Standpoint theory begins from a genuinely important insight: people’s knowledge comes above all from their life experience, and so different people will have different insights and recognize different things. Our life experience does shape what we see and don’t see, and can blind us to things that others see in their position. This difference can in turn become a problem in the context of power relations, when only the experience of the powerful is represented, and other perspectives are ignored and therefore become missing. Standpoint theory’s best moment was probably Patricia Hill Collins’s 1986 sociology article “Learning from the outsider within“, which pointed out that sociological generalizations at that time were generally made by white men, and thus missed things that were clearer to black women:

sociological generalizations about families that do not account for Black women’s experience will fail to see how the public/private split shaping household composition varies across social and class groupings, how racial/ethnic family members are differentially integrated into wage labor, and how families alter their household structure in response to changing political economies (e.g., adding more people and becoming extended, fragmenting and becoming female-headed, and migrating to locate better opportunities). (Collins S29)

I think Collins was right about the sociology of the time; there were important aspects of social life that white male sociologists had missed because they hadn’t experienced them. No doubt there were additional contexts where academic or journalistic writing had to that point been focused on more privileged groups, and attention to marginalized groups proved a useful corrective.

Most standpoint theory – including the very influential writing of Nancy Hartsock – misrepresents the value of this insight, in a crucial way. Black women’s insights were particularly valuable simply because they had been left out of sociology through the ’80s. That problem can be fixed by making sure a wide range of life experiences, including theirs, is represented, in sociology or any other field where it was lacking. Representing that range might be more difficult than it sounds, but as long as it is represented (which could be more difficult than it sounds), then the problem is fixed.

But typical standpoint theorists like Hartsock, drawing from Georg Lukács’s standpoint Marxism, go beyond that point and thereby make a crucial error: they think that the value of marginalized groups’ perspectives is not merely that they are different and underrepresented than more privileged groups’, but that they are inherently better! Hartsock took up what she referred to as Marx’s “proposal that a correct vision of class society is available from only one of the two major class positions in capitalist society” (“The feminist standpoint” 284). On such a view it is not just that the bourgeoisie misses things that come up in the proletariat’s experience (thus leading them to errors like commodity fetishism), but that only the proletariat is even capable of understanding the class society. Hartsock tried to apply such a view to gender, arguing that there are insight only women can have because of their life situation – an approach that, I have argued, fell apart on its own terms. But that didn’t stop Hartsock’s approach from being wildly popular in the Social Justice movement, with its binary divisions between privileged and marginalized.

Marx too had an important insight about the bourgeoisie – that they build up a whole ideological system (classical economics, more or less) to defend their interests and pretend that their self-interest is everyone’s. (It is still worth noting that at the same time Marx admires the bourgeoisie, which has “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”.)

Regarding, the proletariat, on the other hand, Marx got it completely wrong! Even if we were to think of Communism as real Marxism, the proletariat never once led one of the Communist revolutions. The ones who have seen things in a Marxist way and changed society accordingly have, by and large, been intellectuals – what Lenin called the “vanguard class”. Sometimes you can lump intellectuals into the proletariat when they’re paid for their work – but not always, most notably in the case of Marx’s collaborator and co-writer Friedrich Engels, the bourgeois owner who paid to make Marx’s work possible. Even from a perspective that views Marx’s theory as largely correct, the bourgeois Engels seems to have seen things better than most proletarians historically did.

The crucial error at the heart of standpoint theory is to see the differences in knowledge as being asymmetrical: not merely that the marginalized have a different view which we must take care to represent adequately, but that their marginalization makes their view inherently better. And there is no reason to believe that that is the case – certainly not in Hartsock’s original formulation, which, again, fell apart on its own terms.

Indeed, there are ways that being oppressed can make one’s view worse, less accurate. Science education is a privilege, but it is a privilege that leads one to understand better than one would without it. People enter government demanding various programs that they back away from once they see the budget math doesn’t add up – their newfound privilege teaches them something real. As Martha Nussbaum once noted, one thinks badly if one is hungry. Even Hartsock claims that activities of childrearing and housework under contemporary capitalism are “constructed in ways which systematically degrade and destroy the minds and bodies of those who perform them.” (“Standpoint” 302) Having your mind systematically degraded and destroyed doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that gives you an inherently better understanding!

Victimhood can be particularly damaging to one’s understanding. Consider Ayn Rand: genuinely oppressed by a Communist government, she then built a particularly vicious capitalist philosophy out of her determination to be anything but. The proverb says it best there: to the mouse, there’s no beast greater than the cat.

Marx and Lukács get some of their proto-standpoint ideas from Hegel, whom I have great sympathy with. But the most important thing about Hegel for me is his dialectical approach – and standpoint theory can lead us to the exact opposite of that. Dialectic is about seeing truth in all positions, preserving the appearances or prevalent ordinary beliefs. When done modestly, as in Collins’s examples, a standpoint approach can help us see all positions by showing us views we wouldn’t have otherwise considered. But in its more common variations, like Hartsock’s and the bastardized takes so common in the Social Justice movement, standpoint theory is actively hostile to the ordinary beliefs of the privileged, treating someone’s privileged status as a reason to dismiss their views. It was ubiquitous circa 2019 to see Social Justice activists’ eyes roll dismissing an Atlantic or other article on the grounds that it was written by “just another white guy” – in sharp contrast to Collins herself, who actually condemned the “marginalized is always right” view.

Being oppressed doesn’t necessarily mean you understand the oppressive situation better. It might, but it might mean you understand it worse. We don’t know that at the start of the inquiry. What we do know is that your experience is different from that of someone who is not so oppressed, whose experience is not so closely wrapped up in that situation. And so it is important to listen – to both sides. Standpoint theory is right on this much: non-oppressed people will not have a full view of their oppression if they do not listen to oppressed people. But just as much, oppressed people will not have a full view if they do not listen to those who aren’t oppressed.