Review of “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977)
Read in 2024.
The politics of some intersectional Bostonians.
The Combahee River Collective was named after a historical event and an actual river, both far away from the authors of this statement. These authors sewed the banner of identity politics, using a recent development in the scope of the word “identity”. Until the 1970s, identity had been a concept in social psychology. Now it swelled to include inclusion in groups. The authors stood at the intersection of many such groups, some by affinity, some not: Poor, socialist, intellectual, black, lesbian, feminist, women. Their story of marginalization from all sides is worth the read, as an expression both of invisible despair and of Alvin Gouldner’s “underdog metaphysics” as interpreted by Johan Söderberg. In the decades that followed, the solution to marginalization would be to privilege the perspective of marginalized peoples, as if the following syllogism—from the statement—were true:
If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
It is not true. Margo Okazawa-Rey, one member of the collective, was half Japanese, yet another intersection which—like a black intellectual—could be perceived as uncanny in Jentsch and Freud’s sense of Das Unheimliche, and therefore devalued. There’s no end to devaluable intersections, and therefore no bottom: Dirt, age, disability, illiteracy, disease, etc.
The statement’s conclusion, though it came from a sense of unusual powerlessness, was not original. The collective dreamt of a total revolution bringing about “the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy”. This is an echo of Peter Kropotkin and other anarchists deciding to overthrow all states as well as all capitalists. It’s revolutionary absolutism, but the glimmer of millenarianism is fainter than Kropotkin’s, and the odds longer. The methods are also those of 19th-century anarchists: Direct action for the in-group.
References here: A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), Feet of Clay (1996).