Critical Sociology

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Theoretical foundations of an anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism

David Camfield
Crit Sociol published online 17 February 2014
DOI: 10.1177/0896920513507790

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CRS0010.1177/0896920513507790Critical SociologyCamfield

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Critical Sociology

Theoretical Foundations of an
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DOI: 10.1177/0896920513507790
Historical Materialism crs.sagepub.com

David Camfield
University of Manitoba, Canada

Abstract
Bringing together Karl Marx’s key intellectual contributions and the best of contemporary anti-
racist (critical race) queer feminism is a promising direction for critical social theory. Important
studies exist that use this approach. However, its theoretical foundations have not been adequately
clarified or elucidated; this article attempts to do so. The proposed anti-racist queer feminist
historical materialism rethinks Marx’s materialist conception of history and theory of the capitalist
mode of production through the more expansive conceptions of social reality offered by anti-
racist queer feminism while simultaneously reworking the latter contributions through Marx’s
critical materialism and particular attention to historical specificity and social form.

Keywords
Marx, Marxism, historical materialism, feminism, anti-racism, theory, sociology

Introduction
This article proposes that bringing together Karl Marx’s key intellectual contributions and the best
of contemporary anti-racist (or critical race) queer feminism is a promising direction for critical
social theory. The aim of this move is a sublation that simultaneously preserves and changes these
elements in order to produce an anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism (I will also refer to
this as reconstructed historical materialism).1 The essential reason for bringing together these two
bodies of thought in this manner is that each has generated vitally important insights while also
being restricted in its explanatory power because of limitations that can be remedied with comple-
mentary knowledge offered by the other. The proposed theory would rethink Marx’s path-breaking
materialist conception of history and powerful theory of the capitalist mode of production through
the more expansive conceptions of social reality offered by anti-racist queer feminism while

Corresponding author:
David Camfield, Labour Studies Program, University of Manitoba, 114 Isbister Building, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3T 2N2,
Canada.
Email: david.camfield@umanitoba.ca

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2 Critical Sociology 

simultaneously reworking these latter contributions through Marx’s critical materialism and par-
ticular attention to historical specificity and social form.
Important reconstructed historical materialist studies exist (e.g. Bannerji, 1995, 2000, 2005;
Brenner, 2000; Federici, 2004; Gilmore, 2007; Hennessy, 2000; Kinsman and Gentile, 2010;
McNally, 2006; Roediger, 2008; Sears, 2003). However, not much has been written about such an
approach itself (exceptions include Bannerji, 1995, 2005; Ferguson, 2008; Hennessy, 2000, 2006)
and its theoretical foundations have not been adequately clarified or elucidated. This is the task that
this article attempts, without claiming to offer the only possible social-theoretical basis for an anti-
racist queer feminist historical materialism.
There has been relatively little dialogue between rigorously Marxist researchers and non-
Marxist anti-racist feminist scholars in recent years.2 As a result, ideas considered central to one of
these intellectual communities are not always well understood by members of the other. This
unfortunate situation informs the shape of this article, which proceeds by excavating what I take to
be the most important contributions to social theory of Marx and anti-racist queer feminism,
explaining the merits of each, suggesting why these ought to be rethought through each other and
discussing some of the implications of doing so.

The Best Marx

Marx’s theoretical work is a massive unfinished effort containing mistaken notions, unresolved
tensions and lacunae as well as brilliant original intellectual breakthroughs and promising but
undeveloped insights.3 It has long been difficult to consider Marx’s intellectual contributions out-
side of how these have been understood by self-declared Marxists of various persuasions, and so a
very brief discussion of Marxism is necessary. Most Marxist social theory has not in fact built on
Marx’s key conceptual accomplishments, which it has therefore often obscured. As Simon Clarke
(1991: ix) has put it:

Marx laid the foundations of a critical social theory but, contrary to Marxist orthodoxy, he did not provide
an all-encompassing world view. Marx marked out a critical project, which was to understand and to
transform society from the standpoint of the activity and aspirations of concrete human individuals.

It is not that there is nothing of value in the social theory written by Marxists since Marx, but much
of this has not illuminated his ‘foundations of a critical social theory’.
Considered in terms of social theory, the most influential line of descent from Marx has been
orthodox Marxism (or orthodox historical materialism). This offers precisely the kind of ‘all-
encompassing world view’ that Clarke rightly notes Marx did not attempt to produce. Its origins lie
in the appropriation of some of Marx’s ideas in the late 1800s by European working-class move-
ments that ‘harboured a majority orthodoxy as far removed from his problematic as vulgar
Darwinism was from the paths opened up by Darwin’ (Bensaid, 2002: 261). Orthodox Marxism
was indelibly stamped by the ‘sensibility and the collective mentality of the period, saturated with
scientism, dominated by monist materialism and the ideas of progress and evolution that derived
from the natural sciences’ (Haupt, 1982: 281). This kind of social theory was later defended by
Lenin (who partially broke from it after 1914 [Lowy, 1976]) and expounded by many other Russian
writers. It became the official state ideology of the USSR, China and other ‘Communist’ states, and
thereby shaped the worldview of theoreticians and activists globally. In addition, versions of it
were also articulated by anti-Stalinist Marxists such as Ernest Mandel (Bensaid, 2009) and by late
20th-century socialist-feminism (Camfield, 2002). What the many variants of orthodox Marxism
have in common is a failure, to varying degrees, to grasp Marx’s critical social theory.

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Camfield 3

What, then, is the ‘best Marx’4 that ought to be part of the sublation needed to generate an anti-
racist feminist queer historical materialism? My contention is that Marx’s crucial contributions to
critical social theory are a new materialism, a novel attention to historical specificity and social
form, a materialist conception of history, and a theory of the capitalist mode of production. These
do not necessarily exhaust what Marx offers, but they are his paramount contributions. Of course,
there is also much in Marx’s thought that deserves to be discarded.5

A New Materialism6
Feminist theorist Dorothy Smith (1987: 122–3) demonstrates a clear understanding of Marx’s
materialism as:

an ontology that first shifts us out of the discourse among texts as a place to start… What is there to be
investigated are the ongoing actual activities of real people … The distinctive stance of Marx’s materialism
… is the assertion that consciousness is inseparable from the individual … This conception is of the social
as existing in and only in actual people’s actual activities and practices, where the terms ‘individual,’
‘activity,’ and ‘practice’ are taken to include the ‘subjective side’ or consciousness.

This ‘social materialism of practice’ (Osborne, 2005: 26) is a starting point for a theory of human
social activity. It does not merely invert an idealist elevation of ideas (or discourse) over matter in
the manner of earlier and some later materialist philosophies (including many Marxisms). Rather,
it rejects the dualism of material and ideal altogether and asserts the unity of consciousness and
human individuals. Social existence and social consciousness are seen as an internally-related
ensemble. Within that unity, there is a hierarchy of determination: bodies are prior to or determi-
nate of thought. ‘Starting from the standpoint of objects, of the non-conceptual, materialist critique
resists all idealist moves to absorb the object into concepts’ (McNally, 2001: 74). This does not
entail the dominance of ahistorical materiality, since ‘The world of objects is the world of objective
human activity’, although ‘the objective world’ is not reducible to ‘humankind and its history’
(McNally, 2001: 74).
At the centre of this social ontology is human labour, the practical activity of members of the
species in relationship with other members and with the rest of nature. Human beings produce
and reproduce society, making history, though not, as Marx famously put it, ‘under circum-
stances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and trans-
mitted from the past’ (Marx, 1968: 97). Here Marx offers a concept of agency, a historical
conception of human subjectivity.7 Labour in this broad sense is understood as conscious, social
and inescapably linguistic (Marx and Engels, 1970: 51). As a consequence of being conscious,
intersubjective and linguistic, labour entails the creation of meanings; in other words, it is always
a cultural phenomenon. This social ontology involves a rejection of abstract notions of individ-
ual and society in favour of a concept of social individuals (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 91). If
individuals are ‘irreducibly social’ (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 93) and therefore historical, society
is a dynamic ‘set of relationships that links individuals’ (Frisby and Sayer, 1986: 96, emphasis
added) in time.
Connected to this ontology is an epistemology which is a version of scientific realism, ‘the idea
that the objects of scientific thought are real structures, mechanisms or relations ontologically
irreducible to, normally out of phase with and perhaps in opposition to the phenomenal forms,
appearances or events they generate’ (Bhaskar, 1989: 134). Marx’s realism is not a naïve one,
although it is open to misreading as such (Ollman, 1976: 39). It is a realism that never loses sight
of the historicity of knowledge as always a social product (Bhaskar, 1989: 136).

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4 Critical Sociology 

Marx’s materialism is an attractive alternative to the linguistic idealism and Nietzscheanism that
influence much anti-racist queer feminism. It acknowledges the biological dimension of the human
species, and that therefore humans have biological life-requirements, without making the error of
treating human social activity as determined by biology. How biological needs are satisfied is seen
as a matter of social organization, not biological imperative. This materialism is compatible with
the idea that there are emergent properties, such as the social characteristics of the human species,
which are not explicable according to the laws that operate at a prior level, in this case human biol-
ogy (Noonan, 2012). It is consistent with excellent recent work in natural and social sciences (e.g.
Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Fine, 2010; Fuentes, 2012; Lewontin, 2000) that rejects biological deter-
minism, shows how patriarchy, racism and heterosexism influence research and demonstrates that
human bodies are always social and historical.
Marx’s theory is quite unlike social theories that understand societies as if they were languages,
such as post-structuralist deconstructionism. As David McNally (2001: 73, 74) has argued in a
detailed critique of Jacques Derrida in the spirit of Marx, deconstruction’s ‘linguistification of life’
and ‘hostility to all talk of origins or foundations which set limits to conceptual thought leaves
deconstruction endlessly circuiting within the sphere of disembodied ideas. And it renders its cri-
tique of idealism empty and tedious’. Marx’s materialism does not make the mistake of theorizing
societies as if they were languages. Doing so fails to grasp that societies do not change in the ways
that languages do. Changes in language ‘are usually not the result of conscious activity designed to
bring about these changes’ (Markus, 1986: 35), although such activity does occur. They usually
‘arise in the course of the productive application of given linguistic rules in spontaneous, unre-
flected ways’. Thus, in the development of language ‘we find no progression, merely change’.
There are no general trends that characterize languages or ‘explain the history of even one lan-
guage’ (Markus, 1986: 35). Understandably, then, a theory that models society on language per-
ceives ‘history merely as becoming, as pure change’ (Markus, 1986: 39); ‘within its framework the
question about the “causal mechanisms” of historical change cannot even be formulated’ (Markus,
1986: 39). This is a crucial question for those who believe that people are ‘active and conscious
co-creators of their own history’, ‘not merely observers or suffering participants of the historical
process as a fated flux of events’ (Markus, 1986: 39).
This social ontology is also an alternative to those that bear the stamp of Frederick Nietzsche,
whether directly or by way of Weber, Foucault or other Nietzschean writers.8 Leftist Nietzscheans
like Foucault have interpreted Nietzsche allegorically, ‘which eliminates any social meaning or
context’ (Rehmann, 2007: 192) from the ideas of this anti-democratic, radical-aristocratic reac-
tionary (Losurdo, 2002; McNally, 2001: 15–44; Rehmann, 2007). In contemporary Nietzschean
social thought, power is central, in a manner that is derived from an idealist metaphysics of the
will to power: ‘The world is the will to power – and nothing besides! And you yourselves are also
this will to power – and nothing besides’ (Nietzsche, 1968: 550, emphasis in original). This
inspires Foucault’s (1979: 192) studies of ‘procedures that constitute the individual as effect and
object of power, as effect and object of knowledge’. Nietzschean approaches to power and gov-
ernmentality have been appealing to some anti-racist feminists, some of whom have used them in
insightful studies (e.g. Thobani, 2007). However, because ‘Foucault takes power as his point of
departure’ instead of ‘grounding power in social subjectivity’ (Kerr, 1999: 177), ‘rather than con-
ceiving of power in terms of the different, antagonistic forms of social relations which constitute
its differentia specifica, power appears to become the self-expanding subject, or system’ (p. 182).9
This causes difficulties for understanding human agency. Although at times Foucault suggests
that subjects are not simply effects of power-knowledge, these gestures and qualifications do not
amount to another coherent conception of the subject (Dews, 1987: 161–92). Marx’s social ontol-
ogy avoids these problems, and is compatible with the study of relations of oppression across the

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Camfield 5

full range of social institutions and locations. It is also free of the baggage of Nietzsche’s assump-
tion about the universality of domination, which is contradicted by evidence of the existence of
egalitarian-communal foraging societies for thousands of years (Darmangeat, 2012; Endicott,
1999; Lee and Daly, 1987).

A Focus on Historical Specificity and Social Form

Marx demonstrates a profound attention to the historical character of socio-material phenomena
with a method of critique that aims to discover their conditions of possibility. This method is more
than a concern to show that a phenomenon is social, not natural; it poses the question of why a
social phenomenon exists as it does, in a particular determinate social form or mode of existence
(Sayer, 1987: 126–37).
One consequence of this is a rejection of transhistorical abstractions in theory, except with self-
conscious and carefully-specified limitations. Thus general concepts like production, family and
state are of very limited use. The alternative to transhistorical abstractions are determinate concepts
that aim to grasp a phenomenon’s mode of existence. For example, Marx (1891) writes that ‘A
cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it
become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or
sugar is the price of sugar.’ Capital is ‘a social relation of production’. Another consequence is an
alertness to the mistaken habit of retrospectively projecting forms of social organization and modes
of thought that are specific to one society onto earlier societies.
This contribution of Marx’s is of much value today because of the influence of beliefs that
falsely essentialize and/or universalize varieties of human thought, action and social organization
that are the products of historically-specific social relations. These include common conceptions of
aggression, race (Fuentes, 2012), gender (Fine, 2010) and capitalism (Wood, 2002). This focus can
also remedy the unfortunate tendency of some post-colonial theory to treat Orientalism as ‘the
natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind’ rather than ‘a thor-
oughly modern phenomenon’ (Al-’Azm, 1984: 351).

A Materialist Conception of History

We find in Marx a distinctive theory of how, in class-divided societies, the central drivers of fun-
damental social change over time are social production and class struggles that arise from how
production is organized. As Karl Korsch (1938: 230) claims, Marx ‘relate[s] all aspects of the life
process of society to economics’. But Marx’s understanding of ‘economics’ is entirely different
from how that term is generally understood today. It is emphatically not centred on technology or
markets. Instead, the key concern is the social relations involved in processes of producing the
means of human life (Sayer, 1987). Analyzing the ‘relationship of the owners of the conditions of
production to the immediate producers’ (Marx, 1981: 927) and the relations between members of
the dominant class is of central importance.
In explaining trajectories of historical change, Marx gives primacy to developments in the
sphere of social production. Sometimes he uses the concept of base and superstructure as a meta-
phor to illuminate the relationship between production and other spheres of society. However, this
is not an indispensible feature of Marx’s theory, and its value is questioned by some proponents of
historical materialism (e.g. Wood, 1995: 49–75). As his thought evolves, the materialist conception
of history is explicitly defended as a method for open historical inquiry into complex societies, not
a general theory of social evolution (Bensaid, 2002: 9–35; Sayer and Corrigan, 1983). Marx (1877)
explicitly came to repudiate such an interpretation of it, inveighing against the ‘universal passport

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6 Critical Sociology 

of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-
historical’. In addition, his ‘earlier notions of the progressiveness of colonialism’ were ‘replaced by
a harsh and unremitting condemnation’ and ‘his theory of social development evolved in a more
multilinear direction’ (Anderson, 2010: 242, 244).
Here Marx offers an approach that has often been misunderstood, in no small part due to how it
has often been interpreted by Marxists. It has generated enormous discussion. The primacy of pro-
duction is challenged by other materialist sociologies; it is often argued (e.g. Mann, 1986) that no
social process can be said to be generally more influential than any others in explaining how socie-
ties change across time. Yet the case for giving the social production of the means of life more
explanatory weight than, say, military power is quite simple. As Rosemary Hennessy (2000: 10)
suggests:

What is needed for living individuals to continue to be, to keep on keeping on, is that they produce what
is needed to survive. The fundamental material reality of human life is the requirement that humans
produce the means to meet their needs in order to survive and continue living.

People cannot gain access to the means of life outside of social relations that organize that access.
Crucially, in class-divided societies access to the means of life is mediated by how the dominant
class extracts a surplus from the direct producers (whether they are independent producers, slaves
or wage-workers). Thus social production has a privileged role in conditioning historical change in
human societies.
Shed of inessential weaknesses,10 this is a powerful theory of historical change that appreciates
the role of oppressed and exploited people in making history. The materialist conception of history
provides both a challenge to accounts that flatter capitalism and imperialism and a non-teleological
alternative to theory that questions the very possibility of understanding how societies change over
time, seeing history as ruled by ‘the iron hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance’
(Nietzsche, as cited in Foucault, 1977: 155) and positing ‘our existence among countless lost
events, without a landmark or a point of reference’ (Foucault, 1977: 155). Thoughtful ongoing
debates among historical materialists about the theory itself and its application to major historical
processes and events, such as the development of capitalism in the US and the US Civil War, are
an indication of the fruitfulness of Marx’s approach.11

A Theory of Capitalism
The bulk of Marx’s intellectual efforts went into his never-completed theory of the dynamics of the
capitalist mode of production. This applies the materialist conception of history in an effort to theo-
rize the specific features of a mode of production based on the accumulation of capital by compet-
ing commodity producers who usually employ wage-labour. Capitalism, Marx argues, is
distinguished by capital’s unique totalizing drive to expand both in scale, geographically, and in
depth, permeating ever-deeper into societies it dominates.12 The alienation of workers (Musto,
2010) and commodity fetishism (Rubin, 1972) are also peculiar features of capitalism.
This theory is incomplete, imperfect and arguably one-sided (Lebowitz, 2002). It is also indis-
pensable for understanding the modern world. This is because it grasps as no other theory does that
capitalism is a particular way of organizing social production that has inherent properties. These
include the pattern of uneven and combined economic development that continues to underpin
imperialist domination (Callinicos, 2009), a tendency to fall into crises that state action is unable
to eliminate (McNally, 2011), and drives to ecological crisis (Kovel, 2007) and commodification
(McNally, 2006).13

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Camfield 7

The Crucial Contributions of Anti-racist Queer Feminism

Regrettably, theorists who work with these ideas of Marx’s have not often brought them into dia-
logue with anti-racist feminism, understood following Mohanty (2003: 253) as ‘a feminist perspec-
tive that encodes race and opposition to racism as central to its definition’. Some of the strongest
anti-racist feminist theorizing simultaneously scrutinizes the operations of gender, race, settler-
colonialism and sexuality; at its best, class too is integrated into the analysis. This current of social
theory originates mainly outside academia, within social movement organizations of women of
colour in the 1970s, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom, though it also has
historical antecedents (Collins, 2000: 1–13). In the 1970s, activists who sometimes identified
themselves as ‘Third World women’ developed concepts such as ‘triple jeopardy’ as a way to theo-
rize ‘three systems of oppression: sexism, racism, and capitalism or imperialism’ (Aguilar, 2012).
Lesbian feminists within this movement enriched such analysis by incorporating the dimension of
heterosexism (e.g. Combahee River Collective, 1983), leading to the conclusion that ‘Only a syn-
thesis of class, race, gender and sexuality can lead us forward’ (Amos and Parmar, 1984: 18).
Contemporary anti-racist queer feminism is, knowingly or unknowingly, indebted to this earlier
work (Aguilar, 2012), while often developing it in ways that are quite different from the move-
ment-based theorizing of the 1970s and 1980s. For example, engagement with Marx or Marxism
is much less common today, and the concerns animating the Combahee River Collective’s state-
ment (1983) are quite unlike those of, for instance, Ferguson (2004)’s queer of colour analysis. To
avoid circularity and to emphasize the importance of anti-racist queer feminists’ contributions to
those who would build on Marx, in discussing these contributions I will not refer to the small num-
ber of anti-racist feminists who are clearly also Marxists. At points I will cite authors who are not
generally identified as anti-racist queer feminists per se but rather as critical race theorists or theo-
rists of gender or sexuality; this is justified by the former’s use of their work.
Anti-racist queer feminism offers two vital contributions to social theory: a social ontology of
oppression and an understanding that forms of oppression operate simultaneously in social pro-
cesses. This, I suggest, is the best of anti-racist queer feminism; as with Marx, there is also much
to be discarded.14

A Social Ontology of Oppression

Anti-racist queer feminism grasps the extent to which contemporary societies (and many which
have existed historically) have been socially organized both extensively and intensively by social
relations other than class – those of gender, race and sexuality – as well as by class. These social
relations are not epiphenomena. Where they exist (race, unlike the others, is often treated as unique
to modernity [e.g. Mills, 2003: 154]), social reality is constituted by them at the same time as it is
constituted by class. The substance of anti-racist queer feminism’s contribution here challenges all
theories that tread them as ‘add-ons’, in other words all theories whose basic coordinates are
defined without them, including Marx’s.
What Charles Mills argues about race is also true of gender and sexuality: these social relations
are not ‘eternal, unchanging, necessary’ but rather have a ‘contingently deep reality that structures
our particular social universe, having a social objectivity and causal significance that arise out of
our particular history’ (Mills, 1998: 48, emphasis in original). Racial identity can be seen as ‘a
function of one’s location on a racialized social terrain’ (Taylor, 2009: 188). Race, Mills (2003:
168) notes, ‘unlike class … roots itself in the biological, insofar as its identifiers move us to invest
the physical with social significance’. Thus ‘it is on the body that race is inscribed’; with racism
‘political domination becomes incarnated … biologized/naturalized’. If we follow Connell (2002:

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8 Critical Sociology 

10) and understand gender as ‘the structure of social relations that centres on the reproductive
arena, and the set of practices (governed by this structure) that bring reproductive distinctions
between bodies into social processes’,15 then gender too is a social construction that generally
becomes rooted in the biological and naturalized. Similarly, sexuality is also a social construction
that becomes rooted in the biological and naturalized. Jeffrey Weeks (2010: 7–8) argues that what
is understood today as ‘“sexuality” is an historical construction, which brings together a host of
different biological and mental possibilities, and cultural forms – gender identity, bodily differ-
ences, reproductive capacities, needs, desires, fantasies, erotic practices, institutions and values –
which need not be linked together, and in other cultures have not been’.
This is a fundamentally important theoretical contribution. Anti-racist queer feminism makes it
possible to comprehend features of social reality that are opaque to many theories, Marx’s included.
‘If we were to give Marx and Engels the benefit of the doubt’, Mills (2003: 151) suggests, ‘at best
there was no perception on their part that the peculiar situation of people of colour required any
conceptual modifications of their theory.’ The same is true of women and queers for Marx. Unlike
liberal and much Marxist analysis, the best anti-racist queer feminism never reduces forms of
oppression to ideology, a recurring error implicit in the claim of one Marxist critic of Mills that ‘it
is capitalism, not white supremacy, that is a structural system of oppression’ (Cole, 2009: 258,
emphasis in original). Anti-racist queer feminism’s social ontology of oppression relentlessly
denaturalizes what are often wrongly seen as natural phenomena. For example, immediately before
his explanation that a cotton-spinning machine only becomes capital in specific social conditions,
cited earlier, Marx (1891) writes that ‘A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he
become a slave.’ However, as Anna Carastathis (2007: 28) contends:

The question, why a Negro? does not occur to Marx. For Marx, in the absence of these conditions which
make of him a slave, a ‘Negro’ appears to remain (indeed, always already was) a ‘Negro’ … It is striking,
here, that the conceptual cost of denaturalizing slavery is the fetishisation of race.

The ability of this social ontology of oppression to deepen our comprehension of contemporary
reality is demonstrated by many anti-racist queer feminist studies. To give just one example,
Sherene Razack’s Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics (2008: 6)
is a valuable effort to ‘situate contemporary legal and social responses to Muslims in the West
within a history … of the encounter between the West and its racial Others’. It highlights how the
‘denial of a common bond of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not,
remains a defining feature of the world order’. Analysis of this feature, along with gender and
sexuality, is often underdeveloped or absent in Marxist writing on imperialism today (e.g.
Callinicos, 2009; Wood, 2003).

An Appreciation of the Interweaving of Varieties of Oppression

The second singular contribution of anti-racist queer feminism is its understanding that forms of
oppression and class operate simultaneously, not just in the subjective experiences of individuals
(at the level of identities) but also in the operation of social relations. The concept most often used
to theorize this insight is intersectionality (Walby et al., 2012). However, some anti-racist queer
feminists scrutinize and reject the belief that forms of oppression and exploitation exist indepen-
dently and then interact, as is suggested by the metaphor of intersection. Rather, they propose,
what exists is an interwoven, mutually mediating or interlocking matrix of social relations. While
this distinction ‘may appear quibbly at first glance … proponents of the “interlocking” approach
claim they are different in kind’ (Carastathis, 2008: 25); from this perspective, gender, sexuality,

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Camfield 9

race and class never exist independently in the contemporary world but only ever in and through
each other.
The merits of this appreciation of the mutual mediation of social relations over approaches that
do not attempt an integrated analysis or do so via an additive method that does not fully recognize
the profoundly interlocking character of social relations have been demonstrated in numerous stud-
ies. One example is how settler colonialism in North America has been shown to have ‘targeted for
elimination persons whose gender or sexuality deviated from settler norms; but this was done to
“queer” indigenous peoples and to make the “straightening out” of their nations and cultures (in
Mark Rifkin’s formulation) a hallmark of colonial rule’ (Morgensen, 2012: 170, emphasis in origi-
nal). Another is the analysis of how racist sexist depictions of women of colour position them
within imperialist countries. Women of colour are frequently portrayed as essentially unlike white
women, who are treated as normative, because their culture supposedly has an inescapably patriar-
chal core, in contrast to the alleged gender equality of white Western culture. As Sunera Thobani
(2007: 167) puts it, ‘Gendered inequalities, in being reduced to a matter of cultural and traditional
deficiency, have become racialized and normalized, if not overtly sanctioned, as widely pervasive
within immigrant communities; the presence of (proto)feminist practices within such groups is
deemed impossible.’

Why This Sublation?

Why should these contributions be brought together in a sublation that would preserve their most
valuable insights while simultaneously negating their shortcomings? One reason is implicit in the
preceding discussion of anti-racist queer feminism: in Marx’s work there is a profound failure to
comprehend patriarchal, racial, sexual and other forms of oppression that, along with class exploi-
tation, constitute the interlocking matrices of social relations. Social theory that does not integrate
anti-racist queer feminism’s crucial insights will not be persuasive; this includes theory that aims
to build on the ‘best Marx’.
To illustrate the problem, consider an example drawn from a leading self-identified practitioner
of classical Marxism in social theory, Alex Callinicos writing on oppression (he uses the term
domination). Callinicos (1990: 163, emphasis in original) argues that ‘the forces and relations of
production, a complex set of historically developed and changing powers, explain relations of
domination’. This he calls ‘the Marxist claim’. He asserts that Marx’s argument that the examina-
tion of class relations reveals ‘the corresponding form of the state’ (Marx, as cited in Callinicos,
1990: 163, emphasis in original) applies to ‘all forms of domination’, such as gender and racial
oppression. What is involved, he contends, is explaining forms of oppression ‘in terms of some-
thing more fundamental – the forces and relations of production’, admitting that the ‘crucial ques-
tion is how good actual Marxist explanations of non-class forms of domination are’ (Callinicos,
1990: 166). This logic, rarely stated so clearly, continues to be present in some recent Marxist work
(e.g. Young, 2006).
Although a good case can be made that the character of a society’s forces and relations of pro-
duction do explain the basic form of its state power (which is not to say that social relations of
gender, race, sexuality, imperialism and colonialism do not also shape states), when it comes to
oppression explanations like Callinicos’s are never good enough. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that they confuse the origins of a form of oppression with its operations. For example,
the earliest historical emergences of class, state power and gender oppression were probably inex-
tricably intertwined (Coontz and Henderson, 1986; Darmangeat, 2012; Lee and Daly, 1987). There
is also a strong case that the development of capitalism was responsible for the establishment of
racial oppression on a global scale, through European colonial expansion and slavery (Fredrickson,

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10 Critical Sociology 

2002).16 Yet once gender and racial oppression exist neither are any less real than class relations,
and it is a mistake to think that their operations can simply be explained through class. As Mills
(2003: 164) argues about capitalism and racism, this ‘genealogy does not necessarily translate into
continuing causal pre-eminence’.
The second reason why explanations like Callinicos’s are insufficient is that they treat forms of
oppression as derivative, ultimately passive players in explaining social processes; ultimately they
do not explain but are explained, as he puts it, ‘in terms of something more fundamental’. Thus the
embrace of racist ideology by white workers is often seen by Marxists as a destructive response to
the alienation and exploitation they experience as workers (e.g. Callinicos, 1992: 21). From a
reconstructed historical materialist perspective that recognizes that ‘Understanding racism neces-
sitates a separate and distinct perspective on power relations beyond the terms of class’, Betsy Esch
and David Roediger (2006: 7) suggest that ‘racist acts are sometimes or maybe often acts of racial
empowerment, rather than of class disempowerment’. While it may be more persuasive to treat
such acts as often being about both ‘racial empowerment’ and ‘class disempowerment’ rather than
one or the other, their point about the limits of treating social relations of oppression as ultimately
explained by the forces and relations of production is clear.
Similarly, it has been important to build on Marx’s analysis of capitalism to identify how capital
relies on the production of labour power in households. This renders capital dependent on socio-
historically located ‘biological processes specific to women – pregnancy, childbirth, lactation’,
which ‘induces capital and its state to control and regulate female reproduction and … to reinforce
a male-dominant gender order’ (Ferguson and McNally, 2013: xxix). What Marx’s concepts fail to
theorize is that patriarchal gender relations also exist because male privilege gives those who have
it a material interest (mediated by class relations, which make this interest much greater for ruling-
class men than working-class men, given the magnitude of the former’s stake in capitalism) in
maintaining gender oppression. As a result, male gender interests often converge with the class
interests of capital. Faced with the challenges of getting by in societies in which wage-workers are
forced to compete in gendered and racialized labour markets, workers who are conferred racial and
patriarchal privilege frequently engage in exclusionary sectional behaviour. That defending sex-
ism, heterosexism and racism is self-defeating even for straight white male workers, since it
strengthens the power of capital, does not negate the contradictory material realities of privilege
(Brenner, 2000). These must be reckoned with because members of dominant and oppressed
groups within the working class are ‘objectively antagonized’ (Cockburn, 2012: 213).
When it comes to understanding oppressive social relations, then, the importance of the insights
of anti-racist queer feminism is clear. From a different direction, the value of the proposed subla-
tion is also demonstrated by a consideration of limitations found in anti-racist queer feminist
thought that does not draw on ‘the best Marx’.
Most of these weaknesses are not original to anti-racist feminism but stem from the influence of
linguistic idealism and Nietzscheanism, some of whose core problems were briefly discussed ear-
lier. As an example of how this influence affects anti-racist feminist research, consider Razack’s
Casting Out.17 While illuminating aspects of gendered anti-Muslim racism in contemporary
Western societies, its analysis in terms of the ‘race thinking’ that ‘remains a defining feature of the
world order’ (Razack, 2008: 6) implies that this reality is free-floating, rather than an integral
dimension of material racist social relations. Razack (2008: 174) concludes that racist ‘evictions
from law’ suggest that ‘we should challenge the idea of the modern itself’ because of ‘how race
structures modernity’. Positing modernity in this way is an example of what Neil Lazarus (2002:
60) has criticized as post-colonial theorists’ mistaken ‘dematerialization of capitalism, their mis-
recognition of its world-historical significance, their construal of it in civilizational terms, as
“modernity”’. That the world order is shaped in important ways by being organized through the

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Camfield 11

capitalist mode of production and capitalist imperialism, and that this might have something to do
with its racist character, is never considered by Casting Out. As a consequence, the book explores
some of ‘the social landscape of the “war on terror”’ (Razack, 2008: 5) but never addresses why
this ‘war’ is happening. In contrast, Deepa Kumar’s Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire
(2012) scrutinizes anti-Muslim racism in its different variants while exploring its deep historical
roots, contemporary imperialist context and recent propagators in Europe and the United States
from a Marxist perspective. Similarly, Casting Out deals with law and, more broadly, with ‘state
intervention against Muslims’ (Razack, 2008: 125). Yet it never specifically theorizes the state
power whose operations it dissects, in keeping with the common neglect of state theory today and
with Foucault’s ‘treatment of the state as just one locus of power among many others [which] loses
the very meaning of the state’ since ‘a state this is merely a locus of power like any other locus of
power is no state at all’ (Neocleous, 1996: 70).
Another conduit of idealist influence that does not help Casting Out is the thought of Giorgio
Agamben. Razack (2008) picks up Agamben’s paradigm of the concentration camp that exempli-
fies the state of exception in which law is suspended by the sovereign. Razack (2008: 12) claims
that ‘The camp has now become the rule, and our culture is now globally one of exception’. One
problem is that ‘this approach … goes over the edge of hyperbole into out and out exaggeration in
describing the relationship of the modern citizen to the modern state’ (Colatrella, 2011: 102). This
unfortunately detracts from the critical attention to developments in the deployment of repressive
state power to which Agamben and Razack wish to draw attention. Another is that Agamben’s
work is unable to explain why specific states are denying rights to certain groups in particular
places and historical moments; it suffers from a ‘total inability to explain why something is hap-
pening rather than to show us that it is’ (Colatrella, 2001: 103). Analysis building on Marx has
much greater resources for grappling with this kind of explanation. Razack’s exploration of the
racist and repressive ‘social landscape of the “war on terror”’ would have been improved had it
been situated in the context of Western imperialism in the early 21st century (e.g. Callinicos, 2009:
223–6).
Further evidence of Marx’s importance can be found in the limits of how neoliberalism is treated
in theory that ignores or rejects perspectives on this phenomenon that build on Marx. For example,
Aihwa Ong (2007: 4) dismisses Marxist accounts because they depict neoliberalism as creating
‘totalizing social change across a nation’. Such an ‘industrial sensibility’, she claims, pays little or
no attention to spatial specificities and assumes that neoliberalism is inevitable. Instead, she argues
for viewing ‘neoliberalism not as a system but a migratory set of practices … a technology of gov-
erning “free subjects” that co-exists with other political rationalities’. It is concerned with the prob-
lem of how ‘to respond strategically to population and space for optimal gains in profit’. In a similar
vein, Malinda Smith (2010)’s discussion of gender and race in contemporary Canadian universities
treats neoliberalism as a governing philosophy, mentality or rationality. This common approach
bases itself on a more or less uncritical adoption of Foucauldian theories of governmentality, whose
weaknesses have been noted. More specifically, it also misses neoliberalism’s inner-connection to
capital as a social relation organizing the processes of producing the means of human life.
That state authorities and employers in advanced capitalist countries have reorganized the
administration of populations and spaces in the last several decades is undisputed. But these
changes have been crucially conditioned by ‘neoliberalization’: a ‘historically specific, unevenly
developed, hybrid, patterned tendency of market-disciplinary regulatory restructuring’ (Peck et al.,
2012: 269).18 This originated as a response to the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s (McNally, 2011:
25–60). Understanding neoliberalism in this way does not necessarily lead to a homogenizing
account; in fact, it has been argued that neoliberalization has ‘intensified geoinstitutional differ-
ence’ (Peck et al., 2012: 272). However, this recognition does not deny the systematic quality of

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12 Critical Sociology 

neoliberalism: ‘empirical evidence underscoring the stalled, incomplete, discontinuous, or differ-

entiated character of projects to impose market rule … does not provide a sufficient basis for
eschewing the enduring structural significance of neoliberalisation as a historical process’ (Peck
et al., 2012: 271). Over time this process has led to ‘patterned, cumulative effects upon the geo-
regulatory configuration of capitalism’; it ‘has not simply entailed a haphazard “piling up” of dis-
connected, place-bound regulatory experiments’ (Peck et al., 2012: 272, emphasis in original). As
this suggests, a nuanced theory of contemporary capitalism that builds on Marx’s unfinished work
has a lot to offer to anti-racist queer feminism because of its insights into the logic of capital that
today shapes the interlocking global matrix of social relations. Such a theory has been used to illumi-
nate issues that are more often studied within the framework of governmentality, such as neoliberal
education ‘reform’ (Sears, 2003), prison expansion (Gilmore, 2007) and policing (Gordon, 2006).

Conclusion
By way of conclusion, I offer some thoughts on the possible shape of the sublation for which the
article argues. The social ontology of a reconstructed historical materialism should be a material-
ism of praxis that transfigures Marx’s. His conception of the socio-material is insufficiently multi-
dimensional, lacking a theoretical appreciation of how gender, sexuality and (after its historical
development) race are constitutive dimensions of the interlocking matrix of social relations of
which social materiality is composed. Rethinking Marx through anti-racist queer feminism can
give us an understanding of the social as:

a complex socioeconomic and cultural formation, brought to life through myriad finite and specific social
and historical relations, organizations and institutions … [that] involves living and conscious human
agents and what Marx called their ‘sensuous, practical human activity’ … All activities of and in the social
are relational and are mediated and articulated with their expressive and embedded forms of consciousness.
(Bannerji, 2005: 146–7)

Central to this conception of ‘the social whole as always a (frequently antagonistic) unity of differ-
ences’ (Ferguson and McNally, 2013: xl) is the ‘methodological centralization of human bodies as
crucial sites of political, economic and social processes and contestations’ (LeBaron, 2011: 95–6).
Labour is the conscious, meaning-saturated activity through which embodied subjects relate to
each other and the rest of nature and in so doing produce and reproduce the social. Queer feminism
encourages an expansive sense of what embodiment and labour entail: ‘As human beings we work
and desire, we have needs and sensations – all at the same time’ (Hennessy, 2006: 388). Gender,
race and sexuality are socially-constructed, but the processes of their construction are material and
embodied in a way that is not merely discursive or linguistic; bodies, as Connell puts it (2002:
36–40), are more than canvases marked and painted by disciplinary practices. This way of under-
standing social construction has been deployed well in, for example, the demonstration by Craig
Heron (2006: 8) of ‘the centrality of the body’ (p. 8) to what early 20th-century Canadian working-
class men did over the course of their lives – at home, in the streets, at school, in paid workplaces
and in pleasure-seeking activities – and consequently to the formation of their gender, class, racial
and national identities.
Bringing together Marx and anti-racist queer feminism can give us a theory of social processes
in time that preserves Marx’s insight that social production has a privileged role in conditioning
historical change while remedying his important failure to theorize how production is simultane-
ously determined by other social relations within which it is intertwined. Class relations are inextri-
cably interlocked with relations of gender, sexuality, and, following their emergence, race, nation

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Camfield 13

and, in some places, settler-colonialism. Marx’s best attention to historical specificity and social
form ought to guide how the social relations he did not theorize as such are understood. In addition,
the feminist historical materialist insistence on the study of social reproduction as well as production
is valuable and needs to be incorporated (Ferguson, 2008; LeBaron, 2011). This makes the social
production and reproduction of the means of life and human life itself, which together make up the
material conditions of human existence, the core of a reconstructed historical materialist theory of
social processes. In all historical periods, how production and reproduction are mediated by gender
would be considered; when present, other social relations would be woven into integrated analysis.
The challenge is how to integrate the full range of social relations into explanations of change with-
out stripping ‘class of any fundamental structuring or determining force’ (Hennessy, 2000: 11) and
thereby losing sight of how social production and reproduction have a uniquely powerful role in
shaping deep changes in societies over time. Doing this successfully has the potential to enrich our
understanding of many historical questions by building on, for example, existing race-sensitive
Marxist explanations of the Holocaust (Milchman, 2003) and the socio-economic development of
the US South before the Civil War (Davidson, 2011), as well as on other studies.
Most importantly, anti-racist queer feminist historical materialism can provide powerful intel-
lectual resources for social critique of the present grasped as a historical moment. The case for the
proposed sublation offered above gives a sense of some of these. In the broadest terms, this
approach directs us to try to understand contemporary social processes in terms of an expansive
materialist analysis of complex interlocking matrices of social relations of exploitation and oppres-
sion, including their ‘expressive and embedded forms of consciousness’ (Bannerji, 2005: 147), that
are stamped by the distinctive logic of the capitalist mode of production (including its imperialist
dimension). An argument by Lisa Lowe (1996: 22, emphasis in original) about immigration con-
trols in the US can serve as an illustration: ‘legal institutions function as flexible apparatuses of
racialization and gendering in response to the material conditions of different historical moments’.
In so doing, they ‘reproduce the capitalist relations of production as racialized gendered relations
and are therefore symptomatic and determining of the relations of production themselves. In other
words, immigration law reproduces a racially segmented and stratified labour force for capital’s
needs.’ Here we can see that gender and race are fully taken into consideration and capitalism’s
specificity is appreciated, in a manner compatible with the contention that the modern state is both
capitalist and ‘at its core racial’ (Gordon, 2007: 14) and also patriarchal. The social relations in
question do not exist independently and then come into contact with each other; rather, they only
exist in and through each other, as mutually mediated. How this happens in specific cases must be
investigated with concrete analyses of concrete situations. Far from providing the ‘super-historical’
universal passport scorned by Marx (1877), reconstructed historical materialism offers guidelines
for inquiry. Ultimately, its value for understanding features of the contemporary moment ought to
be evaluated by assessing the strength of the explanatory accounts generated by researchers who
take it up. If practice is crucial for judgments about the truth of social theories (Marx, 1845), then
this evaluative task is not separate from (nor is it reducible to) efforts to use such accounts to
inform collective action for social transformation.19

Acknowledgements
Over the years I have benefitted from discussions about issues addressed here with Anna Carastathis, Susan
Ferguson, Gary Kinsman, Genevieve LeBaron, David McNally, Alan Sears and Sheila Wilmot. Thanks to
Susan Ferguson, David McNally and Charles Post for comments on a draft of this article, and to Critical
Sociology’s anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Early versions of the argument devel-
oped here were presented to the University of Manitoba Sociology Department in April 2010 and at the
Toronto ‘Historical Materialism’ conference in May 2012.

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14 Critical Sociology 

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors.

Notes
  1. The best contributions of those 20th-century Marxist social theorists whose work is at least eminently
consistent and compatible with Marx’s theoretical foundations rather than those of orthodox Marxism
also deserve to be drawn on, but space precludes discussing them here.
  2. Witness the contents of the journal Historical Materialism and Razack, Smith and Thobani (2010).
  3. On continuity and change in some aspects of Marx’s thought relevant to the concerns of this article, see
Sayer and Corrigan (1983) and Anderson (2010).
  4. I owe this phrase, though not what follows, to Johnson (1982).
  5. For example, there is an ‘optimistic evolutionism’ (Molyneux, 1986: 30) that at times leads Marx to treat
the emergence of a revolutionary working class and the supercession of capital as the inevitable outcome
of the development of capitalism (e.g. Marx, 1977: 929–30). Marx’s limited theoretical notions concern-
ing gender, race and sexuality also deserve to be discarded; as one of the journal’s anonymous reviewers
put it, ‘Given his own social/historical context and theoretical limitations, Marx was unable to apply the
critical revolutionary method he used in his critical analysis of political economy to also make clear the
social and historical (and not natural) character of race, gender and sexuality’.
  6. Collier (1979: 36) proposes that Marxist materialism has ‘three related but logically independent’ senses:
ontological, epistemological and explanatory. I discuss the first and touch on the second in this sub-
section; explanatory materialism is briefly discussed in the third sub-section.
  7. Thanks to Susan Ferguson for stressing the importance of this as a feature of Marx’s materialism.
  8. Losurdo (2002) has not yet appeared in English but see Rehmann (2007) on this important book on
Nietzsche.
  9. For critical discussion of Foucauldian studies on governmentality, see Kerr (1999) and Frankel (1997).
10. See note 5.
11. Chibber (2011) is an example of the former, and Symposium (2011) of the latter.
12. As Sharzer (2012) discusses, this has important consequences for attempts to develop local economic
alternatives within capitalist societies.
13. Space limits preclude further discussion of ecology in this article, but there are a growing number of
studies using Marx to illuminate ecological questions, such as the excellent Malm (2013).
14. These weaker elements often reflect the influence of post-structuralism and post-modernism. See the brief
comments on the influence of post-structuralism on anti-racist feminism in the US in Collins (2009).
15. Emphasis in the original has been removed.
16. Fredrickson (2002: 31–5) suggests that the oppression of Jewish converts to Christianity under the blood
purity laws that were adopted in Iberia beginning in the mid-1400s was racial or proto-racial in character,
in contrast to earlier religious anti-Semitism. If this was in fact an isolated first instance of racial oppres-
sion, it challenges the belief that racism existed nowhere prior to the development of capitalism (Iberia
was not capitalist) but not the case that capitalism established racist social relations on a global scale
through colonial conquest.
17. As one of the journal’s anonymous reviewers suggests, Puar (2007) could also be considered here. Puar’s
discussion of homonationalism, ‘a collusion between homosexuality and American nationalism that is
generated both by national rhetorics of patriotic inclusion and by gay and queer subjects themselves’
(Puar, 2007: 39), is, as the reviewer notes, ‘insightful but also limited by its largely discursive and
ungrounded character and the avoidance of linking it to class relations and struggles’. Inspired by Puar
but writing from a reconstructed historical materialist perspective, Farris (2012) proposes the concept of
femonationalism to analyse the deployment of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant themes ‘under the idea
of gender equality’ (Farris, 2012: 187).
18. Emphasis in original has been removed.
19. McNally (2006) offers a political perspective derived from an anti-racist feminist historical materialism.

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Camfield 15

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