The first edition of A People’s History appeared at a time when leftists often still desired the unification of all poor Americans against the class system. In the decades since, many prominent leftists have rejected this traditional vision of an interracial class-based alliance as the wrong kind of unity to build. Instead, they insist that the focus on class obscured the need to zero in on white supremacy as the real dragon to be slain. This shift from class to race has led to some curious results that should interest observers on the left and the right.
One of these results is the growing suspicion among leftists that Marxism is a species of white supremacy, precisely because it devotes more attention to class than to race. To be sure, Marx did privilege the importance of class oppression over racism, even going so far as to compare the hostility between exploited English and Irish workers in England with the hatred that poor whites and emancipated slaves felt towards each other in America. Although this analogy does not sound like an endorsement of white racial superiority, the Caribbean professor of philosophy Charles W. Mills, in his work From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003), urges readers of Marx and Engels to read racial prejudice between the lines:
…[A]t best there was no perception on their part that the peculiar situation of people of color required any conceptual modifications of their theory. And if we are less charitable, we must ask whether their contemptuous attitude toward people of color does not raise the question whether they too, like the leading liberal theorists cited above, should not be indicted for racism…
Mills coined the term “White Marxism” in order to highlight what he took to be the racist blind spot of subordinating racial injustice to the “white” preoccupation with class. Nor is he the only leftist to equate a focus on class injustice with white racism. George Ciccariello-Maher, in his book Decolonizing Dialectics (2017) also attacks the Marxian version of “dialectics” for exhibiting Eurocentric tendencies that, at best, ignore colonial oppression of nonwhite races and, at worst, condone them.