one boat is still not rising properly, most reasonable people will accept that something specific needs to be done. The general improvement has created the conditions in which the particular failure can be seen and addressed without appearing to abandon everyone else. But if all boats are sinking and politics says only that one boat requires attention, many people will respond negatively, whether rightly or wrongly. That response cannot be dismissed simply as racism or reaction. It may also reflect the fact that people do not experience the wider system as working for them.

There is a related moment in the interview where this difference becomes clearer. Ash argues that improving people’s material lives and sense of security may make them less vulnerable to racial scapegoating. Crenshaw responds by pointing out that racial hierarchy can itself make some white people feel secure. That is true at one level, but it changes the meaning of security.

Ash is talking about material security: housing, wages, schools, public services, community institutions, social trust, and a future that does not feel permanently precarious. Crenshaw’s response shifts toward positional security: the reassurance some people may feel when a racial order tells them that, whatever else is happening, they still stand above someone else. That kind of security is real as a political force, but it is not the same thing as material security. It is a degraded substitute for it.

This distinction matters. A material socialist politics should not seek to make people secure by preserving hierarchy. It should seek to make people secure enough that hierarchy loses some of its compensatory appeal. If racial hierarchy offers people a false form of status in the absence of real material stability, then the answer is not to ignore racial hierarchy, but nor is it to treat universal material improvement as a colour-blind evasion. The answer is to build the material conditions under which racial hierarchy becomes less politically useful.

This is where I think Ash’s point is stronger than Crenshaw allows. A rising-boats approach does not have to mean ignoring the boats still being held down. It can mean creating the broad social basis on which those particular failures can be addressed without making everyone else feel that their own insecurity has been dismissed.

This is why I do not think intersectionality should become central to material socialism. It can help identify gaps, failures, and institutional blind spots. But the broader political task must remain the rebuilding of the material conditions of shared life: housing, wages, schools, youth services, family support, public infrastructure, labour power, and collective security. Without that wider project, intersectionality risks becoming a way of naming particular harms inside a collapsing system, while leaving the collapse itself insufficiently addressed.

This essay should therefore be read as a cautious critique rather than a wholesale dismissal. Intersectionality can be useful. It can identify things that a crude class-only analysis might miss. But when it moves from diagnosis to programme, it appears vulnerable to narrowing the field of vision, individualising the solution, and misplacing the burden of repair onto the nearest worker or institution. That is the limitation I have tried to describe here.