Gregory Slack

Karl Marx is back. No less than three academic monographs by philosophers treating Marx’s ethical, social, and political thought were published in 2024 alone. This is startling evidence of a renewed interest by philosophers in what Marx has to offer to ethics and social philosophy. Although an earlier flowering of interest by analytic philosophers – arguably beginning some fifty years ago with a debate between Allen Wood and Ziyad Husami – generated an enormous literature on Marx and justice, my contention is that we can uncover a heretofore insufficiently scrutinized concept of justice in the works of Marx precisely by returning to that inaugural debate. We can do this by triangulating the positions of Wood and Husami, showing how their views, when taken together, imply a third position that is more textually faithful and constitutes a more compelling interpretation than either of Marx’s concept of justice. My argument rests on three central interpretive claims: (1) there are two conceptions or standards of justice in Marx’s writings on capitalism, capitalist justice and communist justice, (2) the communist mode of production develops within the capitalist one, and (3) because of (2), the communist standard of justice can validly be applied within capitalism.

In this dissertation I defend the claim that not only was Marx not an anti-black racist, he was an anti-anti-black racist, despite sometimes employing racist language and epithets. I prove this claim by adducing massive amounts of textual evidence from Marx and Engels’ writings, spanning their entire careers as writers and revolutionaries, where time and again they condemn black slavery and the slave-trade, look forward to and call for their abolition, and aim at a future of racial justice and equality for black people, as a component part of communist justice for all working people, under a communist mode of production. I thus show that Marx had a conception of communist justice, from which followed as a matter of course his endorsement of racial justice and equality for black workers. In carrying out this project, I am contributing to the subfield of philosophy of race that has been engaged in a historical reexamination of Western canonical philosophers for their views on race and black people in particular. Much has been written about Kant in this connection, and some on Locke, Hume, Hegel, and others. But Marx has received scant attention. The most prominent philosopher to treat the topic of Marx and race was undoubtedly Charles Mills. But, I claim, Mills got Marx wrong. He wrote as if the only time Marx ever spoke about black people was when he was making racist remarks. Mills does not canvass the material I present here. I also demonstrate that outside of philosophy – in history, political science, anthropology, sociology, and so on – reading Marx as an anti-black racist and/or as one who ignored or misunderstood the relationship between black slavery and capitalism is also widespread. Thus, I also refute the claims of various non-philosophers who, like Mills, get Marx wrong on this issue. Finally, by using Mills’ work as a foil, I seek to re-orient the sympathies of his many disciples. Mills was and is justly famous in philosophy and academia more broadly, and his work has reached and continues to reach a wide audience. Thus his characterization of Marx and Marxism as racist must have wide currency amongst those interested in race and racism, critical race theory, racial justice, black liberation and so on who rightly read and cite his work regularly. My secondary aim, then, is to bring to the attention of Mills’ followers this other – and in my view, correct – reading of Marx, so that they may reconsider the usefulness of Marx and Marxism for tackling issues of race, racism, and racial justice. Despite, as Mills has shown, liberalism’s ‘racial’ (i.e., racist) history, many may follow Mills in embracing a black radical version of liberalism that does not fundamentally challenge capitalist social relations, once they think Marx and Marxism are dumb on race and/or are sources of anti-black racism. Thus it is my hope that the claims I defend in this dissertation will go some way towards remedying this potential misperception on the part of Mills’ followers, and encouraging them to explore the Marxian paradigm in good faith, before they embrace a version of liberalism that inevitably must fail to challenge the capitalist world-order: a world-order that instituted and perpetuates global white supremacy (what Mills called ‘The Racial Contract’) under the guise of ‘liberalism.’

Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipation was conditional on the level of ‘civilization’ attained by black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defense of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-black racism of Marx and the place black workers occupy in his historical materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualizing the relationship between Marxism and black liberation.

Charles Mills' philosophical position has undergone a number of subtle shifts over the past 30 years. Nevertheless, there has been a relative consistency in his thought over the past two decades, at least since The Racial Contract of 1997. That consistency consists in his turn towards social contract theory and its liberal values and away from Marxism with its focus on class and political economy. Mills notes that this turn does not constitute a “a complete repudiation of Marxism, since I do think that a modified historical materialism might be able to carry out an adequate conceptualization of the significance of race.” Some of the claims Mills makes about Marx and Engels, however, should be challenged; they (or their views) are not as “white” as Mills attests. Indeed, Marx and Engels made a considerable start at theorizing white supremacy as an outgrowth of modern capitalism.

In a Times Literary Supplement review of some recent literature on Marx and Marxism for a general readership, Jonathan Wolff claimed that Marx’s solution to the so-called “transformation problem” is “half-baked.” The aim of this paper is to challenge this complacent dismissal of some of Marx’s central economic ideas. In the process, I want to show that although the issues here are subtle and complex, Marx’s ideas retain a great deal of intuitive appeal, and his “solution” to the so-called “transformation problem” is neither conceptually implausible nor mathematically dubious. Crucial to this aim is to show that Marx viewed the categories of (what he called bourgeois) economics through a social lens, which is given in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital.

Here I both celebrate and critique the legacy of Charles W. Mills. I begin by offering some reflections on the trajectory of Mills’s career and intellectual development, focusing on his move from Marxist philosophy to the philosophy of race. I then attempt to undermine an argument in Mills’s final book, for why those interested in emancipation should choose liberalism over Marxism. By contrasting Mills with the late Italian Marxist philosopher of history Domenico Losurdo, with whom Mills shared a blistering critique of ‘racial’ liberalism but whom I claim Mills misread, I seek to weaken key premises in Mills’s argument.