Exclusion or differential treatment suffered by a person for displaying a set of arbitrary characteristics that are unrelated to whatever they are excluded from or which, when they are not, are attributed to them by association with a demographic profile as arbitrary as any other.
Incentives at the root of discrimination
Despite all the hymns to the virtues of "free competition", capitalism has never known competition like the one taught in economics classes. As we see every day in trade wars, commercial laws, taxes... capitalist competition is a total war that takes place only partially in the "language of prices".
Creating monopolies to blackmail millions to death, imposing commercial advantages through military force, subjecting the weakest capital to heavier burdens... these are the day-to-day realities of competition between capitalists. Even the most wretched petty bourgeois knows that "good margins" and "big business" are born from positions of strength, normally backed by the state or sustained by the ownership of large masses of capital; not from competition in price and quality, but from the possibility of using the market to impose exactions rigged outside it.
So however much "equal opportunity" is sold to us as the very essence of the system, it is the system itself that constantly recreates the incentives for discrimination.
When the left tells us that this or that discrimination must be confronted and prosecuted with all the force of the state, it is taking the point of view of big capital. What big capital, which runs state capitalism, is interested in is homogenizing the conditions of exploitation as far as possible, in order to guarantee the mobility of big capitals among their possible placements.
But capital in competition, gigantic social parasite that it is, does not hesitate to use any means at its disposal to survive and reproduce. If there is a possibility of discriminating, there is a possibility of increasing exploitation and, with it, profit.
What is more, from the point of view of individual capitals it is often the only way to do so. The equalizing tendency of big capital will clash again and again with the needs of real competition, above all for the petty bourgeoisie, but also among big capitals. If one discrimination ceases to be useful, an old one will resurface or a new one will appear.
For capital there is nothing essential about the supposed "identities" upon which, at a given moment, it brings to bear the full force of discrimination; there are only demographic profiles that it may be useful to discriminate against. The existence of any pre-capitalist remnant or prejudice and of any situation of marginality -prisoners, undocumented migrants, etc.- will then be encouraged and taken up again and again by the new competitors who aspire to accelerated accumulation by scraping together margins. And if there are no prejudices at hand, others will be invented.
That is real competition. So brutal that the state itself has to moderate it because of its subversive potential for the bourgeoisie itself and its state. Discrimination under capitalism is systematic, necessary and universal. Not even the state can go beyond prosecuting excesses without eliminating the play of incentives created by the competition of capitals.
The inculturation of discrimination
When a discrimination is practiced over time in a way that is not harmful to the system as a whole, its ideological justification ends up becoming part of culture.
Thus, for example, the social values that condemned women of all social classes to a subordinate place within their own class were, in principle, an inheritance for capitalism. Capitalism did not need a sexual division of labor, nor is it in its logic to establish a differentiated and separate mode of exploitation for men and women.
It nevertheless took it up and reproduced it from the very first moment as a way of directly increasing the exploitation of women workers. The temporary incorporation of even larger numbers of women into industrial production during the two great imperialist wars removed a good part of the legal restrictions still placed on women in the countries of the capitalist center, although it was not enough to change the culture.
For culture to change to the point of socially condemning a given form of discrimination, a change in the needs of accumulation is required, one that permeates the state and moves it, first, to free accumulation from the obstacles that the structures arising from a general discrimination materially place in its way and, second, to undertake the transformation of culture.
Culture is by definition "national", and when the values and prejudices underlying a certain discrimination become counterproductive or harmful to accumulation, to the state or simply to social peace, the state will try to "reform the culture", to "purify" it or "modernize" it. A certain ideological contradiction is then established which will inevitably generate supporters and detractors in all social classes. Veritable fireworks, these conflicts can drag on indefinitely in the form of "culture wars", reinforcing around themselves the regimenting capacity of the state.
The example of Spanish machismo
If the world wars did not permanently change the role of women in the productive apparatus, one of their consequences did: the development of state capitalism.
With the proliferation of bureaucratic structures in states and enterprises all over the world, the early 1960s saw a generation of petty-bourgeois women enter wage labor. The development of the service sector that accompanied the process during the second post-war period -an expression of increasingly insufficient markets- and the falling share of wages in national income resulting from the development of accumulation extended the process during the 1970s until it affected the working class as a whole.
Families were transformed from more or less extended families, in which adult men and only some women worked to bring in "supplementary income", into "nuclear families" in which, in order to maintain their consumption capacity, father and mother both had to hold full-time jobs.
Let us look at an example from Spain. Between 1978 and 2017 the female labor force grew by 177% and the female activity rate rose from 27.75% to 53.13%. Over the same period, the male activity rate fell from 74.63% to 65.04%. The bulk of this transformation of the labor market took place in the eighties, the period in which the Spanish bourgeoisie undertook its "modernizing" project, which included industrial restructuring and the predominance of services.
The working women of that time thus entered an economy that demanded qualified workers. It would find them in the new graduating classes of the universities, where the change had already begun in the 1960s. When the Constitution was approved in 1978, almost 40% of students were women. By the mid-1980s there were already more women than men in higher education. In other words, the women who lived first-hand through the structural change of the Spanish labor market, those who had to fight "for real" against sexist bosses and vile hiring processes, are the ones who are 60 years old or more today.
The economic change was accompanied by a series of cultural changes driven by legal change. In 1981 the Suárez government introduced and managed to pass the divorce law, and in 1985 the Felipe González government passed the first abortion law. From the 1979 municipal elections onwards, which produced a majority of PSOE-PCE town councils, "family planning" centers spread basic sex education and made contraceptives accessible to a new generation.
Values linked to sex changed, they were "modernized", and in general personal, family and work relations became -not without friction- more egalitarian with respect to each person's sex. This tendency went hand in hand with the collapse of the Catholic Church as a reference point and a creator of models in Spanish society. Spain went from almost 70% practicing Catholics to 12%. The change in sexual morality and customs continued.
When the Zapatero government approved same-sex marriage in 2004, 56% of the population was already in favor and only a little over 20% against. Of course machismo went on, goes on and will go on as long as social relations as a whole are based on violence and exclusion, but the unbearable, crude Spanish machismo that had been hegemonic until the end of the 1980s had by then become a subculture of the most diehard right, a reprehensible tic in politicians, an argument for why the "trash television" that had taken off with the arrival of Berlusconi and his "Tele5" was unbearable.
The cultural change, surprisingly fast in historical terms, also generated its resistances and its victims. But it is significant that the first government to acknowledge it, mobilizing friendly media to establish the problem and passing the first law on violence against women, was Aznar's in 2001, the year the euro was introduced.
That is to say, the bulk of the cultural change -the generation that made sure at home that the brothers washed the dishes and not just the daughters, the women who normalized for themselves the same sexual practices and emotional relationships as men, those who lived through the shift in the perception of gender violence from intimate shame to social scourge- belongs to the women who are over 45 today. Or, put another way, to the generation before the consecration of feminism as state ideology.
The end of machismo as a defining and characteristic element of Spanish culture was driven by the shift of capital investment towards the tertiary sector from the 1960s onwards. It was accompanied from the beginning by the state, which provided higher education to more and more women and, from 1978 onwards, transformed the legal apparatus that had enshrined discrimination.
The absence of a feminist movement with the capacity to mobilize throughout this whole process is significant. Only from 2015, a decade after the socio-economic transformation had been completed, would feminism appear as a form of mass political regimentation. It would do so directly from the state or with the state's strong support.
Of course, it would rewrite the social history of the 60s, 70s and 80s as if the material transformations had been pushed forward by a non-existent feminist mobilization. The new feminism, a state ideology, was in fact the product -and neither the cause nor the motor- of a cultural change that had already taken place and that the state now claimed as a defining element of the country's social culture.
The class position against discrimination
The movement of the proletariat represents, in its very process of constitution as a class, the overcoming of all discrimination. Not, of course, in the manner of a cultural movement, but as the expression and result of the centralism it needs in order to move forward.
The proletariat can only fight effectively by overcoming the divisions artificially imposed within it. Even at the most elementary level of its struggle, that of a local strike, it either overcomes the fractures imposed by the various systems of discrimination -by type of contract, age, race, sex, language, origin, etc.- or the struggle will remain isolated and powerless. To go further, to become a class struggle and, once posed as such, to prosper, it will need to call into question all oppressions and discriminations.
It is important to understand that, at every stage of the struggle, at every moment, this overcoming is the result of a collective practice and of a need of the concrete struggle. The overcoming of discrimination is not the result of an ideological illumination that affects individuals one by one. Struggles are not Pentecostal magic that generates sudden, deep moral convictions transforming slaves, one by one, into enlightened saints.
We are at the opposite pole from the famous puritan-feminist slogan the personal is political. The political, the class struggle, transforms human relations as the expression of a material need. It is true that in doing so it asserts in practice a moral perspective. But that perspective is none other than that of a society neither fractured into classes nor enslaved by scarcity, manifesting itself in the struggle as the negation of all oppression and discrimination. That is to say, the general principle of communism as the real movement which abolishes and overcomes the present state of things.
The duty of the class party of the proletariat to protest and resist national oppression arises not from any special "right of nations," just as, for example, its striving for the social and political equality of sexes does not at all result from any special "rights of women" which the movement of bourgeois emancipationists refers to.
This duty arises solely from the general opposition to the class regime and to every form of social inequality and social domination, in a word, from the basic position of socialism.
Rosa Luxemburg. The National Question and Autonomy, 1908
Consequences for class organizations
Centralism is the organizational expression of the idea of the unity of the class as a universal political subject. When this is carried over to the organization of the most clear-sighted workers, the class party, it becomes evident that the organization that seeks to drive forward the development of class consciousness has to centralize all efforts and unite everyone without distinction of national or religious origin, sex, age or language. This is what Rosa Luxemburg recalls, precisely when discussing the organization of Russian social democracy.
A pronounced centralist spirit exists throughout social democracy. Having grown up on the economic soil of capitalism, which tends to be centralist, and being obliged to wage its battle within the political framework of the great bourgeois centralized state, social democracy is, from birth, a determined enemy of all particularism and all federalism. Since social democracy has to defend the general interests of the proletariat as a class in the framework of a concrete state, against the partial and group interests of the proletariat, it shows the logical tendency to merge all the national, religious and professional groups of the working class into a single unitary party. (...) Social-democratic centralism has to be of an essentially different character from the Blanquist one; it cannot be anything else but the impetuous concentration of the will of the conscious and militant vanguard of the working class in front of its isolated groups and individuals; it is, so to speak, the "self-centralism" of the leading sector of the proletariat.
Rosa Luxemburg. Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy, 1904
That is to say, the party, the organization of militants, cannot be organized as a federation of particularisms, of "partial interests", of religious origins, as if the proletariat were the sum of a series of identity fronts, of subjects fighting against distinct, differentiated oppressions. The centralism of the party means asserting the centrality of the struggle against wage labor.
Discrimination and the scope of specialized groups
The debates within Russian social democracy that gave rise to the pamphlet from which the above quotation is taken are very illustrative of how Marxists understood centralism.
Lenin had been campaigning since 1903 to bring the Bund, the majority socialist party among the Jewish working-class concentrations of the Russian empire, into full integration within the RSDLP. At that time Jews in the Russian empire could only live inside a confinement area, their political, educational and economic rights were legally restricted, and they regularly suffered "pogroms" stirred up by the repressive apparatus itself, which thereby released social tensions.
With antisemitism turned into state ideology, if there were archetypal victims of tsarist discrimination and oppression, they were the Jews. The Bund demanded autonomy within the party in the name of its differentiated identity, based on that specific oppression. The party, with Lenin -and not a few leaders of Jewish origin- at its head, held that this autonomy should not go beyond the logical autonomy of a working group specialized in contributing to the development of class consciousness within a specific sector of the proletariat: the Yiddish-speaking one. For the Bundists, on the contrary, it meant a de facto "federation". Problems would not be long in coming.
"Autonomy" under the Rules adopted in 1898 provides the Jewish working-class movement with all it needs: propaganda and agitation in Yiddish, its own literature and congresses, the right to advance separate demands to supplement a single general Social-Democratic programme and to satisfy local needs and requirements arising out of the special features of Jewish life. In everything else there must be complete fusion with the Russian proletariat, in the interests of the struggle waged by the entire proletariat of Russia. As for the fear of being "steam-rollered" in the event of such fusion, the very nature of the case makes it groundless, since it is autonomy that is a guarantee against all "steam-rollering" in matters pertaining specifically to the Jewish movement, while in matters pertaining to the struggle against the autocracy, the struggle against the bourgeoisie of Russia as a whole, we must act as a single and centralized militant organization, have behind us the whole of the proletariat, without distinction of language or nationality, a proletariat whose unity is cemented by the continual joint solution of problems of theory and practice, of tactics and organization; and we must not set up organizations that would march separately, each along its own track; we must not weaken the force of our offensive by breaking up into numerous independent political parties; we must not introduce estrangement and isolation and then have to heal an artificially implanted disease with the aid of these notorious "federation" plasters.
Lenin. "Does the Jewish Proletariat Need an 'Independent Political Party'?", 1903
Although they did not go by that name at the time, we can already see all the ingredients of the debates with identitarianism and its traps. By defining one part of the proletariat as "Jewish", the rest begins to be defined as "gentile" (goyim) or "Christian", and it begins to be insinuated that they are "beneficiaries" of the discrimination suffered by others. Lenin replies angrily in a note:
It is this task of “organising impotence” that the Bund serves when, for example, it uses such a phrase as “our comrades of the ’Christian working-class organisation.’” The phrase is as preposterous as is the whole attack on the Ekaterinoslav Committee. We have no knowledge of any “Christian” working-class organisations. Organisations belonging to the R.S.D.L.P. have never distinguished their members according to religion, never asked them about their religion and never will—even when the Bund will in actual fact “have formed itself into an independent political party.”
Lenin. "Does the Jewish Proletariat Need an 'Independent Political Party'?", 1903
The danger of this kind of rhetorical trap, which in reality only seeks to fragment the class in order to consolidate a small sectoral bureaucracy by exploiting people's exhaustion with an aberrant discrimination, was very much present from the first moments of the Third International. It was not only that the communist women's, youth or cooperative movements limited their activity to specific propaganda; organizationally they did not stand *alongside* the International and its parties, but *within* them, as sectoral groups.
There is only one movement, only one organization of communist women -formerly socialist- within the communist party together with communist men. The aims of communist men are our aims, our tasks.
Clara Zetkin