Did Marx Ignore Race in His Critique of Economics?

Reckoning with Marx from the Black Radical and Third World Tradition

By Musa T. Bey

. Introduction: The Invisible Architecture of Empire

To ask whether Karl Marx ignored race in his critique of political economy is not to reduce a profound body of thought to its blind spots—it is to reckon with the limits of European revolutionary theory when confronted with the afterlives of colonialism, the machinery of anti-Blackness, and the everyday resistance of the oppressed majority of the world.

For those of us shaped by the Black Radical Tradition and Third World Marxism, this question is neither academic nor symbolic. It is practical, historical, and strategic. It emerges from the soil of stolen land and enslaved labor. It echoes in the prisons of Philadelphia and the refugee camps of Gaza. It is asked in the dialect of struggle: Can Marxism truly liberate the wretched of the earth if it does not center the experience of the wretched?

Marx gave us tools. But as the Third World revolutionaries and Black radicals taught us, those tools require sharpening, decolonizing, and sometimes replacing when they fail to map the terrain of racialized exploitation.

II. Marx and the Racial Foundations of Capitalism

Karl Marx understood capitalism as a mode of production characterized by wage labor, the extraction of surplus value, and the commodification of human life. In Capital, he meticulously analyzed how labor becomes alienated, how commodities mask social relations, and how crises are inevitable under the logic of accumulation.

But here lies the contradiction: Marx’s theory assumes a universal proletariat—a generic worker stripped of race, nationality, and gender. He centers the European industrial worker as the revolutionary subject of history, even as the blood of colonized peoples irrigated the fields of global capital.

To be clear, Marx did not completely ignore race. In fact, he made important, if scattered, observations:

He acknowledged that American slavery was foundational to British industry. He argued that white workers could not be free while Black workers remained enslaved. He supported Irish independence and criticized British colonialism in India.

But these insights remained episodic, not systemic. They were not fully theorized into the architecture of his critique. Race, in Marx’s framework, was a derivative contradiction, not a constitutive one. That distinction is not minor—it is political.

III. What Marx Missed: Slavery, Colonization, and Racial Capitalism

The violence of this omission becomes clear when we look at the historical foundations of capitalism. European capitalism did not emerge in isolation—it emerged through:

The transatlantic slave trade, which commodified Black bodies. The genocide of Indigenous peoples, which cleared the land for extraction. The colonial exploitation of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, which provided raw materials, cheap labor, and expanded markets.

As Walter Rodney wrote in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, the rise of Europe and the underdevelopment of the Global South were not parallel events—they were causally linked. The wealth of the imperial metropole was built on the backs of the colonized. Marx noted this in passing. The Black radical and Third World traditions made it central.

Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism tore open the Eurocentric assumptions of classical Marxism. He argued that capitalism did not destroy feudal racial hierarchies—it racialized them further. Capitalism, Robinson wrote, “emerged within an already racialized social order and was constituted by it.” This is the theory of racial capitalism—not capitalism with racism, but capitalism as racial to its core.

And then there is W.E.B. Du Bois, who in Black Reconstruction in America placed the Black proletariat—not the white European worker—at the center of modern history. For Du Bois, the Civil War was not just a war of northern capital against southern slaveocracy. It was a revolution sparked by the self-activity of enslaved Africans, who struck for their freedom, undermined the southern economy, and reshaped the meaning of democracy.

IV. Third World Marxism: The South Speaks Back

Marxism, when filtered through the hands of colonized peoples, took on a different character. Third World Marxists did not abandon class struggle—they grounded it in anti-imperialism, national liberation, and the lived realities of racialized labor.

Frantz Fanon, writing from the crucible of Algerian revolution, warned that the European proletariat was “fatally entangled in the web of colonial privilege.” For Fanon, the true revolutionary subject was not in the factories of Europe, but in the countryside of the colonized, among the damned of the earth. Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau argued for a “re-Africanization” of Marxism, where culture and race were not secondary but weapons of resistance. Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian-born Marxist in the U.S., developed the concept of triple oppression—Black, working-class, and woman—as a basis for revolutionary analysis, decades before intersectionality was named. Che Guevara, Walter Rodney, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah—each took Marxism beyond Europe, fusing it with the demands of land, dignity, sovereignty, and race.

These thinkers did not treat Marx as scripture. They treated him as a comrade—brilliant but incomplete. They revised, expanded, and revolutionized his work.

V. The Black Radical Tradition: Memory and Motion

The Black Radical Tradition, as theorized by Cedric Robinson, is not simply an intellectual lineage—it is a collective memory of rebellion. It is the culture of resistance forged in maroon communities, slave uprisings, blues songs, and Black churches. It is not linear. It is not Western. It is not dependent on the state. It is fugitive, prophetic, and communal.

This tradition has always understood what Marx only began to glimpse: that freedom cannot be reduced to wages, nor liberation to the factory floor. It must account for the psychic, spiritual, and social dimensions of Black life. It must honor the dead and protect the living. It must imagine new worlds, not just seize old ones.

To critique Marx from within this tradition is not betrayal—it is continuation. It is to demand that revolutionary theory meet the full weight of Black existence.