For the official version of record, see here:
Parekh, S. (2025). Charles Mills’ Turn to Liberalism. Media Theory, 9(2), 277–306. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i2.1283

Charles Mills’ Turn to Liberalism

SURYA PAREKH
Binghamton University, USA

Abstract

In 1994, there was a turn in Charles Mills’ thinking, which he framed as a move away from a white Marxism unable to adequately think race and toward a Black radical liberalism. In this essay, I show that this turn is more complex and problematic than Mills’ presentation and that it involves a disavowal of Mills’ own attempts at forging what he calls a “‘black,’ or at least racially informed, Marxism.” By looking at Mills’ early work, I offer some suggestions for how we might read Mills’ turn and his framing of it. I also consider why it’s important for us revisit Mills’ turn today.

Keywords

Liberalism, race, Marxism, Black

I.

The academic year 1993-1994 was a banner year for Charles Mills. Newly tenured and on fellowship, Mills quickly researched and penned the first draft of The Racial Contract over several months (Mills, 1997: x; Mills, 2010: 24-25). Upon its publication in 1997, the book established Mills as a pioneer in race studies in philosophy. He also wrote a series of essays that set out a future trajectory that remained relatively consistent from 1994 through to his death in 2021 (Slack, 2020: 68). It was in these works that Mills first proposed thinking of white supremacy as an autonomous system of oppression best confronted through a revised race-sensitive liberalism that he would later call “black radical liberalism” (Mills, 2017: 201).

This marked an important turn in Mills’ thinking. Since his entry into graduate school at the University of Toronto in 1973, Mills had been interested in Marxism rather than liberalism. His 1985 doctoral dissertation, titled “The Concept of Ideology in Marx and Engels,” explores different interpretations of ideology in Marx and Engels, as well as in Lenin and in Gramsci. His subsequent publications until 1994 – the writings that led to his gaining tenure – were either works in analytical philosophy engaged with Marx and Marxism or interdisciplinary work on Caribbean issues of race, postcolonialism, and imperialism from a Marxist perspective.

In Mills’ own words, the year marked a turn away from a white Marxism unable to adequately think race and toward a Black radical liberalism. By reading Mills’ self-characterization against his early work, I will show in this essay that Mills’ turn is more complex and problematic than his presentation of it and that this presentation disavows Mills’ own attempts at relating Marxism to race in his early work. Through a consideration of this early work, I explore the problematic that this moment in Mills’ itinerary negotiates, a moment that I argue remains timely and instructive for us.

One of Mills’ contributions has been to emphasize the racial dimensions involved in the production of the visible. He showed how historically cultivated practices that ignore, forget, and hide race – an active blinding – are constitutive of the field of vision. Although Mills’ interventions were in philosophy, they have had wide circulation in a range of fields, including in media theory. Dwelling on the turn in Mills’ itinerary, we will see how in Mills’ own work there appears a pessimistic horizon of a racial, militarized future that he subsequently tries to forget. By looking again at this moment, I will try to offer a reading of Mills’ own field of vision.

II.

What exactly was Mills turning away from and what was he turning toward? Mills consistently employs a Black/white binary to designate the terms of this shift, most often from white Marxism to Black radical liberalism, which at times is synonymous with a move from class to race as object of study. Such a characterization appears starkly in the title to his 2003 edited volume, From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism, a selection of Mills’ essays from the 1980s and 1990s in revised form. In more recent work, Mills has suggested that the turn to race was in fact a return; here the trope of the repressed original renders even flimsier Mills’ interest in Marxism, portraying it as only ever a substitute:

I originally went to graduate school in philosophy in the hopes of exploring the issues of race and imperialism then being hotly debated in my native Jamaica. Not finding any appropriate philosophical frameworks in a white field in an all-white department in a white Canadian university without even a black studies program to assist me, I decided to do a dissertation on Marxism instead. So in a sense, my 1990s turn to race in my work was a return, a coming back to what I had originally wanted to do (Mills, 2017: 181).

Mills attributes his (re)turn to a number of factors, including a changing racial consciousness, precipitated by his move to the United States in 1987 and subsequent experiences of a rather insidious personal and professional racism, his growing involvement with the small group of Black philosophers in the profession, and his efforts at teaching the new subject of African-American philosophy (Mills, 2010; Mills, 2016: 103; Mills, 2017: 183-184).

In his 2016 Dewey Lectures, Mills “localizes this shift” (Mills, 2016: 103) to 1994. A particularly important moment was the May 1994 meeting of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in Kansas City. For the meeting Mills had organized two panels, titled “Market Socialism” and “Moral Universalism and Ethnic Affirmation” respectively. Whereas the first, in the subfield of Analytic Marxism, had only one person in the audience, the second, in the newly developing subfield of philosophy of race, had a packed crowd, confirming for Mills the irrelevance of Marxism: “if Marxism was dead, race was alive and well” (Mills, 2016: 104). Just as important as this public sign for Mills were his new contacts with Linda Alcoff and Lewis Gordon at the meeting. Their informal conversations, listening especially to Gordon’s enthusiasm for developing Africana philosophy (glossed as Gordon’s “plan for black philosophers to take over the world”), confirmed for Mills the need to break with Marxism in order to study race and develop a Black philosophy (Mills, 2016: 104).

Scholars have accepted Mills’ characterization of the turn in his work. They have also not noticed that the essays selected for From Class to Race are revised versions, sometimes significantly changed, of earlier essays. Yet, if we read this early work, we find that Mills was working on race from his dissertation onward. Indeed, at least one of his dissertation supervisors was also taking race seriously (Cunningham, 1977). Race (and to a much lesser extent gender) is an important, albeit subsidiary, concern in Mills’ dissertation. From within an investigation of Marx and Engels, the dissertation treats the IQ debate of the time, popularized in the Bell Curve and its responses, and the relationship of capitalism to slavery. It also offers a novel way to relate Marxism to race in terms of the base-superstructure metaphor.

Questions of race are central to such early publications by Mills as the 1985 ‘Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconciling Paradigms?;’ the 1988 ‘Alternative Epistemologies;’ the reading of the James Bond novels set in the Caribbean in the 1988 ‘Red Peril to the Green Island: The “Communist Threat” to Jamaica in Genre Fiction, 1955-1969;’ and Mills’ analysis of the New Jewel movement in Grenada in the 1990 ‘Getting out of the Cave: Tension between Democracy and Elitism in Marx’s Theory of Cognitive Liberation.’ Race is also tacitly or explicitly a concern in almost every other essay Mills published during this time period.

Why then does Mills’ characterization of his turn diverge from the essays that he published at this time? Why do Mills’ remarks and editorial practices after this shift seek to frame the turn in a specific way? This framing appears in the first essay that Mills publishes after his self-identified moment of change, the 1994 ‘Revisionist Ontologies,’ finalized in May 1994 and published in September 1994. There, Mills speaks to the predicament of the professional Black philosopher, who must adopt a bifurcated approach to their work, publishing “on ‘respectable’ subjects in established mainstream philosophy journals” and works on “black or Third World research interests” in other, typically “Third World”, venues. The Black philosopher must constantly calculate the ratio (“1:1, or, for the more cautious, 1:2 or even 1:3”) between the work necessary for job security and the work that is their real concern (Mills, 1994f: 106). Yet even this early framing doesn’t quite hold up. Among other examples, the 1988 ‘Alternative Epistemologies’ was written for Social Theory and Practice, published by the Florida State University Department of Philosophy.

That the turn in Mills’ thinking is accompanied from the outset by a desire to frame that turn is intriguing. We find a clue in the essay completed immediately prior to ‘Revisionist Ontologies,’ ‘Under Class Under Standings,’ likely finalized in March 1994 and published in May 1994. This review essay about two recent books on the “underclass” – the racialized substratum below the working class – is deeply troubled by what Mills calls “the 1992 urban disturbances in Los Angeles (riot for some, righteous uprising for others)” (Mills, 1994c: 872) which followed the acquittal of one of the officers who had been involved in the police brutality against Rodney King. The beating of Rodney King was the first time that incidentally captured video footage went, in today’s parlance, “viral,” leading to a nationwide outcry; it also marks among the first uses of video footage as evidence (Georges-Schwartz, 2016). Yet such widespread circulation is accompanied by a relative transience in the mainstream, national imaginary. Mills despairs that “the worst urban disturbances in U.S. history,” occasioning the invocation of the Insurrection Act, are followed by “the astonishing disappearance of Los Angeles from public white discourse and consciousness less than two years after” (Mills, 1994c: 878).

Against this disappearance, the conclusion of the original essay presents two visions that signal the problematic involved in Mills’ turn: 1) an improbable scene of a possibly brighter racial future placing hope in the moral power of liberalism; and 2) a pessimistic horizon of racial subordination issuing in this essay from what Mills calls a “‘black,’ or at least racially informed, Marxism” (1994c: 857). Grappling with the general mainstream tendency toward the right in the United States, punctuated by Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 and the leadup to Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in 1994, Mills confesses “that one is psychologically pulled rightward by the fear of political marginalization and irrelevance” (Mills, 1994c: 880). He proceeds to the first vision, foreshadowing his move to liberalism, “in the odd spirit of hoping that one is wrong in one’s analysis.” Marxism is here figured as a hat that can be doffed or donned.

Doffing my Marxist hat, then, let me assume what I believe to be false, that is, that moral motivation can be a social prime mover and that liberalism’s presumptions about socio-economic possibilities are correct […] In this debate, white Americans would somehow have to be made to understand that their color has historically given them a massive systemic advantage quite independently of their personal degree of liberalism on race, and the Negro best friends they may (or may not) have, that – as Cheryl Harris has argued – whiteness has been (stolen) property, a collective agreement to share in the illicit booty of racially structured exploitation and its proceeds. Only in this way can the necessary reconstitution of the polity, and the transcendence of its Herrenvolk character, be achieved (Mills, 1994c: 880-881, my emphasis).

The revised version of this essay that appears in From Class to Race ends here. In the original, however, Mills puts on his Marxist hat again and assesses the probability of such a future: “What are the chances of this happening? In my opinion – hat on again – asymptotically close to zero” (Mills, 1994c: 881). Mills then proceeds to offer a pessimistic, militarized, segregated vision of the future:

The likelihood, then, is for a future somewhat (but not actually that much) extrapolated from our present, in which a largely white overclass, with light-skinned Latinos, Asians (“probationary whites,” according to Andrew Hacker), and a few blacks, go indifferently about their suburban business, segregated from a biologically and culturally stigmatized, permanently jobless dark-skinned caste, who are walled-off under paramilitary supervision in the inner cities, a standing threat of bigger and brighter Los Angeleses to come (Mills, 1994c: 881).

Sometime between March 1994, when this essay was likely completed, and May 1994, when ‘Revisionist Ontologies,’ was likely completed, Mills doffed his Marxist hat for good, putting his hope instead in the power of moral motivation to move white Americans within a liberal framework. In Mills’ own subsequent framing, the problematic that organizes these distinct visions – of an improbable liberal future and a pessimistic Marxist one – is displaced into a choice between two racialized alternatives: Black liberalism and white Marxism. This displacement requires Mills to disavow his own attempts at forging a “‘black’ Marxism” in analytic philosophy, attempts resonant with but distinct from Cedric Robinson. Even as Mills will occasionally grant Marxism plausibility in later years, it is always white Marxism that he refers to. By framing the alternatives as Black liberalism or white Marxism, the black Marxist vision that ends ‘Under Class Under Standings’ is excluded. In the revised version of the essay in From Class to Race, all references to Los Angeles are also deleted. Mills will not mention Los Angeles again in published work.

How are we to understand the problematic that Mills’ turn negotiates, a problematic that requires the disavowal of a “black” Marxism? Let us turn to Mills’ early life and work.

III.

Charles Mills was born in 1951 into a family on the move socially and politically, the result of a limited expansion of socio-economic mobility in a British colonial Jamaica on the cusp of independence which came in 1962.  Mills’ paternal grandfather had quickly risen in ranks as a police officer, only to be then limited by racialized colonial policies. His father Gladstone, by contrast, became Professor of Government and Dean of Social Sciences at the University of West Indies, Mona campus. In addition, Gladstone had been appointed to chair the Electoral Commission in 1973 and, in that role, was later credited by both the ruling party and opposition leaders of the time, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, for helping reduce political violence (Jamaica Observer, 2004; Davidson, 2004). Mills’ mother Winnifred was a nurse and became President of the Jamaican YWCA. Gladstone’s brother Don was ambassador to the UN and the first Jamaican President of its Security Council. Don’s wife Sonia was a well-known journalist (she had worked under Claudia Jones in London), playwright and activist (Jamaica Observer, 2025).

Despite his family’s involvement in the social and political life of the country, Charles Mills was more interested in science fiction and bookish pursuits (very much the opposite of his father who had been a first-class cricketer). The 1968 expulsion of Guyanese, Marxist historian Walter Rodney, leading to protests on the streets of Kingston, were Mills’ first tentative moment of politicization. Mills, then a first-year student at the University of West Indies, recounts being at one of the protests:

As a middle-class JC [Jamaica College] friend (Michael Coore) and I were standing waiting for the speeches to begin, we were approached by two ghetto youths, probably about our own age of seventeen or eighteen […] Then – this is indelibly engraved on my brain more than forty years later – one of them said: ‘Look…You have the brains. We have the guns. You tell us what to do, and we will follow you.’ […] We backed quickly away, telling them, in not so many words, ‘Don’t call us – we’ll call you’ (Mills, 2010: 6-7).

This memory, “indelibly engraved” and recalled some forty years later, condenses two themes or motifs that would characterize Mills’ posture. The first: a lifelong pursuit for social justice, but at some distance from the scene of action, here staged in the deferred refusal to the request to lead by the “ghetto youth.” The second: within a conventional division of labor identifying middle class with brains and ghetto with guns, the desire for a division of theory and practice in similarly clear-cut terms, the possibility that the intellectual working at a distance might then lead the activists in some deferred future. In this recollection of a conversation among teenagers, the class hierarchy between middle-class friends and “ghetto youths…about our own age” may also carry some of the generational charge between “big boy” and “yute.” David Scott has written that Mills, who had graduated a year before Scott began at Jamaica College, was “a ‘big boy’ to me, virtually beyond the prospect of reciprocal communication” (Scott, 2022: viii).

In 1972, Michael Manley of the leftist People’s National Party was elected Prime Minister of Jamaica. In 1974 he “declared democratic socialism as his Administration’s doctrine” (Campbell, 2024). In 1973, Mills, teaching science for a year after receiving a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of West Indies, left for Toronto on a Commonwealth Fellowship to begin a master’s degree in philosophy, completing a thesis on Marx and Engels. In 1976, he returned briefly to teach physics. In one account, Mills writes that “the hellish experience of teaching bratty thirteen-year-olds at one of the local high schools” (Mills, 2016: 94) – alongside the “intensifying debate in the country” spurred him back to Toronto to do a PhD in 1977. Jamaica’s recognition of Cuba and support for independence in Angola in the 1970s had raised Henry Kissinger’s ire, bringing covert US involvement into Jamaican politics, fomenting intermittent violence. In another, not quite incompatible, account, he writes that he was “fired up to do a doctorate in Marxism so I could ‘assist the struggle’” (Mills, 2010: 11). As Marxist, leftist politics were actively part of the geopolitical fabric of Jamaica and the larger Caribbean, Mills was studying Marxism through analytic philosophy in Toronto.

How can the intellectual help bring about social justice? This is the question that, in one form or another, animated Mills’ pursuits. Mills’ predilection for science may have had an influence on his choice of analytic philosophy, a subject for which he had little to no preparation, as the field in which to raise this question. His desire for social justice, especially given his family’s involvement in the leftist politics of Jamaica, the general cultural milieu in the wake of the worldwide and local events of 1968, and his own membership in the Workers Party of Jamaica (Ferguson, 2022: 5-6; McClendon, 2022: 15), may have led to his study of Marx with two philosophers who were themselves involved in activism, Danny Goldstick and Frank Cunningham.

The focus of Mills’ early scholarship was the concept of ideology. From the 1960s onward, stimulated in part by the work of Louis Althusser in France and the recent translations of Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, the concept of ideology had attracted much interest from academics in the English-speaking world. In the first sentences of his dissertation, Mills writes that “the concept is now ubiquitous in the humanities and social sciences” (Mills, 1985a: iv). Ideology and its relation to other Marxist concepts – including base and superstructure; consciousness and determination; and class struggle – was heavily contested. It is within these discussions that the role of the intellectual in bringing about change had been posed by Marxist thinkers.

Mills’ entry into these discussions was through analytic philosophy, where the study of Marx had only recently been made respectable through the works of G.A. Cohen, particularly his 1978 Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense. Cohen, along with economist John Roemer and political scientist Jon Elster, had helped found a subfield called Analytic Marxism. The analytic of analytic Marxism was characterized by its rejection of dialectical thinking. Cohen thus writes that it rejects “the claim that Marxism possesses valuable intellectual methods of its own.” This “rejection enabled an appropriation of a rich mainstream methodology” (Cohen, 2000: xvii). This methodology uses the “techniques” of analytic philosophy that stress “precision of statement on the one hand and rigour of argument on the other” (Cohen, 2000: xviii). Yet Cohen’s own method of defining his own project by way of rejection starts to suspiciously resemble what a dialectical thinker might call negation. One early review of Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense observes that “much of what he [Cohen] writes is inherently dialectical.” In the case of Cohen’s defense of materialism and rejection of idealism, the reviewer writes, “however brisk Cohen’s rejection of idealism [is] at the front door, it enters unchallenged through the back” (Foster, 1981: 45).

The analytic philosophical reader of Marx is thus placed in a peculiar, fraught position: they must persistently translate Marx’s thinking into defensible claims as they reject his method of thinking. In the hands of a skilled philosopher, at its best, these constraints can be wielded flexibly to make persuasive arguments. At its worst, it leads, as Goldstick will write in a review of Sebastiano Timpanaro, to a method where moments of opposition are turned into “the sort of exclusive either/or narrowness which dialectics decries” (Goldstick, 1979: 370). A tendency towards schematism and the simplification of problematics allows for the transformation of dialectical opposition into binary choices that can be evaluated through a certain kind of “rigor” that for Cohen is taken from logic and the natural sciences.

Goldstick and Cunningham did not hold the same position on the dialectic and were more catholic in their sense of philosophy. Yet Mills must have felt the pressure to meet the standards of analytical philosophy: he recalls at least one tale of a professor at Toronto giving him a lower grade on suspicious grounds (Mills, 2010: 9) – and he had nearly been denied his Commonwealth fellowship for lack of background in philosophy. He was thus admitted on a probationary basis and required to take remedial classes (Mills, 2010: 8). That sense of being behind lingered with Mills through graduate school and until at least his second professional appointment in philosophy (Mills, 2010: 17). It’s also possible that Cohen’s sense of his approach as aspiring to natural science appealed to Mills because of Mills’ own background.

Mills’ dissertation reflects these disparate influences. The last, and longest, chapter on the role of intellectuals is open to dialectical thinking; Mills offers a fine commentary on disparate moments in Lenin, Gramsci, and the secondary scholarship on the role of intellectuals and the question of hegemony. The rest of the dissertation shows the tension between an analytic method and the dialectical thinking of Marx and Engels. At times this tension is productive. In chapter 3, for instance, Mills uses complex interactional systems theory and wave graphs to give a persuasive, probabilistic account of Marx’s base-superstructure metaphor. That account is accompanied by a nuanced narrative discussion of the relative place and influence of abolition in the end of enslavement in the British colonies, a discussion which resonates with Eric Williams’s argument (cited by Mills). Too often, however, the resolution of this tension leads to simplifications of the text and a tendency to schematize. ^[i]

The main aim of Mills’ dissertation is to find a consistent interpretation of ideology in Marx. Reviewing a representative selection of the literature, Mills finds two prevailing interpretations. The first understands ideologies as “complexes of ideas used by classes to defend their class interests…marred by a particular, systematic kind of cognitive deficiency…grounded in the structure of class society”. The intellectual demystifies, wielding ideology “as a polemical debunking term” (Mills, 1985a: 3). The second interpretation offers a more neutral and broad conception of ideology, as, citing John McMurtry, “men’s conception of themselves” (Mills, 1985a: 11). On this interpretation, there is no space outside of ideology but rather different ideologies striving for dominance. The intellectual’s role is to then work within this field of competing ideologies. Mills offers a holistic interpretation that finds both senses of ideology in the works of Marx. A late change, due to prodding by Goldstick, occurs in the last pages of chapter 1, and is unevenly carried through the dissertation. It leads him to revise his interpretation in terms of the connection between the two senses. Somewhat strangely, in Mills’ published works, the change is not announced until his 1989, ‘A New Old Meaning of “Ideology”’, cowritten with Goldstick.

The key text for Mills (as it was for Cohen), is Marx’s 1859 ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, written before Marx had come to the discovery of the secret of surplus-value that led to Capital. In this dynamic text, which sees Marx reflecting on changes in his own itinerary, he offers some brief formulations of the results of his study, particularly his “critical revision (Revision)” (Marx, 1992: 425; Marx, 1961: 8) of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Taken out of this context, these formulations lend themselves to schematism, giving a kind of model of the relationship between “the mode of production of material life” and how it “conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life” (Marx, 1992: 425; Marx, 1961: 8-9). Marx writes that “relations of production,” which “men inevitably enter into […] which are independent of their will […] constitute the economic structure of society, the real basis (Basis).” Above this, “arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond determinate (bestimmte) social forms of consciousness” (Marx, 1992: 425; Marx, 1961: 8, trans. slightly modified).

This metaphor of a base and superstructure relates two kinds of relations: the relations of production and the more overt relations of “social, political, and intellectual life.” For Marx, since the latter are conditioned by the former, “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being (Sein), but inversely (umgekehrt) their social being (Sein) that determines their consciousness”  (Marx, 1992: 425; Marx, 1961: 9, trans. modified). One task of the intellectual is to try to understand the relationship between the two kinds of relations, especially at moments of transformation, when “changes in the economic foundation lead slower or faster (langsamer oder rascher) to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.” Marx writes that the “material transformation of the economic conditions of production […] can be determined with the precision of natural science.” But this must be distinguished from “the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out” (Marx, 1992: 426; Marx, 1961: 9, trans. slightly modified). The contradictions in the economic conditions of production show up as ideological antagonisms in human consciousness. The task then is to relate the latter to the former. Ideology names the necessarily murky space where consciousness is determined by social relations of production. These methodological instructions to the historically minded philosopher, formulations gained from Marx’s own self-critical and dynamically changing study (Marx does not use the term ideology after this text) (Balibar, 2014; Spivak, 2018), become a fixed, layered model for Mills with philosophical claims that can be evaluated in terms of consistency. The model can accommodate complexity within its constraints but is no longer dialectical.

In his dissertation and earliest works, Mills tries to theorize race from within this model. This theorizing quickly takes shape as efforts to formulate the relationship between race and class. Class is an undertheorized, unfinished concept in Marx and Engels that names a relationship to means of production and not necessarily a social formation or a group identity. By contrast, racial classification has imposed group and individual identity, through fictional or pseudo-biological differences.  The difficulties of relating race to class are well-known. For a dialectical thinker like Stuart Hall, the terms themselves name a movement which we must continue to grapple with. In Mills, the tension between dialectical thinking and an analytic approach leads to a fixing of class and race as discrete terms, against which one can pose questions of priority and relation.

In his 1987 essay ‘Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconcilable Paradigms?’, Mills asks whether race and class are “absolutely counterposed” or “complementary” paradigms in the Caribbean through a critical reading of MG Smith’s The Plural Society in the British West Indies (Mills, 1987: 70). Smith had dismissed class in the British Caribbean, claiming that what he called “race-culture” was the only salient difference, a position criticized by Stuart Hall in the latter’s 1977 essay ‘Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society,’ an essay cited by Mills. The differences between Mills and Hall are instructive.

For Hall, enslavement had created in Caribbean societies a period in which there was established an “absolute identification between race, colour and caste-status” (Hall, 2021: 144). This original identity is significantly complicated by the move from enslavement to abolition to independence, widespread intermixing (forced and otherwise), and the advance of capitalism. It leads to complex, highly stratified societies in which “class-cultural differentiation is peculiarly sharp, and…coincident to a high degree with race/colour stratification” (Hall, 2021: 139). Coincident however is not the same as identical. Instead, writes Hall, “Caribbean society [is] one of the most complex social systems on earth” (Hall, 2021: 153), where “the race-colour elements in the stratification matrix constitute the visible index of a more complex structure” (Hall, 2021: 152). Thus it may be possible for “black men with clearly Negroid features and hair who are either wealthy or educated or in middle-class occupations” to “rank higher in the stratification scale than the coloured poor and uneducated” (Hall, 2021: 152), but such instances are not to be understood as exemplary. Social mobility within these societies requires sometimes the “double or triple articulation of the systems of status mobilization” (Hall, 2021: 152). For Hall, therefore, race and class are both significant elements in their relation to each other, rather than considered as discrete items.

At first Mills’ argument in “Race and Class” seems similar. He writes that “the basic point made by all the Marxist critiques […] is that, as societal variables, race, colour and ethnicity acquire differing significances in different social contexts” (Mills, 1987: 93). In this framework, ethnicity is “at least partially created by social structure, and […] deeply influenced in its development by a class dialectic” (Mills, 1987: 93). Reading Edna Bonacich and Malcolm Cross, he writes “Bonacich and Cross agree that it is where there is a congruence of political and economic interests with ethnicity that ethnic and cultural allegiance will become intense” (Mills, 1987: 94). At this point, Mills’ tendency to schematize intervenes. The dialectic he had just mentioned seems to drop away. The “coincidence” of race-color and class-culture in Hall leads to a theory in which the former is the “visible index” of the latter; the very vocabulary signals a complex system of meaning-making. By contrast, in Mills, the metaphor of “congruence” suggests two discrete items that intersect, becoming one, for a certain distance. For Mills, whereas during enslavement, there is a congruence, a “social structure where race and class were coterminous,” the structure itself is comprised of two discrete, analogizable systems: “just as capitalism tends to foster particular ways of seeing the world, quite independently of the conscious efforts of pro-capitalist ideologists, so the slave system produced its own characteristic ideational patterns” (Mills, 1987: 94-95). This positing of a fundamental discreteness is at work in Mills’ attempts to give a description of the complexities of the Caribbean, where on the one hand, “race and colour provided the foundation for the ‘common-sense’ of society” (Mills, 1987: 95) or its “dominant ideological framework,” (Mills, 1987: 94) and on the other hand, “after Emancipation […] the one-to-one correspondence between colour and social position began to be gradually eroded, so that for some individuals the race and class indicators would point in different directions” (Mills, 1987: 95). At the end of the essay, Mills writes that any effort to “develop a Caribbean Marxism” must confront “questions […] about culture and race […] this task still remains largely uncompleted” (Mills, 1987: 101). For Mills, however, the desire to schematize slavery and capitalism as discrete systems in this essay leads in subsequent years to a commitment to understanding race and class as discrete.

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[i] The most extreme instance of this commitment to “correctness” is in display in ‘Ideology’ in Marx and Engels’ ‘Revisited and Revised.’  Writing in an endnote of “the nagging feeling that some obscure passage I have not taken into account might shed some new light of the usage of this term [ideology]” (Mills, 1992: 324), he tells us that he has (this is before the days of digitized searching!) gone through all the volumes of the Collected Works in English, looking for every instance of “ideology,” “ideologist,” “ideologue,” “ideological,” “ideologically,” “ideologise,” “ideologism,” performing the enormous labor of building a concordance of these terms in order to assuage his anxiety (Mills, 1992: 324-325).

IV.

In the Fall of 1987, Mills began a tenure track job in philosophy at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. His entry into the US was a shock. Whereas in Jamaica, he had been a respectable middle-class “brown” man, and in Canada, a fellow Commonwealth citizen, in the US he was Black, and subject to anti-black racism personally and professionally (Mills, 2016: 100). There was suspicion that he was an underqualified affirmative action hire, a suspicion that would follow him to his subsequent job at the University of Illinois at Chicago (Mills, 2010: 13-14). The biggest surprise for Mills, however, was in the classroom. In a graduate seminar on Marx that he taught in his first year, Mills had devoted a session to “white racism as ideology,” the subject of his philosophical scholarship. The seminar was comprised of self-selected graduate students interested in left politics and social justice. Yet Mills’ contention that “the subordination of blacks has been central to US history” was met with complete denial: “The entire period was taken up with my trying to convince them (unsuccessfully) of something I had assumed was completely obvious.” It was Mills writes, his first realization of a “cultivated amnesia […] both at the high-school level and within the academy,” a racial ideology that worked to “mystify and obfuscate the historic centrality of racial domination” (Mills, 2010: 16).

These experiences seem to solidify in Mills the thinking of race in terms of its own discrete system and the need to insert the study of race and its centrality into the curriculum. These concerns can be discerned in ‘Alternative Epistemologies,’ likely completed sometime in the Spring of 1988, as Mills was finishing his first year at Oklahoma.^[i] The essay’s main target is the subfield in analytic philosophy of epistemology. Mills challenges the criteria by which the field is constituted and offers “alternative epistemologies” centered on three cases: 1) feminist philosophy; 2) black philosophy; and 3) “the longstanding challenge of the Marxist political tradition” (Mills, 1988a: 237). To these correspond three systems of oppression: patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. As Mills develops these alternative epistemologies, he also criticizes, by way of Cedric Robinson, Marxism for its Eurocentric focus. We can thus read here the inchoate beginnings of Mills’ focus on the concept of the person and from there, his turn to liberalism. Although Robinson never thematizes the concept of personhood, Mills writes that “the ‘black experience’ in this case starts from an ontological status of official non-personhood” (Mills, 1988a: 256). At essay’s end, the task is to relate these alternative epistemologies:

For the past century, Marxism has been the most powerful theory of the dialectic of social oppression. It is now obvious that this oppression is multi-dimensional, and that the historical forces which produced Marxism as a theory have now thrown up other perspectives, other visions, illuminating aspects of the structured darknesses of society that Marx himself failed to see. What we need to work towards is a synthesis of these alternative epistemologies, which recognizes both the multiplicity and the unity, the experiential subjectivity and the causal objectivity, of hierarchical class-, gender-, and race-divided society (Mills, 1988a: 259).

Although Mills ostensibly uses a dialectical vocabulary, the synthesis called for here is on the basis of a parallelism between Marxism, Black philosophy, and feminism.

Mills’ move away from Marxism is quickened by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. ‘Marxism and Caribbean Development: A Contribution to Rethinking,’ written in the winter months of 1990, asks its readers to take the paper as “the ruminations of a leftist Caribbean intellectual on a worldview by which he was convinced,” over against “the corporate press in North America, where I am writing this in the first few months of 1990, [for whom] the events of 1989-90 merely signalled the final interment of a 19^th century zombie, the real ‘spectre haunting Europe’” (Mills, 1991: 14).

In this essay, Mills argues that a key fault of Marxism has been its trivialization and dismissal of the liberal tradition of rights. Mills suggests that the stratification into the elite (who were the theorists) and the rest of the party, the emphasis on a future socially just world, and the absence of theories of the nation and state in Marx and Engels lead to a situation in which the horrific brutalities of the Stalinist system in the Soviet Union and elsewhere – he identifies the violence surrounding Marxist movements in the Caribbean with this system – are justified to its own members through a moral consequentialism which prioritizes a future social justice. In ‘Getting out of the Cave’ and ‘The Moral Epistemology of Stalinism,’ Mills had drawn on interdisciplinary materials – including cognitive psychology and testimonials – to consider the mindset of everyday party members and intellectuals who persisted in their beliefs despite the growing evidence of abuses. 

Such a diagnosis opens up a space for liberalism, with its emphasis on rights, in a rethinking of Marxism. Mills writes: “It may be, therefore, that the most morally defensible approach for the left would be to accept the legitimacy of a human rights framework […] imply[ing] a significantly different intellectual posture towards the liberal tradition […] no longer […] seen as a historically discredited ideology […] but rather as a major political advance for humanity, providing rights and guarantees […] which any morally informed socialism must respect and build on” (Mills, 1991: 36-37). He goes on to say, “the task of the left would then be to supplement and revise liberal theory to take into account the insights of Marx, feminists, oppressed racial groups, and others on the material and cultural factors which in practice undercut the formal political equality and democracy proclaimed in the theory” (Mills, 1991: 37). Here then is a quiet transition from rethinking Marxism to rethinking liberalism.

V.

In 1991, Mills accepted a job in philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, one of the top 20 programs in philosophy. A senior colleague subsequently wrote a pseudonymous piece to a new national publication airing concern about a recent affirmative action job search, writing that while the outcome was a satisfactory hire, the process was dubious (Kindrow, 1994). Mills read the piece, not realizing it was about him (the author claimed to be an English professor and the candidate that was hired was from Rutgers). After repeated readings, Mills realized that the author’s name (G Kindrow) was an anagrammatized spelling of his colleague Gerald Dworkin and that the piece was about his hire. This was the same Gerald Dworkin who with Ned Block had written a powerful criticism (Block and Dworkin, 1976) of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s racist The Bell Curve. Mills in turn wrote a response and became embroiled in a national controversy (Mills, 2010: 16-21). Various conservative commentators rushed to offer their own verdict, and the Wall Street Journal and other media outlets reprinted Dworkin’s article.

It was also in his first years at Chicago that Mills taught his first introductory course on African-American philosophy, compiling a reader since there was no textbook. Discussing the class in “Non-Cartesian Sums,” Mills writes of the problem of finding an organizing principle which would characterize the “the […] struggles of people of African descent in the Americas against the different manifestations of white racism” in terms of their “philosophical aspects” (Mills, 1994e: 228). He writes “I decided that ‘personhood’, or the lack of it, could provide an ingress to this universe, and that I would work with the concept of a ‘sub-person’ as my central organizing notion” (Mills, 1994e: 228). It is thus with the liberal notion of the person that Mills finds a way to both connect African-American philosophy to the mainstream of analytic philosophy and to organize a set of texts that might challenge that mainstream. This essay is also striking in that neither Marx nor Marxism are ever mentioned in the essay nor included in the syllabus for the class.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the revelations of the extent of Stalin’s purges and other human rights abuses had shaken Mills’ commitment to Marxism. Domestic events in the United States had raised doubt about the capacity of liberal democracy to address racism. The beating of Rodney King by police officers in Los Angeles in March 1991 occurred during Mills’ first year at the University of Illinois at Chicago, followed by the racial uprising in Los Angeles in 1992.

It is thus during a period of turbulence that Mills attempts one last Marxist theorization of race, the 1994 long review essay ‘Under Class Under Standings.’ The politics of publication here are noteworthy. This is Mills’ first essay in a prestigious philosophy journal, Ethics, which was edited by none other than his colleague Gerald Dworkin. The essay was finished sometime in March 1994, presumably around the same time that Mills was also writing a draft of The Racial Contract. At this point, Mills’ attention was fully on questions of race. Although Mills localizes his turn to race to the May meeting of the Central division of the American Philosophical Association, a look at his curriculum vitae shows that he had given a version of ‘Dark Ontologies’ in Toronto two days prior to the May meeting and the lecture version of ‘Revisionist Ontologies’ some three weeks later at the Caribbean Studies Association meeting in Yucatan, Mexico. In fact, all of his talks after February 1994 were on race (Mills, 2021).

The contemporary, contested debate on the underclass was an appropriate topic for Mills to attempt one last Marxist theorization of race. Underclass is a term that was, as Mills credits, first used by Gunnar Myrdal (1962), and popularized by William Julius Wilson (1987) in The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. For Myrdal, the underclass “is not really an integrated part of the nation but a […] substratum” (Myrdal, 1962: 35) under the working class, comprised “of unemployed, unemployables, and underemployed […] hopelessly set apart from the nation at large” (ibid.: 10). In the United States, the underclass is racialized; in 1994 it was largely Black and increasingly also Latino/a. The 1980s had seen an upsurge of academic and popular debate around the terms; Mills writes that “few social issues of the last decade have generated as much acrimonious popular and academic debate as the question of the ‘underclass’ and what (if anything) to do about it” (Mills, 1994c: 855). Charles Murray’s conservative work arguing that the welfare state was responsible for the increase and perpetuation of the underclass by creating a “culture of poverty” had become popular in conservative circles, which called for an end to federal programs begun with Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” This work was used strategically in Newt Gingrich’s coordinated campaign for the 1994 congressional elections. ‘Under Class, Under Standings’ was written as this campaign, culminating in Gingrich’s “Contract with America” was well underway and, a review by Mills written a year later speculates about a future “President Newt” (Mills, 1995: 18). Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, reflecting a new centrism by Democrats was accompanied by “an increasing number of liberal commentators argu[ing] that race is a divisive issue, and that Democratic ‘concessions’ to black demands have been a major factor in driving away blue-collar white workers” (Mills, 1994c: 877).

A discourse that coded federal programs as “hand-outs” standing in the way of financial and personal independence had become mainstream. Mills writes that the term “underclass” must thus be understood within a “racial cryptography” where “a racial subtext […] is fused […] with the characteristics of personalized causal responsibility.” By “euphemism and indirection,” the term underclass recodes “the long history […] of the black threat” into a seemingly descriptive term shorn of racial signification, which is “intrinsically […] race-neutral”  (Mills, 1994c: 858). Thus, Mills observes that William Julius Wilson later shifts to the term “ghetto poor,” Jennifer Hochschild to the “estranged poor,” and David Theo Goldberg to the “racially marginalized,” in an effort to fight that recoding (Mills, 1994c: 859).

There is a pessimistic tone in the essay, since the “‘new moderate’ (corporate) liberalism of the future [is …] highly convergent if not identical with traditional conservatism” (Mills, 1994c: 877). Even as Herbert Gans warned that a growing underclass would lead to the rise of fascisms, a sentiment, as Mills writes, echoed by the then Secretary of HUD, Henry Cisneros, (Gans and Cisneros are cited by Mills, 1994c: 881) the prevailing trend was to ignore “the plight of the underclass […] a new ‘benign neglect’ increasingly malign” (Mills, 1994c: 877-878).

It is with the aim of providing a “philosophical perspective doubly minoritarian” (Mills, 1994: 857) that Mills reviews Christopher Jencks’ Rethinking Social Policy: Race, Poverty, and the Underclass and Bill Lawson’s collection The Underclass Question, the latter “the first collective written intervention on a specific topic by black philosophers in U.S. history” (Mills, 1994c: 856). Mills’ perspective here, however, is a split, rather than a unified, double perspective. He is writing “racially – as an African-American in a largely white profession – and theoretically – as somebody who, despite everything, still considers himself a Marxist (albeit in some appropriately hyphenated and qualified sense whose details I have yet to work out)” (Mills, 1994c: 857, my emphasis). We must ask what exactly is being hyphenated? A racial and a theoretical perspective? Mills frames this split between racial identification and voluntary theoretical commitment as a soon to be unified doubly minoritarian perspective. The subsequent sentence is written as if unity had been achieved: “So I will be taking this opportunity to make some general points about moral-political theory and race, and the possible insights provided by a ‘black,’ or at least racially informed, Marxism” (Mills, 1994c: 857). The ambiguous hyphenation in the first line has now been replaced by quotation marks around the term black.

The unfinished task changes rhetorically again to a parenthesis as Mills describes his argument in this essay: “My claim will be that race is much more central to the polity than is standardly recognized in philosophy, should accordingly be much more central to our theorizing than it currently is, and that this can be explained by (a modified) historical materialism” (Mills, 1994c: 857). In what follows, Mills will fulfill the first part of his argument, “mak[ing] some general points about moral-political theory and race” to argue the centrality of race to the polity, but the second part, explaining this centrality through “(a modified) historical materialism,” never materializes. Even as Mills projects a unified double perspective, the essay maintains its split perspective.

The theoretical question of the relation of race to Marxism, and the burden of offering a Marxist theorization of race, is most explicitly confronted in the second section, titled ‘Race and Class.’ In the first part of this section, Mills considers “the general theoretical question of the extent to which a convincing class, that is, Marxist, account can be given of the centrality of race, racial self-identification, and white racism to the polities of the New World” (Mills, 1994c: 860). This is a key question since “race […] is central to discussions of the underclass, which is disproportionately, although not exclusively, black” (Mills, 1994c: 860).

Yet in his discussion, Mills presents Marxism in terms of a straw person called “white Marxism.” This is not to say that the criticisms Mills makes are incorrect. Rather we see a rather cavalier, simplistic reading of Marx – one that Mills would repeat throughout his later writings – at odds with nearly all of the work Mills had done previously. By way of this straw person, an opposition is created between “white Marxists, who have tended to write off race consciousness and black nationalism as an obfuscatory digression from the necessary focus on class” and Black intellectuals who see “a commitment to Marxist theory as excluding a theoretical focus on the causal significance of white racism” (Mills, 1994c: 860-1). Neither Stuart Hall nor the other Black thinkers Mills had engaged with in his dissertation and early work, such as Oliver Cox, Walter Rodney, or Eric Williams, are mentioned here. On the basis of a distinction between white Marxism and Black nationalism, Mills thus writes “any Marxism that is going to be able to survive into the twenty-first century needs to be able to demonstrate that this polarization can be transcended” (Mills, 1994c: 861).

Mills proceeds to raise the question, “What would a convincing Marxist theorization of race be like?” We must ask, “convincing” to whom? The mainly white professional philosophers who are readers of Ethics (who at one point he explicitly addresses in the essay)? Black philosophers? Caribbean Marxists? As Mills describes the problem, consider who his addressee is and upon what ground he is placing this problem: “The challenge […] is the capturing of the phenomenological dimension of a racialized existence, the centrality of racial identity to the polity, the extent to which race structures one’s life and penetrates to one’s ontic bones” (Mills, 1994c: 861-862). The use of the singular possessive ‘one’ suggests that we are in the realm of identity. Mills then reverts to the parallelism that he had used in ‘Alternative Epistemologies’ to frame the failure of existing attempts to meet this challenge by Marxists in terms of a priority of race or class: “Race has been seen as epiphenomenal […] the ‘false consciousness’ which needs to be demystified so that the underlying proletarian identity can assert itself and we can all get on with the important thing, the class struggle” (Mills, 1994c: 862). The absence of Hall’s work seems here particularly symptomatic as Marxism is figured as a “proletarian identity.” For Mills, Marxists prioritize this identity, even if it is covered over by the construction of race as “false consciousness.” Conceived in this way, the fundamental constraint posited by Marxism – namely that social change must be linked to economic change – disappears; Marxism becomes the name of a theory focused on the plight of the working class, conceived as proletarian identity. Even on this framing, Mills glosses over the ideological work necessary to “demystify” the “false consciousness” of race. In contrast to the failed Marxist theorizations of race, Mills points, quite strangely and without explanation, to the work of “black separatists.”  For this contrast to be “transcended,” “a successful account would have to synthesize the insights, and recognize the theoretical failings, of both black separatists and the traditional white Left” (Mills, 1994c: 862). Such an account could not make “race simply reducible to class.”

Identity has now become the ground upon which class and race must be connected as parallels. There is in these pages a tension between the desire for a Marxist theory of race through identity and a concomitant desire to adopt liberalism. Mills writes “from the 1970s onward, more theoretically sophisticated Marxist treatments of race have begun to emerge” (Mills, 1994c: 862), citing in particular Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1986) Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. Yet Mills moves quickly and by way of analogy to the moral-political theory more suited to questions of identity, that is, liberalism: “correspondingly, the normative moral and political theories […] which assign moral standing to […] the inhabitants of this society [settler colonial] […] cannot be understood in terms of an abstract liberalism…they must be seen as the organic outcome of this peculiar hybrid situation” (Mills, 1994c: 863). And here, upon a ground of identity that moves by way of analogy, feminist criticisms of liberalism from the inside become a beacon: just like “pioneering feminists […] constructed ‘patriarchy’ as a central theoretical notion […] Black philosophers need, analogously, to start speaking bluntly of a historic system of global white supremacy, and, correspondingly, of a white-supremacist liberalism” (Mills, 1994c: 863). Mills introduces a distinction between “persons and racial subpersons” in relation to the “moral notion of ‘respect’” (Mills, 1994c: 864), a distinction that is independent of any economic relations. Somewhat surprisingly, Mills ends this first section by claiming a Marxist perspective: “the general claim is, then, that race – like gender – provides an illuminating prism for reconceptualizing moral/political philosophy […] My additional, Marxist claim would be that it is possible to develop a historical materialist account of this tectonic partitioning in the social ontology of the planet” (Mills, 1994c: 865). Mills proceeds in the rest of the essay as if the split perspective has been articulated as a unified, double perspective. Over against this, though, is the successful splitting of the project of a revised Black liberalism, on the model of feminism, combatting white supremacy, from some future project of a Marxist theorization of race or a “black” Marxism.

At essay’s end, the differences between Black liberalism and a “black” Marxism split most dramatically. The last section of the essay, titled ‘The Political Spectrum of Diagnoses and Solutions,’ is the most anguished. Mills writes that for Marxists, “there is…an embarrassing disarticulation between analysis and prescription…the Left is caught in a situation where […] a socialist solution […] seems improbable, and […] a capitalist economy […] will continue relentlessly” (Mills, 1994c: 880). It is a sign of Mills’ sense of Marxism that he notices the ideological pulls happening within: “What inevitably happens under these […] circumstances, of course, is that one is psychologically pulled rightward by the fear of political marginalization and irrelevance.” Hope is thus rather improbably located: “one then puts forward recommendations in the odd spirit of hoping that one is wrong in one’s analysis” (Mills, 1994c: 880). It is at this point that Mills doffs his “Marxist hat”. As I mentioned at the beginning of his essay, hope is here placed in the possibility that “moral motivation can be a social prime mover” (Mills, 1994c: 880). Against this of course is the dystopic vision of Los Angeles.

VII.

In the years that follow, Marxism increasingly becomes a foil for Mills against which to elaborate Black radical liberalism. The modes of denunciation differ; what is notable is the persistence with which Marxism haunts Mills’ work. In the ‘Preface’ to Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality, he writes of the New Jewel Movement and the People’s National Party in Jamaica as anachronistic, “the Marxist Anglo-Caribbean left in the 1970s and 1980s was living through a time whose dimensions had already been explored and had ended elsewhere, a time which had run out” (Mills, 2010: x). Sometimes the denunciation is casual. In Black Rights, White Wrongs, Mills repeatedly says in passing that the Marxist theory of value has been discredited without offering a citation or argument (Mills, 2017: xix, 45, 70, 119). On occasion, Mills suggests Marxism and a Marxist theory of race are plausible alternatives that should be pursued (Mills, 2003: xvi-xvii; Mills, 2017: xix, 206). Mills’ own criticisms of so-called “white” Marxism often proceed by way of loose argument, at odds with the careful readings of Marx that characterized Mills’ work in the 1980s and early 1990s. Such loose arguments are also at work in Mills’ “retrieval” of the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Domenico Losurdo as straightforward endorsements of liberalism, evincing more his desire to shore up his position than attentive readings of these works (Mills, 2018; Mills, 2017; Slack, 2022). Beginning with the 1999 essay ‘European Specters,’ Mills also appropriates Marxism in a novel way, by arguing that if class were replaced by race the structures of Marxism would be plausible. In this appropriation, Marxism has been made entirely static and the category of class fixed. We can read Marxism itself as a specter in Mills’ later work, whose repeated exorcism is sometimes productive but never final.

In 1994, the ostensibly opposed visions of an impossible hope in moral motivation and a pessimistic view of the future turn into a “decision,” that Mills self-narrates as a move into racial consciousness and Black liberalism, disavowing his own attempts at a “‘black’ Marxism.” It is here that we should linger today.

Mills had just received tenure and was at the beginning of a lifelong fight to insert African-American philosophy into the mainstream of philosophy and to change the demographics of who becomes a philosopher. Rightfully fearing irrelevance in his attempts to enter the mainstream of philosophy – and finding a point of entry in the liberal concept of personhood – Mills moves towards Black radical liberalism. This is a productive move for Mills. He will later remark that the short, punchy first draft of The Racial Contract that he quickly writes during this period is the one he returns to for the final publication. Mills grants a flexibility to liberalism that he will deny to Marxism. This move also gives voice to the desire that “correct” theory-making might lead to change in the discipline of philosophy. In later works Mills will acknowledge the immense resistance to such change. Even in analytic philosophy, having the “correct” theory doesn’t necessarily change the racial politics that produces the canon. (One wonders what happened to the lesson Mills had learned from Gramsci in his dissertation, that, in ideology conceived as a “field where rival hegemonies struggle” (Mills, 1985a: 347), it is a fallacy to believe that “the superior scientific character of a set of ideas” (Mills, 1985a: 357) is enough “for it to achieve the hegemonic victory over its competitors” (Mills, 1985a: 350).

Moving with an earlier Mills reading a certain early Marx, we might ask how the tremendous economic changes from the 1960s onward and the rise of a racialized underclass relate, “slower or faster,” to ideological changes in which the apparent opposition of the two visions that close ‘Under Class Under Standings’ are framed as an “either/or” choice: either Marxism or liberalism, either class or race. The ostensible antagonism between Marxism and liberalism – or between a Marxist theorization of race and a revised liberal confrontation with white supremacy – might then be considered as the ideological site in which economic changes become available to consciousness. We might try to read the movement of this antagonism rather than reject liberalism or hold it up as a superior alternative. In media theory, as we try to bring to visibility what was hidden, we might consider how the movement of this ostensible antagonism is involved in the production of differences, for instance, between mainstream and alternative media.

This is a practice that might thus also, in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s words, declare “complicity” (Spivak, 2018: 269) with liberalism, a way of self-critically interrogating the mainstream from the inside. Perhaps this is how we continue the unfinished project that in 1994 Charles Mills called a “‘black,’ or at least racially informed, Marxism.”

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Notes

[1] The most extreme instance of this commitment to “correctness” is in display in ‘Ideology’ in Marx and Engels’ ‘Revisited and Revised.’  Writing in an endnote of “the nagging feeling that some obscure passage I have not taken into account might shed some new light of the usage of this term [ideology]” (Mills, 1992: 324), he tells us that he has (this is before the days of digitized searching!) gone through all the volumes of the Collected Works in English, looking for every instance of “ideology,” “ideologist,” “ideologue,” “ideological,” “ideologically,” “ideologise,” “ideologism,” performing the enormous labor of building a concordance of these terms in order to assuage his anxiety (Mills, 1992: 324-325).
[2] Although I cannot elaborate here, there is a distinct shift in Mills’ sense of Marxism which can be discerned in the differences between work produced prior to this appointment, including ‘Determination and Consciousness in Marx,’ written and submitted in August 1987 (although not published until 1989), and the work that occurs after.

Surya Parekh is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University and affiliate faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He is the author of Black Enlightenment (Duke University Press, 2023) and co-editor of Living Translation (Seagull, 2022) and Ritwik Ghatak: Occasional Essays for a 100^th Birthday (Seagull, 2025).  He has published in CR: The New Centennial Review, Nineteenth Century Literature, and Postcolonial Directions in Education. 

Email: mparekh@binghamton.edu

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 30/09/2024
Date of original decision: 28/01/2025
Revised article submitted: 13/09/2025
Article accepted: 22/09/2025