Stretching Marxism

In the opening plenary for rs21’s Festival of the Oppressed Jaice Titus argued for a ‘Marxism that refuses to treat race as a distraction from class, or as a mere ideological supplement’.

We are living through a moment of deep and overlapping crises. Economic stagnation, political volatility, imperial war, and ecological collapse define the terrain. The ruling class reaches for one of its most enduring tools, racialisation, not just as ideology, but as structure; not just as division, but as organisation.

If we are to build a revolutionary movement capable of confronting these crises, we must understand how race and class are bound together as co-constitutive forces. This is the central insight of stretched Marxism, a term drawn from Frantz Fanon and developed by Robert Knox. It is a Marxism that refuses to treat race as a distraction from class, or as a mere ideological supplement. It is a Marxism that recognises racialisation as a material process, embedded in the circuits of capital accumulation, and reproduced through law, labour, and violence.

Let’s begin with Marx.

Marx understood that capitalism was global from the start. In Capital, he wrote of the ‘discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of black [people].’ He saw that so-called primitive accumulation, the violent creation of the conditions for capitalism, was inseparable from colonialism and slavery.

But Marx also understood that racism and nationalism were tools of division. He condemned English chauvinism toward the Irish, arguing that ‘the English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland.’ He supported the abolition of slavery in the United States, recognising it as a revolutionary rupture in the global order of capital. For Marx, solidarity across racial and national lines was not a moral imperative; it was a strategic necessity.

Fanon took this further.

Writing from the frontlines of anti-colonial struggle, Fanon argued that race was not only a cultural construct but also a material relation. In the colonies, he said, ‘the economic substructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.’ Race in the colonies structured access to resources, political power, and ideological legitimacy.

Fanon did not reject Marxism. He stretched it.

He insisted that Marxist categories had to be rethought in the colonial context, where the economic and the racial were fused. He showed how racialisation was used to justify dispossession, to discipline labour, and to manage resistance. He argued that the colonised were not just exploited but also dehumanised. This was not incidental but rather it was functional. It was how imperialism worked.

This is the foundation of stretched Marxism: the recognition that race and commodification are not competing explanations but fundamentally interlinked. Racialisation is not a distraction from class struggle; it is one of its primary terrains.

Stuart Hall wrote that ‘race is the modality in which class is lived.’ He argued that the structures through which black labour is reproduced ‘are not just coloured by race; they work by means of race.’ He showed how race enters into the distribution of labour, the constitution of political forces, and the formation of ideology.

Today, racialised labour is central to the functioning of capitalism. Migrant workers, overwhelmingly racialised, are concentrated in sectors defined by precarity: logistics, care work, hospitality, agriculture. These are the sectors that keep the economy running, but they are also the sectors most exposed to intensified forms of exploitation.

Migration controls play a key role here. They regulate borders and structure the labour market. Migrant workers are simultaneously essential and disposable. Capital needs their labour but keeps them in a permanent state of insecurity. The threat of deportation hangs over families. The border is a regime of discipline. Racialisation determines who does what kind of labour, under what conditions, and with what rights. It is a mechanism for segmenting the working class, for extracting value and managing crises.

As Hall puts it, ‘the constitution of this class fraction as a class, and the class relations which inscribe it, function as race relations. The two are inseparable.’ We see this clearly in the care sector, where migrant women, often from the Global South, are employed under exploitative conditions with their immigration status tied to their employer. The ‘better life’ promised by migration is constantly deferred, while the threat of deportation is ever-present.

In the political field, race is a central axis of mobilisation. We see this in the rise of anti-migrant rhetoric across the political spectrum. Economic decline is not explained through capitalism but through migration. The far right and right-populist formations, like Reform UK, weaponise this narrative to expand their base. But increasingly, they mix open reaction with coded racialisation, drawing in sections of the racialised middle and upper strata.

This strategy is why the presence of racialised elites in the state and professions is so ideologically potent. We see it in the leadership of the Conservative Party, where figures like Rishi Sunak and Kemi Badenoch represent a new racialised elite. Their presence does not negate racism but instead transforms how it operates. Figures like Reform UK’s Zia Yusuf show how race and migration politics are being reconfigured to appeal beyond the traditional white reactionary base. They are key to establishing a narrative of meritocracy while continuing racialised exclusions. They redirect resentment away from capital and toward ‘new’ migrants. We also see this in the role of Hindutva politics among sections of British Indians, where reactionary nationalism is being rearticulated in diasporic form. Race is not static but is constantly being reconfigured in the theatre of politics.

This is the terrain on which we must fight. If the notion of stretched Marxism teaches us anything, it is that the categories of race and class are not fixed but historically produced and politically contested. To stretch Marxism today is to recognise that gender, like race, is not a distraction from class struggle but one of its primary terrains. We are seeing this clearly in the brutal attack on trans people by the British state. The recent Supreme Court ruling, which effectively strips trans people of legal recognition even when they hold a Gender Recognition Certificate, is a class attack. It denies trans people access to equal pay claims, to protection from discrimination, to the basic dignity of being recognised as who they are. It is a ruling that enshrines ignorance and hostility in law, and it is a defeat not just for trans people but for all workers, all women, all oppressed people.

It is part of a broader project of right-wing gender politics, which seeks to regenerate patriarchal authority under the guise of ‘protecting women’ and ‘defending children.’ As rs21 has argued, this project is about reimposing rigid gender roles and policing bodies. It is about creating scapegoats in a time of crisis when the ruling class has no answers to falling wages, collapsing services, or climate catastrophe. It is no accident that the same forces attacking trans people are also attacking migrants, racialised communities, and trade unions.

The ruling class is trying to reassert control by narrowing the boundaries of who counts as human, who counts as a worker, who counts as a man or a woman. If the picture so far has seemed gloomy, that is understandable. As we said in our publicity for this festival, ‘The world is in a bad place and the future doesn’t look bright.’ But we also have to take confidence in every instance of fighting back.

Tens of thousands have taken to the streets in defence of trans lives. Trade unions have issued statements of solidarity. Trans and cis people, queer and straight, have marched together in defiance of the Supreme Court’s ruling. This is what solidarity looks like. The mass mobilisations for Gaza have shown us what racialised but multiracial struggle can look like. These movements are not just symbolic. They reflect a growing political radicalisation outside of mainstream party structures. The election of five independent pro-Gaza MPs and many close second and third place finishes for the left in the election last year is just one expression of this. To build a movement capable of confronting racism and genocide, we must also confront gendered capitalism. We must fight for trans liberation not as a side issue but as a central part of our class politics. Because the liberation of trans people is the liberation of us all. The task now is to build on these breakthroughs. To cut against anti-migrant politics in a way that goes beyond simple denunciations of racism. To develop a strategic vision for political organisation in the face of racialised and gendered capitalism.

We need a revolutionary movement that understands that the working class is not homogenous, but is fractured, racialised, gendered, and unevenly positioned. This means that solidarity must be built through difference. As Stuart Hall reminds us, ‘race determines some of the modes of struggle. It also provides one of the criteria by which we measure the adequacy of struggle to the structures it aims to transform.’ The same is true of gender. The attacks on trans people are a test of our movement’s capacity to fight for liberation in its fullest sense.

So: What is to be done?We must reject the false choice between class and oppression. We must reject the liberal fantasy that representation alone can undo the structural violence of the system. We fight for migrant rights and gender self-determination not as moral issues but as class issues. We confront the far right not just with slogans but with strategy. We build struggles and organisations that are multiracial, multi-gendered, and militant. We stretch Marxism not to dilute it but to deepen it.