Having discussed the history of standpoint theory, I now want to dive into it more philosophically. While I have plenty of outsider’s objections to standpoint theory, here I want to explore what goes wrong with standpoint theory on its own terms – noting a key tension internal to standpoint theory which I do not think it resolves.

Namely: the main justification for standpoint theory – the reasoning that gave it plausibility – was materialist, in a sense drawing on Karl Marx. But as it grew, standpoint theory lost that materialist justification, leaving it with little grounding. We can see the loss of standpoint theory’s materialist underpinnings just within the work of Nancy Hartsock, one of its key founders.

Hartsock’s original 1983 chapter, “The feminist standpoint” states what I think was standpoint theory’ in general’s core underlying claim: “If material life is structured in fundamentally opposing ways for two different groups, one can expect that the vision of each will represent an inversion of the other, and in systems of domination the vision available to the rulers will be both partial and perverse.” (285) The key word in this claim is material: for Hartsock as for her predecessors Marx and Georg Lukács, one’s viewpoint is deeply structured by the material conditions of one’s life. What Hartsock’s feminist analysis adds to Lukács and Marx is the materiality of household work and childrearing. She cites Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room to illustrate how this materiality works:

Washing the toilet used by three males, and the floor and walls around it, is, Mira thought, coming face to face with necessity. And that is why women were saner than men, did not come up with the mad, absurd schemes men developed; they were in touch with necessity, they had to wash the toilet bowl and floor. (quoted on Hartsock 292)

Notice the implications of Hartsock’s materialism: a woman who doesn’t have to do domestic labour – such as a childless woman wealthy enough to hire others to do it – would have no way to acquire this sanity or this better perspective. She would logically be prone to come up with schemes just as absurd and mad as the men did. The simple fact of being biologically female, or of socially having a feminine gender, is not sufficient to give her the standpoint. A single father too poor to hire domestic help would have far more of it.

Hartsock’s Marxist predecessor, Georg Lukács, assigns this same sanity to the proletariat, the working class. In Lukács’s view the proletariat understands social reality in a way the bourgeoisie cannot, because its material circumstances mean it has to:

For the proletariat to become aware of the dialectical nature of its existence is a matter of life and death, whereas the bourgeoisie uses the abstract categories of reflection, such as quantity and infinite progression, to conceal the dialectical structure of the historical process in daily life… (164-5)

Thus a bourgeois man is able to imagine himself “the subject of his own life”. But for a proletarian, “In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence.” (165) So the proletariat necessarily sees as the bourgeoisie does not and cannot: “The self-understanding of the proletariat is therefore simultaneously the objective understanding of the nature of society.” (149)

Lukács, importantly, thought that standpoint needed to be specific to the bourgeoisie and proletariat: “Simply to transplant the structure we have discerned here into any stance other than that of proletarian action—for only the class can be practical in its relation to the total process—would mean the creation of a new conceptual mythology and a regression to the standpoint of classical philosophy refuted by Marx.” (205) Why? Because what gives the proletariat its special standpoint is its material relation to obtaining the necessities of life, “a matter of life and death”; proletarians must work or die.

That’s not to say that Lukács was right about this; one could possibly say Hartsock and Frantz Fanon succeeded in their projects in a way that proved Lukács wrong. Still, those words should give us some pause. Lukács already anticipates even Hartsock’s initial formulation of feminist standpoint theory and calls it “mythology” and “regression”.

I do think that Hartsock retains Lukács’s basic materialism in her original essay on standpoint theory, with her Marxian emphasis on work (like cleaning toilets). Where she does not retain it, though, is in her followup 1998 piece “The feminist standpoint revisited”, included in the book with that title – in which she refers to “the feminist standpoint (now I think standpoints)…” (“Revisited” 236)

There, she apologizes for having blind spots that mirrored (what she took to be) Marx’s own: “he lost track of women’s labor in reproducing the working class. So whereas I too took note of some race and class differences in terms of the sexual division of labor, I made no theoretical space that would have accorded them proper significance.” (“Revisited” 239) Thus she seeks to “pluralize the idea” of a feminist standpoint, as an “instrument of struggle against dominant groups“, plural. She cites Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa on “la facultad”, a capacity to see deeper hidden structures below the social surface: “those who have pounced on the most have it the strongest—the females, the homosexuals of all races, the dark skinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign.” (quoted in “Revisited” 243) It is that pluralized view of standpoints that has underlied key Social Justice texts like McIntosh’s “invisible knapsack”, with their identifying of “privilege” as the key problem.

But what falls away, wordlessly, in these pluralized standpoints is the sense of materiality. As it must, because there is no more powerful material standpoint that one can attribute to marginalized-groups-in-general in the way that Lukács attributed to the proletariat and the earlier Hartsock to women. Different oppressed groups are oppressed in different ways, which are often not material. Her weakened version of the standpoint says only “marginalized groups are less likely to mistake themselves for the universal ‘man.'” (“Revisited” 240) As examples she cites a black American who said “I have grown to a womanhood in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear”, and Gabriel García Márquez saying “our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.” (“Revisited” 242-3) But to simply not be believed by powerful people – this is something that everyone faces in different ways at different times, and has very little to do with Hartsock’s earlier argument about the materiality of women’s lives.

Lukàcs says the proletariat has a superior standpoint because its oppressed status allows it to see things the bourgeoisie cannot. But how is this claim to superiority demonstrated, in the face of the bourgeoisie’s inevitable claims to its own superiority? By the historical inevitability of revolution. There is a better world made possible by the proletariat’s insight, which will eventually come to vindicate it, through a world that is better for all. (That’s the theory, at least, and whatever one may think about it in practice it does make internal sense.)

Hartsock’s initial formulation of the feminist standpoint could do something similar… but, as soon as that initial standpoint becomes plural “standpoints,” it no longer can. There is no longer a group – whether the proletariat, women, the colonized or anything else – whose superior vantage point is epistemologically vindicated by its supposed eventual triumph. (Unless perhaps you believe the laughable claim that all marginalized people are natural allies, which would tell me only that you don’t know many marginalized people.)

What all that means, in turn, is that in the later Hartsock there is no longer anything objective about the superiority of the oppressed standpoint. Her revised standpoint theory is simply a normative claim that depends for any legitimacy on the egalitarianism of the oppressor groups — that is, on white liberal guilt. Once class politics are replaced by ethnic politics, the struggle is no longer a struggle for (justice, equality, freedom) but simply a struggle between (races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, groups). The struggle for can make normative claims. The struggle between cannot. The struggle for seeks to secure justice for all. The struggle between is just looking for a bigger piece of the pie.

Once you start claiming that any oppressed group – not a specific group with specific conditions like women or the working class – has an epistemologically better standpoint, there are few real grounds left for believing that their standpoint actually is better. Once “the feminist standpoint” becomes “feminist standpoints” and different ethnic groups are added to the mix, then it falls apart. Then you’ve got the situation we’re in now, where everybody claiming marginality to get the privilege associated with it –without there actually being a reason behind the claim.

The only real justification that remains in the later, weakened, version of standpoint theory is the idea that “marginalized groups are less likely to mistake themselves for the universal ‘man’.” But this seems to me like an obsolete problem at best, for we live in an era where too much universality is not the problem. Consider the white identity politics of the current Trump administration: there is no longer any pretence toward universality remaining. Unlike Reagan or George W. Bush, they’re not even pretending they are doing something good for the whole country. They recognize that there is a battle over the spoils and they want more for themselves – and to punish their enemies. This seems like a very bad thing to me – but it’s the main thing that Hartsock’s revised standpoint theory encourages! You wanted privileged people to stop mistaking themselves for the universal? Great, you got that wish – and boy is it making a mess of things.