Class, Race, and Gender

These readings example how class intersects with racial and gender oppression, how these divisions benefit capital, and how socialists have fought against these oppressions through the years.

Class Struggle: The Motor of History

• Why the Working Class?, Vivek Chibber, Jacobin
• Uniting the Dispossessed, Bryan Palmer, Jacobin
• Class Analysis, Eric Olin Wright, Class Matters

Capitalism, Class, and the Left Today

• Back to Marx, Ellen Meiksins Wood, Monthly Review
• Politics Without Politics, Chris Maisano, Jacobin
• Why Class Struggle Is Central, Ellen Meiksins Wood, "Against the Grain"

Race and Class

• The Social Construction of Race, Brian Jones, Jacobin
• Socialism and Black Oppression, Paul Heideman, Jacobin
• A "Freedom Budget" for All Americans, The March on Washington Organizers
• The Political Economy of Racism (chapter 7, excerpt), Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, "From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation"

How Socialists Can Dismantle the US Police State

• It's Not Just the Drug War, Maria Gottschalk (interview), Jacobin
• Did Liberals Give Us Mass Incarceration?, Adaner Usmani, Catalyst
• America Is Waking Up to the Injustice of Cash Bail, Bryce Covert, The Nation
• Modern Day Debtors' Prisons, Meagan Day and Bhaskar Sunkara, The New York Times

Socialism and Gender Oppression

• Gender and the Communist Manifesto, Stephanie Coontz, Solidarity
• Capitalism's Crisis of Care, Sarah Leonard and Nancy Fraser, Dissent
• The Pitfalls of Radical Feminism, Erica West, Jacobin
• The Feminist Case for Single Payer, Natalie Shure, Jacobin
• A Blueprint for Universal Childhood, Megan Erickson, Jacobin
• Cockblocked by Redistribution, Katie J.M. Baker, Dissent
• Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, Kristen R. Ghodese, The New York Times
• A Feminism for Tomorrow: Introduction, Kaavya Asoka and Sarah Leonard, Dissent

Martin Luther King, Jr.: Democratic Socialist

• The Forgotten Socialist History of Martin Luther King Jr., Matthew Miles Goodrich, In These Times
• Remembering King’s roots in labor and socialist movements of the 20th century, Nathan Newman, Monthly Review Online
• The Legacy of Martin Luther King, Lee Sustar, Socialist Worker
• Nonviolence and Social Change, Martin Luther King, Jr., Lecture in 1967
• Programs and Prospects, Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

Social Reproduction and Capitalism

• What Is Social Reproduction Theory?, Tithi Bhattacharya, Socialist Worker
• Contradictions of Capital and Care, Nancy Fraser, New Left Review
• Caring Enough to Strike: US Teachers’ Strikes in Perspective, Tithi Bhattacharya, Rebel
• Caring in the City, Johanna Brenner, Jacobin
• More on the theory of social reproduction: Capital, Labor Power, and Gender Relations, Susan Ferguson and David McNally, Introduction to Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: A Unitary Theory
• Social reproduction, migration, and the global labor supply chain: Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race, and the Social Reproduction of a Global Working Class, Susan Ferguson and David McNally, Socialist Register