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But what did Marx actually have to say about the inter-relationship of race, gender, and class? Actually, quite a lot. Unfortunately, the post-Marx Marxists who formalized his thought were often unaware of this, or worse, in some cases rejected outright Marx’s thought on race and gender.
Take, for example, his writings on race and class and their relationship to capital. Even before the Communist Manifesto, the young Marx theorized that modern capitalism existed on the foundation of Black slave labor: “Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works [hereafter MECW] 38, pp. 101-2, trans. slightly altered). Thus, it was not only a question of capital’s exploitation of legally free wage labor inside Britain, the leading industrial power of the day, but also one of a wider set of relationships that involved a type of unfree labor, slave labor, organized in a highly modern capitalist sense, one that had marked differences from Roman or other earlier forms of slavery.
As Marx wrote in the 1861-63 preparatory manuscript for his magnum opus, Capital, the relentless pressure of value production, of capital accumulation, gave this modern capitalist form of slavery a ruthless, almost genocidal character, working Africans to death: “If the capitalist sets the worker to work for e.g. 20 hours today, tomorrow he will be incapable of working the normal labor time of 12 hours or perhaps any labor time at all. If the overwork extends over a long period, the worker will perhaps only preserve himself and therefore his labor capacity for 7 years instead of the 20 or 30 years for which he might otherwise have preserved it…. This is still at this moment the case in Cuba, where after 12 hours in the fields the Negroes have a further two hours of manufacturing labor to perform in connection with the preparation of sugar or tobacco” (MECW 30, pp. 182-83).
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