As Comrade Mao Tse-tung said in his work “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War”, “[i]t is well known that when you do anything, unless you understand its actual circumstances, its nature and its relations to other things, you will not know the laws governing it, or know how to do it, or be able to do it well.” Many comrades have made legitimate criticisms of the problems of identity politics from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint, but I contend that though it does have many flaws, there are still useful lessons to be gained from it in analyzing the everyday and individual-level functioning of systems of oppression and holding our comrades accountable to our goal of eradicating all forms of oppression and exploitation. As part of this effort to develop a theory for integrating identity politics into a Marxist-Leninist framework, I have developed an idea I call “the materialist definition of privilege”, a definition consisting of three conditions that must all be true:

The ‘privilege’ confers some material or social benefit that is consistently accessible by the privileged person; i.e., the privileged person does not have to do something in particular or present themselves a certain way to receive the benefit. The ‘privilege’ significantly colors the perception of a privileged person, the essential test for this condition being that a person could conceivably go their entire lives without realizing that they have it; in other words, the privilege of being unaware of privilege. The ‘privilege’ affirms the privileged person’s identity, and can be accessed when the privileged person is fully expressing it; this may even be the most fundamental aspect of privilege, society’s affirmation of one’s identity coupled with social benefits.

The materialist definition of privilege is important because in social justice contexts having privilege implies a need to step back and let others who have less privilege do the talking; if privilege is imprecisely defined it can effectively result in people being silenced from talking about their own oppression.

The primary thing the materialist definition of privilege is designed to exclude is all types of “passing privilege” concepts, such as “white-passing privilege” for people of color, “straight-passing privilege” for bisexual people, and the “privilege” of a trans person “passing” as their gender identity. All of these concepts completely fail the materialist definition of privilege: they are not consistently accessible because they depend on being perceived a certain way, anyone who has them is well aware because they are treated differently when they fail to “pass”, and they all fundamentally involve the erasure of the person’s identity, because they involve being perceived in a way that contradicts the person’s self-understanding (though in the case of trans “passing” it’s a bit more complicated: the social benefits are contingent on hiding trans identity, or essentially being perceived as cis). Passing privilege essentially amounts to a brief malfunction of an oppressive system: as soon as the person stops “passing” and their true identity becomes visible, it corrects itself; any social benefits that the “privilege” had conferred are then immediately revoked.

Things that fail the materialist definition of privilege should not be called “privilege” because they do not represent a definite higher social position. For another example, a trans woman being treated better because of being perceived as a man is not privilege in any meaningful sense because it completely contradicts her self-understanding; rather than being privilege it is just a particularly distressing and confusing form of transphobia. Similarly, trans people assigned female at birth receiving favorable treatment in transmisogynist feminist spaces is not privilege either, because they are in essence not truly accepted but rather treated as women defying gender stereotypes. The idea that trans and non-binary identities are more accepted for people assigned female at birth is comparable to the idea that bisexuality is more acceptable in women because female bisexuality is fetishized by patriarchal society; in both cases, beneath the surface appearance of “acceptance” is a dismissal of the legitimacy of the identity. Just as this “acceptance” of bisexual women ends when the person refuses to use their sexual orientation to serve men’s sexual gratification, such “acceptance” of trans people assigned female at birth in transmisogynist feminist spaces ends when the person refuses to use their identity to uphold trans-exclusionary feminism’s cissexist and transmisogynist narrative of “female” empowerment.

The materialist definition of privilege comes from the Marxist recognition of the unity of theory and practice; silencing of oppressed voices in supposedly “progressive” social justice spaces cannot be separated from the reckless description of marginally better treatment of some oppressed people in very limited contexts as “privilege”. A precise definition of privilege that only includes benefits resulting from a definite higher social position resolves this issue, enabling a better theoretical analysis of the functioning of oppressive systems and by extension making revolutionary practice aiming to dismantle such systems more effective; in Mao’s words, it gives a clearer picture of the “actual circumstances” of the phenomenon of social privilege, allowing us to “know the laws governing it” and improve our practice accordingly.