“We regard our personal experience, and our feelings about that experience, as the basis for an analysis of our common situation. We cannot rely on existing ideologies as they are all products of male supremacist culture. We question every generalization and accept none that are not confirmed by our experience.”¹
This quote, from the 1969 Redstockings Manifesto, summarizes a basic philosophical principle which underlies many liberatory movements in recent history — the importance of “lived experience.” The Redstockings, a radical feminist organization, did not invent this concept. “Lived experience” was and continues to be an important phrase for the feminist movement of the day, and the notion itself extends outward and deeper.
From the perspective of an oppressed person, oppression is no mere theoretical abstraction. It is something lived and experienced — in the conditions of one’s life, in the perceptions of others, in limited access to resources, in limitations of possibilities. The Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist organization, said of this that “There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black feminism; that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women’s lives.”² For this generation, this was a natural outgrowth of the philosophy in the slogan “the personal is political.” As scholars like Patricia Hill Collins have shown, however, the concept had existed for a long time before being explicitly formulated as a theoretical framework, such as in the approaches of historical figures like Sojourner Truth.³
This concept of “lived experience,” which tends to be paired with the interrelated concepts of embodied knowledge and standpoint theory, has now proliferated across everyday discourse — particularly after the upheaval of 2020. From an intuitive experience of the epistemic principle in everyday life, to intellectual and academic expression of it, the concept has now moved back into the public in a somewhat altered form. Like a game of telephone, it has been mediated and modified from a guiding concept of radical and confrontational movements to a conduct guide incorporated by capitalists and bureaucrats into training procedures. The value of lived experience is now a mantra being inserted into psychology, social work, public policy, infographics, YouTube videos, casual conversations, etc. Today, it seems like almost everyone respectable agrees that one must listen to the lived experience of others, that lived experience of oppression gives one a uniquely privileged standpoint to discuss the subject.
This, unsurprisingly, has led to a wave of criticisms, for the most part from conservatives. Many conservative or “centrist” media outlets, like the New York Times, peddle pieces saying that this way of thinking “[…]would lead to a world in which we would create stories only about people like ourselves, in stories to be illustrated by people who looked like ourselves, to be reviewed and read only by people who resembled ourselves.”⁴ To them, it is just another step in the decline of our civilization into entitlement, narcissism, and nihilism.
I would like to push back on this idea that accounting for the primacy of “lived experience” is solipsistic — it can be, but is not inherently so. The vast majority of theorists who have intellectually expressed it, from Patricia Hill Collins to Audre Lorde, have not done so to dismiss theory in general.⁵ Rather, they emphasize that they defend “lived experience” as necessarily a starting point for any theory, and a standpoint from which to engage with theory. On this basis, they criticize theory which obscures or neglects their experiences as untrue, or not fully true, to their place in the world. This is simply supposed to make knowledge true to its conditions — we engage with knowledge from our positions in the world, so we should create knowledge which works through that positionality.
The Telephone Game
Nevertheless, it is true that the telephone game of proliferation has, in some cases, turned “lived experience” into a solipsistic dogma. Often, radical liberals speak of “lived experience” in opposition to “theory.” If I already know everything I need to know from my own immediate experience, why should I bother with what a bunch of dead old white people have written? If you have spoken to anyone ‘left of center,’ you’ve probably also come across the admonishment to “stay in your lane.” This advises people to stay silent on issues which they lack the authority of lived experience on.
Although motivated by benevolent intentions, this restriction of discourse into hard distinctions can become harmful to movement-building. If done crudely, it can encourage a passive, infantile, and quite honestly, obnoxious attitude for the ones kept “in their lane” — they’re supposed to sit by, suck their thumbs, and naively “listen and learn,” rather than develop a capacity help.⁶ It also assumes strong delineations between identity-positions which simply don’t exist. How does one define whether an issue affects them or not? For race and ethnicity, this becomes especially tangled when one considers the issues posed by mixed people, light skin, white-passing people, assimilation, tokenism, etc. The dissolution of any hard definition upon closer inspection is a classic teaching of dialectic.
There is also the issue of whether every single individual in a group represents the entirety of that group. This is a criticism made very soon after standpoint epistemology was first explicitly formulated by Black feminists who rejected the homogenous category of “Woman,” which often led to white women speaking for and over them.⁷ Philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò has identified this phenomenon, where the most powerful of a group become the “spokespersons” for everyone else, as “elite capture.” He describes this phenomenon as “the control over political agendas and resources by a group’s most advantaged people.”⁸
Ironically, many of these advocates of “staying in your lane” recognize the risk of “spokespersons” having positions which contradict the interests of their group in the case of working-class Trump supporters. To them, it’s obvious that their voting for Trump undermines their own interests as workers. It is perhaps also obvious that a blatant reactionary like Candace Owens can’t necessarily speak on behalf of Black women as a group, even if doing so is well within “her lane.” Nevertheless, they do not think through this conundrum.
Perhaps one source of the pitfalls of this popularized, radical liberal approach is that it exists thoroughly within the quantitative thinking of global bourgeois society. This is not to say it literally speaks of numbers, but that it speaks with the same way of thinking associated with speaking of numbers. The concept of “lived experience” was originally vindicated as a means of challenging this quantitative way of thinking and being. As opposed to positivism, which only values what is captured and expressed in statistics, there was to be an approach which expressed the silenced experiences of everyday life for oppressed peoples from a concrete perspective.
Yet, mediated by the quantitating influences of capitalist bureaucracy and intellectual production, which turns everything into a category in a filing cabinet, it has in turn taken on a quantitative character in the telephone-gamed version. This can be illustrated with the average diagram used to explain privilege theory, the guiding rationale behind “staying in your lane.” One must locate oneself on the diagram, and then work within the literal delineations of positions.
Though diagrams can be useful for understanding everyday experience and the social whole by abstracting parts from it, they also formulate and organize that experience in a certain way. If I think of myself as placed into the category-cabinets of X, Y, and Z, I think of myself abstractly. The abstract categories tell me little about the experience behind them. When we speak of an abstract category like “Woman,” we try to capture many concrete, lived experiences — deeply differentiated by actual social position — in a single, homogenous whole.
This quantitative reasoning tries to accommodate through it with an extremely crude version of “intersectionality.” In order to understand unique experiences, we simply add together multiple abstract categories. “Woman” + “Black” + “Poor” = “Poor Black Woman.” By coalescing three definitions for abstract categories, we are somehow supposed to reach the wealth of experiences in everyday life. At best, we can account for this issue by simply saying that every person has so many “axes of oppression” that their lived experiences cannot be captured entirely in just a few, and we need a quantitative infinity of categories to understand lived experience itself. That is, simply enumerate more identities! This is the bad infinite, defined purely by homogenous quantities stacked on top of each other, that Hegel critiqued over two centuries ago.⁹
Such a quantitative thinking depends, ultimately, on a homogenous substance to divide up. Think of it this way: In order to figure things together into a quantity, I need to first put them on a single scale, axis, or measure. In order to do so, I need to determine a common character, or quality, between them. I have to abstract from them. This quantitative radical liberalism does so in something like “oppression points.” The more privileged identities someone has, the less oppressed they are. The more oppressed identities someone has, the more oppressed they are. There is also an interest rate on each intersection! Such psychology is basically the ressentiment described by Friedrich Nietzsche, who compared it to lambs saying “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb — would he not be good?”¹⁰
This mockery of intersectionality has been criticized by Patricia Hill Collins as believing that “the more subordinated the group, the purer the vision available to them.”¹¹ She identifies the positivism inherent in this thinking, reflective of the reasoning of a mediocre bourgeois rational bureaucracy. However, she then polemically asserts that such an error “is an outcome of the origins of standpoint approaches in Marxist social theory, itself reflecting the binary thinking of its Western origins.”¹² This assertion certainly cannot be left to stand. If we think through the quantitative reasoning, which assumes a basic homogenous substance across human beings which allows their identities to be quantified, we in fact begin to head towards Marx’s direction.
The quantitative figuring of privileges and oppressions, not coincidentally, sounds like a capitalist figuring liabilities and assets. Instead of money, it simply transfers this to the field of morality and flips it around so that oppression is moral capital while privilege is social capital. As Marx noted, capitalism itself depends on an abstraction of human characteristics into the homogenous substance of abstract labor.¹³ This abstraction becomes the substance of value-as-such and enables the operation of universal exchange.¹⁴ That is, there must be a qualitative abstraction and homogenization in order for there to be a quantitative rationalization.
It is no coincidence that capitalist bureaucracy has so easily swallowed up this “enlightenment” into workplace Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) training. This notion of diversity is simply diversity within a unity, just like having many capitals subsumed under general capital on the social scale. “Diversity makes us strong” in this light sounds like “diversify your investments” rather than anything even close to the intent of decolonization. To use “decolonial” in any proximity to such thinking is a bad joke. This quantitative reasoning of privilege-liabilities and oppression-assets is ultimately well within the rationality of the capitalism it thinks it criticizes.
Embodied Knowledge and Mystified Experience
Against this bourgeois quantitative thinking, the critical approach of “lived experience” teaches that we can understand social phenomena through our embodied knowledge, since we experience society as embodied subjects.¹⁵ That is, we are both subjects and objects. This is trying to operate outside of the mind-body dualism of Cartesianism and to say that abstract, disembodied (masculine) reasoning is not the only path to knowledge. Despite accusations of irrationalism by conservatives, this is ironically not very different to the rationalist Baruch de Spinoza’s solution to Cartesian dualism. Spinoza asserted that mind and body are of one substance, and that thus all experiences are embodied experience.¹⁷
On this subject of Spinoza, the similarities of this rationalist-monist philosophy to “intuitive” Indigenous philosophies has been observed explicitly by the late philosopher Viola Cordova (Jicarilla Dindéi).¹⁸ This importance of embodied knowledge is meant to be a philosophical teaching which contradicts the dominant Cartesian rationality of Euro-bourgeois civilization, rather than operating within it through the limitation of quantitative-thinking. Those solipsists who damn theory as being colonial misunderstand the decolonial approach.
Decolonization of knowledge does not mean rejecting theory, but redeeming knowledge which does not operate within the Euro-bourgeois mental-manual labor separation by critiquing that separation.¹⁹ It sees “theory” in everyday life, rather than establishing a dualism of “theory” and “lived experience.” Such a critique of that separation between mental and manual labor, between thinking and being, is shared both by decolonial philosophers like Cordova and Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou) and Western critical philosophers like Spinoza and Marx. This approach reclaims the role of the body in knowledge, which has in Euro-bourgeois-modernity become identified with femininity.²⁰
Indigenous decolonial philosophers do not reject theory, like the solipsistic quantitative-thinkers do, but seek to transcend the need for its abstraction through knowledge true to the unity of mind and body and thinking and doing. Their understanding of lived experience is as the position from which one engages with the One of reality. The one is not the One, but the One is the interrelation of all the ones, it is the harmony of them.²¹ “Lived experience” is the experience of one subject in a world of countless subjects — this is qualitative reasoning.
In a world which is split, alienated, untrue to itself, this unity of the world is torn and reconfigured under the totalitarianism of alienated existence. Capital aims at becoming the social whole, at subordinating everything to itself and reorganizing the world around its all-devouring growth. As Marx taught us, capital originates from the way the relations between living beings are organized, but also dominates these beings. By doing so, it acts “behind the backs of the actors.”²² In a word, capitalism becomes second nature in a dual sense — it literally operates above and beyond the individuals who create it the same way that natural, physical processes like gravitational pull do, and it appears to individuals in capitalist society as the natural order of the world.
Marx tried to describe this phenomena in the related concepts of commodity fetishism, where value appears as a characteristic of objects themselves rather than as socially created, and of real abstraction, abstract categories like labor-as-such or value-as-such which operate in everyday life. The division of labor and growing scale and density of society in turn make society into something like a massive machine, where it is impossible for any individual to comprehend or control the whole thing.²³ What he always emphasized is that capitalism is literally mystified, and that this mystification occurs both on the level of our social whole and on the level of subjective consciousness.
With this in mind, an uncritical form of appealing to “lived experience” seems quite problematic. Not only can our consciousness about the world be mystified, and fail to understand — the world itself can be mystified? How can we be sure we understand the world, or even ourselves? If our lived experience is complacent with this mystification (and vice versa), then how can it be a reliable appeal for emancipatory truth?
One answer to this unreliability would be to simply identify that truth with the whole rather than the individual, to say that truth on an individual scale falls apart and that one only reaches truth when the truth-seeker is identical to the object they seek truth about. The individual truth-seeker, the knower, is not enough — one must reach the scale of the whole knowing itself. Perhaps, this ultimate identity of subject and object can directly be called God, or it can be called the Absolute, the unconditioned truth which is not merely true relative to something else. This is Hegel’s answer. In light of the horrific catastrophe of modern life however, from the Holocaust to the capitalocene, this seems trite. Theodor Adorno’s slogan, that “The whole is the false,” seems more appropriate to the world we live in.²⁴
The critical dialectic of Marxism offers us a potential to redeem this desire for emancipatory approach premised on “lived experience” where it critiques the “truth” of this capitalist social totality. This dialectic teaches us to question intuition, since immediate experience often contains abstractions and mystifications. Yet, it also values that embodied intuition as a potential seed for transformation on a total scale. Marx spoke approvingly of the intuitive revolts of workers, saying of the 1844 uprising of Silesian weavers “[…]Not only are the machines, these rivals of the worker, destroyed, but also the ledgers, the property titles, and while all the other movements turned first only against the industrial baron, i.e. the visible enemy, this movement turned also against the banker, the hidden enemy[…]”²⁵
Here, Marx sees the working class as already recognizing the power of capital as transcending individuals, as something beyond just its embodiment in the boss. In this sense, the workers themselves, in their uprising itself, point through their practice to a theoretical point. In his words, “[…]the Silesian revolt by no means took place in the separation of thoughts from social principles.”²⁶ As Raya Dunayevskaya has noted about his writing on the working class struggle to shorten the workday in Capital (1867), “[…]theory is not something the intellectual works out alone. Rather, the actions of the proletariat create the possibility for the intellectual to work out theory.”²⁷ Rather than emancipatory truth being the social totality, or being the solipsistic and quantitative individual, Marx pointed towards the potential emancipatory whole embedded in the revolutionary actions of everyday life.
Revolution, or emancipation, must start from everyday life, but cannot become content with staying there. The notion of “emancipatory” solipsism is in truth a defense of the capitalist social totality — You are not revolutionary merely by existing. There is a revolutionary potential within our concrete, lived existences, but these existences in themselves are not revolution. We must reject both those pessimistic doctrines which speak of the “system” as independent of human action (whether it is the natural order or it is so entrenched that it may as well be so) and those which try to take the individual as a refuge from society, ignoring the historical and social mediation of every individual and their identities — including their very identity of being an individual! We are not inherently anything, and this becomes obvious when the attempt to strictly delineate “lanes” falls apart into incoherence.
Adorno offered sound advice on this dilemma, saying:
“[…]the point about dialectics is not to negate the concept of fact in favour of mediation, or to exaggerate that of mediation; it is simply to say that immediacy is itself mediated but that the concept of the immediate must still be retained[…]”²⁸
On this ground, embodied knowledge has its place, but is not immediate access to truth. The point of Marx’s analysis of mystification is that our world is riddled with false appearances, but that these are made necessary by the organization of our interrelations with each other. These — necessary — false appearances mutilate us in a very concrete way. Frantz Fanon, for example, harshly critiqued Richard Wright’s ontological turn:
“It is true that black writers and poets all endure their own suffering, that the drama of consciousness of a westernized Black, torn between his white culture and his negritude, can be very painful; but this drama, which, after all, kills no one, is too particular to be representative: the misfortune of the colonized African masses, exploited, subjugated, is first of a vital, material order; the spiritual rifts of the ‘elite’ are a luxury that they are unable to afford.”²⁹
Fanon famously wrote of the internalization of anti-Blackness in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) — noting that individuals internalize a false world.³⁰ Our “lived experience” is not separate from the falsehood of the world — it is intertwined in it. It is important to note that Fanon also teaches us that the very experience of lived experience as “false,” to officialdom, is an effect of the world’s falsehood. This lived experience of being “false,” or “non-being,” to the world, is the scarring of racialization.³¹ Identity in this sense is a brand, or a wound. To live this wound does not inherently mean one has reached truth — internalization of racism is the untruth of the world seeping into the individual through their lived experience.
Rather than upholding identity as inherently good in itself, Fanon considered identity as something which offers a ground to start from in reaching towards total revolutionary transformation. In fact, one must start here, from the experience of common racial oppression and, in turn, common racial identity. However, it is only a beginning — staying within this identity, this brand, of race is to stay within the old racial world.³² In order to reach a new world, we must also recreate ourselves anew — “After the struggle is over, there is not only the demise of colonialism, but also the demise of the colonized. This new humanity, for itself and for others, inevitably defines a new humanism. This new humanism is written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”³³
From Experience, Beyond Identity
Critiquing identity politics is now a commonplace for socialist circles, typically being a scapegoat for the mediocrity of the American left and the failure of various social democratic electoral campaigns. Yet, this thinking tends to rest on the basic identity of the working class with itself. The “working class” is true, and racial, gendered, etc. identities are untrue and mere illusions. If we just come back to the interests of the workers as a group, we’ll be in the realm of true politics.
This is thinking about the working class the same way a trade union bureaucrat does, a figure who merely helps manage workers as one interest group among many other interest groups within capitalism. It thinks it is revolutionary, but it considers workers as already a coherent collectivity in their mere existence. It does not figure workers as living beings, living beings who may have other “identities,” but merely as workers. In a word, worker=worker and nothing else. The working class is identical with itself.
This thinking is thus right there in that identity-thinking, that formula of A=A, which is the classic target for critique by dialectic. Hegel already attacked the identity-formula, saying that it is purely within the realm of positivity (asserting what is — it literally says that what is, is what is). He said “They do not see that in saying, ‘Identity is different from difference,’ they have thereby already said that identity is something different. And since this must also be conceded as the nature of identity, the implication is that to be different belongs to identity not externally, but within it, in its nature[…] the truth is complete only in the unity of identity and difference, and, consequently, that it only consists in this unity.”³⁴
Marx in turn continued this dialectical critique of identity-thinking, criticizing a conception of revolution that calls for the universalization of the identity “worker” as “crude communism” which “in negating the personality of man in every sphere,” turns out to be “really nothing but the logical expression of private property, which is this negation[…]”³⁵ It is merely a first negation, it tries to abolish classes by making everyone a worker as the worker appears under capitalism. Marx speaks damningly of this form of “identity politics”:
“The community is only a community of labor, and an equality of wages paid out by the communal capital — the community as the universal capitalist. Both sides of the relationship are raised to an imagined universality — labor as a state in which every person is put, and capital as the acknowledged universality and power of the community.”³⁶
The working class is the “negative” side of the capitalist social whole, but is still a capitalist class in the sense of being of that society. Workers are the other side of the coin of capital.
Instead of identity-thinking, Marx called for the abolition of the proletariat by the proletariat — to him, this was the true step into a communist society.³⁷ Frantz Fanon in turn, in writing of decolonial revolution, critiqued narrow nationalism as caught in a dialectic of identity with the colonizer rather than abolishing the colonial relation.³⁸ He believed that decolonial revolution needed to start from here, just as Marx said that communist revolution starts from the worker, but that it must transcend it and “make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.”³⁹
Marx and Fanon both critiqued class society and coloniality, respectively, from a broader and deeper perspective than that offered by the quantitative-thinking of contemporary radical liberalism. This includes the silly dualism of race versus class, which we are supposed to choose one out of to be “primary” as a source of oppression. On the level of “lived experience” and the critique from out of that perspective, the two are not separated by any means. Global and national divisions of labor, including the development of classes, is heavily racialized, and that distinction in relations of production in turn is the ground of racialization itself. Fanon described this situation well, observing that “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.”⁴⁰
The ultimate question is, following the revolutionary dialectic, to reject the identity of our world with itself, and thus our identity with ourselves. If we want to change the world, it also means changing ourselves, which means refusing to just be at peace with ourselves as “pure” and “authentic.” Our “lived experience” does not automatically guarantee emancipatory truth, as we have said.
Yet, as Enrique Dussel has said, this cannot be done with a purely critical stance which tries to reject peace with any unity rather than beginning with the unities given to us.⁴¹ We must begin where we are, and that means with the unities that we are branded into. We must be particularistic in order to be universalist, without assuming that those particular identities are settled facts. Otherwise, we risk asserting a universality which is a particular interest in disguise — this is what Black feminists critiqued in the abstract “Woman” of white feminists — or retreating within a particular identity and refusing to engage the untrue social whole.
The particular, individual or identity-standpoint cannot be the totality, the whole. It cannot even be a potentially new, free, true whole. In Marxist terms, this means to stand against György Lukács, who identified the proletariat with the identical subject-object, and to stand with Adorno and his critique of identity-thinking.⁴² Adorno’s critique is in line with Marx’s critique of workers as being workers-in-capital rather than already the embodiment of the new world.
To refer back to Collins’ dismissive remark on him — Marx did not think in binary terms. He saw workers and capital as an identity, a unity, in capitalist society. He wished to shatter this identity, which necessarily meant the self-abolition of the proletariat (or the oppressed, if you like). Such a concept of revolution means that the oppressed group must work from their position of oppression to remake the oppressive world, which in turn means remaking themselves a new from “the oppressed” to something which thrives and creates a liberated world order.
We can therefore agree with both Patricia Hill Collins and the Marxist Henri Lefebvre — that the unity of theory and practice is realized through everyday life, or rather a revolution from out of it.⁴³ Rather than something alien to Marxism (as is implied in the base-superstructure trope), this is directly embedded in Marx’s rejection of the separation of mental and manual labor and of thinking and doing. This unity is a truth of knowledge to be realized through revolutionary disalienation, by overcoming the identity of the world with itself. In trying to change our world, we should understand the necessity of Marx rather than merely dismiss him. Furthermore, this harmony of thinking and being, of subject and object, advocated by Marxism can in turn learn from the sibling critique represented by decoloniality. Both begin from the immediacy of lived experience.
