The totality problem: C.L.R. James,Claudia Jones and critical theory

The Caribbean as method

To understand James and Jones is first to understand the Caribbean not as a peripheral region awaiting metropolitan recognition but as a constitutive location within the architecture of racial capitalism. The Caribbean was a laboratory and part paradigm of colonial modernity. It is the site where European capitalism systematised the transformation of human beings into commodities; where the plantation prefigured the factory; and where racial classification emerged as a technology of labour control and social organisation. ⁵ As James writes in ‘The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery’, the Caribbean plantation represented ‘the finest flower of industrial organization’, a grotesque perfection that anticipated European industrial development. ⁶

This history produced what Édouard Glissant calls ‘a prophetic vision of the past’. ⁷ This vision provides a capacity to perceive within Caribbean history not backwardness but futurity, not exception but paradigm. When James declares in The Black Jacobins that the Haitian Revolution was ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’, he performs a double operation, empirical claim and theoretical intervention. For if Toussaint L’Ouverture and Dessalines demonstrated that enslaved Africans could organise revolutionary transformation without European tutelage, then the entire stadial theory of historical development, from Hegel through orthodox Marxism, required fundamental revision. ⁸

Jones understood this geography with equal precision. Her analysis of Caribbean migration to Britain in ‘The Caribbean Community in Britain’ refuses to treat diaspora as dispersal or loss. Instead, she theorises the middle passage and its afterlives as producing new forms of political consciousness and collective capacity. ⁹ Black workers in London’s transport system or Manchester’s textile mills were not simply labour power extracted from peripheral colonies; they were also bearers of organisational knowledge forged through anti-colonial struggle. Their presence in the metropole did not represent individual mobility but rather what Paul Gilroy would later call the Black Atlantic, a transnational formation that challenged the very categories of national belonging and territorial sovereignty organising post-war politics. ¹⁰

The Caribbean, then, functioned for James and Jones as what we might call an epistemological affordance: a standpoint that made visible what metropolitan positioning obscured. This is not a claim about essential identities or automatic consciousness, but rather about the structural possibilities enabled by specific locations within the global system. ¹¹ To be Caribbean, to have experienced the totality of colonial domination through economic extraction, political subjugation, cultural denigration and bodily violation was to possess both intimate knowledge of capitalism’s violence and clarity about the inadequacy of partial resistance.

Metropolitan peripheries and internationalism

James and Jones wrote not primarily from Port of Spain or Kingston, but from London and New York. This positioning has often been misread as exile, marginalisation, or metropolitan seduction. We argue instead that their inhabitation of what we term ‘imperial interstices’, spaces where the presumed separation between colony and metropole collapsed, was neither accident nor misfortune but rather strategic necessity and analytic resource.

Consider James’s trajectory: Trinidad to Lancashire to London to New York, moving always within the circuits of British and American empire while maintaining connections to anti-colonial movements across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. His physical mobility traced the very pathways of capital accumulation and imperial administration, allowing him to perceive structural connections invisible from any single location. ¹² When he writes in 1941’s ‘Russia and Marxism’ about the convergence of fascist Germany and Stalinist Russia toward what he terms ‘state capitalism’, his analysis draws authority precisely from his capacity to compare imperial formations across geographic and ideological boundaries. ¹³

Similarly, Jones’s movement from Trinidad to New York to deportation and London was not romantic wandering but forced migration through the machinery of Cold War anti-communism and immigration control. ‘I was deported because I fought the color bar’ is the title of one of Jones’s essays that outlines that machinery. ¹⁴ Yet the vulnerability of the Black radical woman to state violence sharpened her analysis of how empire operates through intimate regulation. ¹⁵ Her founding of the West Indian Gazette in 1958 and the Caribbean Carnival in 1959 enacted what we call metropolitan peripheralisation: the creation of Caribbean space within London that refused assimilation while claiming urban territory. ¹⁶

Through the West Indian Gazette, Jones worked to overcome the fragmentation that imperial rule had imposed on Caribbean island communities. In doing so, she practised anti-colonial internationalism structurally, not merely rhetorically. She sought to forge explicit links to the US Civil Rights movement and to liberation struggles across Africa and Vietnam. The renaming of the West Indian Gazette to the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News in 1962, undertaken in close collaboration with Indian Marxist A. Manchanda, signalled a deliberate commitment to this expansive solidary project. Likewise, her organising against the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act alongside other ‘New Commonwealth’ migrants extended this practice. In this respect Jones anticipated what would become, from the late 1960s through the 1980s, the defining framework of militant Black politics in Britain whereby Blackness was conceived not as phenotype presentation, but as shared experience of colonial subjugation and metropolitan racism, a framework most rigorously theorised by Ambalavaner Sivanandan, founder of the Institute of Race Relations and of this journal.

The imperial interstice, then, names a political and conceptual location instead of mere geographic position. It designates spaces where the contradictions of colonial modernity become undeniable. Where colonised subjects encounter metropolitan workers and reveal their shared position within capital; where the myth of European civilisation confronts its foundation in colonial extraction; where the promise of liberal democracy meets its constitutive exclusions. James and Jones inhabited these spaces not as outsiders seeking entrance but as theorists whose analysis challenged the very boundaries being policed.

Decentring geopolitics

This positioning enabled a decentred analysis of global capitalism. This analysis refused both nationalist territorialisation and economic reductionism. Against the centre–periphery model dominant in development economics and dependency theory, James and Jones theorised a system without a geographic outside, where accumulation operated through complex articulations rather than simple extraction, where metropolitan working classes benefitted from imperial spoils while remaining exploited within their own nations. ¹⁷

James’s concept of ‘world revolution’, articulated most fully in World Revolution 1917–1936 (1937), refuses to hierarchise struggles according to geographic or economic ‘advancement’. ¹⁸ The Russian Revolution, anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia, and labour militancy in the United States are not separate phenomena awaiting coordination. Rather they are expressions of a unified crisis requiring simultaneous transformation. This is not internationalism in the conventional sense of solidarity between discrete national movements, but rather a theory of capitalism as integrated global system where contradictions in any location reverberate throughout the whole.

Jones develops parallel insights through her concept of ‘triple oppression’: the interlocking domination of race, class and gender experienced by Black women. But crucially, she refuses to localise this analysis to the United States or Britain. In ‘The Caribbean Community in Britain’ and ‘We Seek Full Equality for Women’, she demonstrates how the super-exploitation of Caribbean domestic workers in London, African women in colonial territories, and Black women in the US South constituted a unified system of accumulation rather than parallel injustices. ¹⁹ The domestic worker cleaning a Manchester flat and the plantation labourer cutting Jamaican sugar cane occupied different positions within the same structure, a structure requiring their simultaneous liberation rather than sequential reform.

This decentred analysis challenges the methodological nationalism still prevalent in American Studies, the inertia of imperialism remaining in British Studies, and the area studies logic organising Caribbean Studies. James and Jones demonstrate that neither the United States nor the Caribbean can be understood as self-contained units of analysis. The United States is always already a Caribbean power (through slavery, occupation and economic domination), while the Caribbean is constitutively diasporic, its population distributed across metropolitan centres where they reshape urban space and political possibility. Studying either field adequately requires transgressing its boundaries, a methodological imperative that James’s and Jones’s work both practises and theorises.

James’s Hegel: The Black Jacobins and revolutionary subjectivity

James’s reconfiguration of Marxism begins with his analysis of slavery and revolution in The Black Jacobins. When James published the book in 1938, he did more than recover a suppressed history. He performed a fundamental intervention into the philosophy of history itself, one whose implications orthodox Marxism could not assimilate. The text’s opening gambit establishes both empirical claim and theoretical provocation:

The slaves worked on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living together in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which covered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at the time, and the rising was, therefore, a thoroughly prepared and organized mass movement. ²⁰

This passage condenses James’s revolutionary heresy. Against Marxism’s stadial schema where feudalism precedes capitalism and peasants lag behind proletarians in revolutionary capacity, James demonstrates that Caribbean slaves represented capitalism’s most advanced formation. The plantation was not pre-modern but hyper-modern. Not feudal remnant but capitalist avant-garde. Consequently, the Haitian Revolution was not a premature uprising. James insists it to be the first and the most successful proletarian revolution.

The theoretical stakes become explicit in James’s treatment of Toussaint L’Ouverture as a dialectical subject. Unlike Hegel’s famous reading of the master–slave dialectic, where the bondsman achieves consciousness through labour while the master atrophies in parasitic domination, James presents Toussaint as enacting the dialectic through military and political praxis rather than contemplative recognition. ²¹ Toussaint’s tragedy, his inability to complete the revolution, his eventual capture and death in a French prison, stems not from philosophical inadequacy but from material constraints such as the isolation of Haiti, the hostility of surrounding slave powers and the absence of international support.

Yet James’s interpretation diverges crucially from both Hegelian idealism and orthodox historical materialism. For Hegel, the dialectic operates through Spirit’s self-realisation across history; for Marx, through the contradictions of material production. James, however, locates dialectical movement in the creative praxis of enslaved subjects who transformed themselves from commodified objects into revolutionary actors. This is neither idealist consciousness nor mechanical determinism, but what we might call insurgent materialism, which attends to how those positioned as non-subjects within capital’s logic nevertheless generate the practical knowledge and collective capacity necessary for revolutionary transformation. ²²

Notes on Dialectics (1948), written a decade after The Black Jacobins, makes these philosophical commitments explicit. There, James reads Hegel’s Logic through Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks to argue that the dialectic is not a method to be applied per se; it is the form that reality itself assumes, the movement through contradiction toward determinate negation and qualitative transformation. ²³ But whereas Lenin reads Hegel as anticipating Marxist materialism, James insists that neither Hegel nor orthodox Marxism adequately grasps what Black revolutionary practice reveals: that the most thoroughly objectified can become the most thoroughly revolutionary subjects precisely because their position within capital admits no reformist compromise.

This reconceptualisation challenges Marxism’s Eurocentrism at its philosophical core. If, as James argues in The Black Jacobins, Toussaint and the Haitian masses enacted the dialectic more purely than European workers constrained by national identity and reformist organisation, then Marx’s own historical narrative requires fundamental revision. The proletariat is not that class formed in European factories who eventually spread consciousness to colonial subjects. Rather, the colonial subject reveals what proletarian being means, that is total dispossession, absolute opposition to the existing order, revolutionary necessity.

Jones’s triple oppression and super-exploitation

Where James reconfigured Marxism through attention to racial slavery’s centrality to capitalism, Claudia Jones insisted that this analysis remained incomplete without theorising how gender operates as a constitutive rather than derivative category of exploitation. ‘An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman’, published in Political Affairs in June 1949, opens with a diagnostic claim that remains startling in its precision:

The bourgeoisie is fearful of the militancy of the Negro woman, and for good reason. The capitalists know, far better than many progressives seem to know, that once Negro women begin to take action, the militancy of the whole Negro people, and thus of the anti-imperialist coalition, is greatly enhanced. ²⁴

This passage performs several theoretical operations simultaneously. First, it centres Black women as political agents, not passive victims. This move challenged both white feminist frameworks focusing on middle-class women’s access to professional careers and Black nationalist discourse emphasising masculine leadership. Second, it identifies capital’s own recognition of this militant potential, suggesting that ruling-class strategy possesses clearer analysis than Left theory. Third, it establishes Black women’s organising as a catalyst for broader anti-imperialist struggle instead of narrow identity politics.

Jones develops this analysis through what she terms the ‘triple oppression’ of Black women (exploitation as workers, oppression as Black people, and degradation as women). But importantly, she refuses to treat these as additive burdens or intersecting identities in the contemporary sense of multiple marginalisation. Instead, she theorises super-exploitation as a structural position within capitalism where these determinations fuse into a qualitatively distinct form of domination serving specific accumulation functions. ²⁵

Consider her analysis of domestic labour:

The Negro woman worker is the lowest-paid worker in the United States, and the superexploited household worker is the lowest of the lowest-paid workers. Earning as she does only $200–$500 per year, her purchasing power for food, clothing, and shelter is the lowest in the country. ²⁶

This is not merely empirical description but a theoretical claim about capitalism’s requirement for unwaged and underpaid reproductive labour, work that maintains current workers and produces future generations while remaining unrecognised in wage calculations or GDP measurements.

Jones demonstrates how this domestic labour operates across multiple scales. This includes within individual households where Black women cook, clean and care for white families while their own children remain unsupervised; within communities where Black women’s unwaged care work sustains collective survival; and globally, where the reproductive labour of colonised women subsidises metropolitan standards of living. The figure of the Black domestic worker thus concentrates multiple determinations. These include racial capitalism’s commodification of care work, the heteropatriarchal organisation of social reproduction, and the imperial extraction of value from colonised territories. ²⁷

The household here emerges not as private refuge from public exploitation but as terrain where state violence, economic domination and intimate violation converge.

The heresy of totality

James’s and Jones’s refusal to subordinate race to class or defer gender liberation constituted what we call the heresy of totality, an insistence that capitalism, racism and heteropatriarchy form an integrated system requiring unified analysis and struggle. This position was systematically rejected by the institutional Left, whether Communist parties that demanded Black militants subordinate anti-racist organising to class struggle, Trotskyist formations that treated colonialism as secondary contradiction, or social democratic movements that pursued incrementalist reform. ²⁸

The historical record of this rejection is extensive. James’s expulsion from the Socialist Workers Party in 1940 over his analysis of Black self-determination; Jones’s conviction under the Smith Act in 1953 and subsequent deportation in 1955; and their marginalisation within historical narratives of twentieth-century socialism are not incidental biographical facts but symptoms of a theoretical foreclosure. ²⁹ Orthodox Marxism could not accommodate the totality they insisted upon because doing so would require acknowledging that European workers benefitted from imperial extraction, that masculine privilege structured revolutionary movements themselves, that white supremacy was not ideological mystification but material structure organising accumulation.

Consider James’s 1941 essay ‘Russia and Marxism’, where he argues that Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany represent convergent developments toward what he terms ‘state capitalism’, without collapsing their political differences or ideological antagonisms, here understood as the increasing concentration of productive forces under centralised control while maintaining workers’ position as commodified labour. ³⁰ This analysis scandalised both official Communism and much of the anti-Stalinist Left because it refused the geopolitical binary organising Cold War politics. But James’s point is precisely that the apparent opposition between fascism and communism obscures their shared trajectory: capitalism’s increasing socialisation of production while maintaining its exploitative social relations.

Jones’s parallel analysis focuses on how reforms won through struggle – New Deal legislation, welfare programmes, civil rights advances – become technologies for managing rather than transforming oppression. In ‘We Seek Full Equality for Women’, she demonstrates how gains in women’s employment during the second world war were systematically reversed in the post-war period, with Black women experiencing the most severe displacement. ³¹ The point is not that struggle produces no gains but that under capitalism, every reform generates new forms of domination, a dialectic requiring revolutionary transformation rather than incremental amelioration.

The totality problem, then, names both diagnosis and political demand. Diagnosis: capitalism, racism and heteropatriarchy constitute a unified system whose contradictions cannot be resolved through partial transformation. Demand: liberation requires simultaneous transformation of economic relations, the racial order and the gender system (what Jones calls ‘full equality’ and James terms ‘world revolution’). This is the heresy that metropolitan leftism could not assimilate and that contemporary politics has difficulty acknowledging.

James’s cricket

In 1963, C.L.R. James published Beyond a Boundary, a text that confounded generic expectations. Part autobiography, part sports history, part Marxist analysis, part aesthetic theory, the book troubled the boundaries between serious political writing and mere cultural commentary. Yet for James, this generic promiscuity was precisely the point. Cricket, he argues, is not a leisure activity distracting from politics but rather a site where colonial subjects enact selfhood, where artistic expression meets strategic intelligence, where individual brilliance serves a collective purpose. ³²

The book’s opening establishes its stakes: ‘What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?’ ³³ The question, echoing Kipling’s imperial geography (‘What do they know of England who only England know?’), performs a reversal. James suggests that to understand cricket requires grasping its location within colonial domination and anti-colonial resistance, while simultaneously arguing that political analysis that remains ignorant of culture, of how people construct meaning, experience beauty, and exercise creativity under domination, remains incomplete.

James’s attention to specific players and matches is not antiquarian nostalgia but close reading of embodied practice. When he describes George Headley’s batting technique or Learie Constantine’s athletic virtuosity, he analyses how colonised subjects claimed authority through mastery of the coloniser’s game. This mastery transformed colonial standards. Constantine’s revolutionary fielding, James argues, represented an aesthetic innovation that challenged cricket’s aristocratic conventions. ³⁴ This analysis becomes explicit in James’s treatment of Frank Worrell’s appointment as West Indies cricket captain in 1960, the first Black captain to lead the team despite the Caribbean’s Black majority. James reads this delayed recognition as a symptom of colonial racism while treating Worrell’s leadership as enacting decolonial possibility. The point is not representation (a Black man in authority) but rather the challenge to colonial presumptions about rationality, leadership capacity and civilisational achievement that Black cricket excellence posed.

But James’s cultural analysis operates at another register as well. He treats cricket as pedagogy, both in the sense of colonial education and potential decolonial formation. The colonial school system used cricket to discipline colonial subjects into proper British comportment, such as obeying rules, respecting authority and accepting hierarchy. Yet this same education created unintended effects. Young James learned not obedience but critical standards, not inferiority but capacity for excellence, not acceptance but grounds for refusal. ³⁵

The dialectical reversal is characteristic. The master’s tools, intended to secure domination, instead provide resources for resistance. Nevertheless, James’s insight goes further. He suggests that culture (artistic practice, aesthetic judgment, embodied performance) develops capacities that overtly political organising cannot alone produce. Cricket taught strategic thinking, collective coordination, individual responsibility to group purposes, and the experience of excellence. All together these are resources for revolutionary transformation even as they seemingly served colonial reproduction.

Jones’s Carnival

If James theorised culture through cricket’s embodied discipline, Claudia Jones grasped its revolutionary potential through festival and performance. Her founding of the Caribbean Carnival in January 1959 responded immediately to racist violence, including white mobs attacking Caribbean residents, police complicity in these assaults, and media demonisation of Black communities as criminal threats. The Carnival was simultaneously a defensive measure, asserting Caribbean presence in London and a creative transformation of urban space through performance. ³⁶

But Jones understood Carnival as more than symbolic resistance or cultural preservation. In her West Indian Gazette editorials, she articulates Carnival as enacting alternative social relations, akin to prefigurative politics. During Carnival, normal hierarchies suspend. The street becomes collective property, strangers become participants in shared performance, aesthetic expression displaces commodity exchange. These are not permanent transformations but temporary autonomous zones demonstrating what Édouard Glissant calls ‘realized possibility’, moments when different futures become experientially present. ³⁷

Jones’s analysis of Carnival’s political function appears throughout her cultural journalism. She emphasises how Caribbean working-class communities organised the event despite limited resources, how it created employment for Black artists and musicians otherwise excluded from legitimate cultural institutions, how it asserted Caribbean aesthetic traditions as equivalent to European high culture. But she also recognises Carnival’s limitations: its temporary nature, its vulnerability to police repression, its potential commodification as multicultural spectacle. ³⁸

The tension between Carnival as resistance and its potential incorporation into the multicultural state that would eventually celebrate ‘diversity’ while maintaining structural racism anticipates contemporary debates about cultural politics. Jones refuses to romanticise culture as automatically oppositional while insisting on its necessity for building collective identity and capacity. Cultural practice, she suggests, is neither sufficient for liberation nor mere distraction from ‘real’ political organising but rather a necessary component of decolonial transformation.

Pedagogy and revolutionary consciousness

Both James and Jones understood that decolonial transformation requires creating new forms of consciousness. This consciousness comes about not through propaganda or manipulation but through educational practices that develop critical capacity and collective intelligence. James’s work in workers’ education, from the Independent Labour Party in Lancashire to the Socialist Workers Party in New York, emphasised rigorous study of Marxist texts alongside analysis of contemporary struggles. His pedagogical method combined a close reading of theory with attention to how workers themselves understand their conditions, a dialectic between systematic knowledge and experiential insight. ³⁹

Jones’s pedagogy operated primarily through journalism and cultural organising. The West Indian Gazette served as a vehicle for political education, publishing analysis of Caribbean politics, British racism and international anti-colonialism alongside cultural coverage and community news. Her editorial practice treated readers as active participants from which to solicit contributions, submit letters, or organise community forums. This was pedagogy as capacity-building through creating infrastructure for collective analysis and debate. ⁴⁰

What unites their pedagogical commitments is the conviction that decolonisation requires not only structural transformation but the creation of new subjectivities capable of inhabiting freedom. This distinguishes their approach from both liberal education (which treats individuals as pre-formed subjects requiring skill development) and Leninist vanguardism (which treats masses as requiring leadership from those possessing the correct consciousness). Instead, James and Jones theorise consciousness as emerging through collective struggle that simultaneously challenges oppressive structures and transforms participants.

The theoretical foundation appears in James’s reading of Hegel. Consciousness develops through practical activity rather than preceding it, self-transformation and world-transformation occur together rather than sequentially, revolutionary subjectivity names capacity for creative praxis rather than possession of correct theory. ⁴¹ Jones’s ‘triple oppression’ analysis extends this by emphasising how different positions within capitalism require different forms of consciousness-raising and collective organisation.

Domestic labour and imperial extraction

Claudia Jones’s most persistent analytic focus concerns the household as a site where global political economy meets intimate violence. Her analysis of domestic labour reveals how the boundary between productive and reproductive work, public and private spheres, economic and intimate relations collapse under scrutiny of how racial capitalism actually operates. ⁴² These boundaries are key to liberal political theory and Marxist orthodoxy.

These seemingly empirical observation contains a theoretical claim. Capitalism requires massive quantities of unwaged and underpaid reproductive labour such as cooking, cleaning, childcare, emotional support to maintain current workers and produce future generations. This labour remains unrecognised in GDP calculations, wage negotiations or welfare provisions while being absolutely necessary for capital accumulation.

Jones demonstrates that reproductive labour’s invisibility is not an accidental oversight but rather a structural requirement. Capital accumulation depends on treating this work as ‘naturally’ women’s responsibility, requiring no compensation beyond subsistence. Racial stratification intensifies this extraction by positioning Black women as performing reproductive labour for white families while their own households remain under-supported. The Black domestic worker thus subsidises white working-class and middle-class reproduction while her own children receive inadequate care. ⁴³

Jones extends this analysis to colonial territories, showing how metropolitan standards of living depend on reproductive labour extraction from colonised populations. When Caribbean women migrate to Britain for domestic work, they simultaneously experience three determinations: wage exploitation (earning poverty wages), racial oppression (experiencing discrimination and violence), and gendered degradation (performing intimate labour for employers who view them with contempt). The domestic worker concentrates capitalism’s contradictions in a single figure.

The household here emerges as what we term the colonial household, a site where intimate relations are organised through and for imperial extraction. This challenges both liberal feminism (which treats the household as requiring reform through equal access to employment) and orthodox Marxism (which treats reproductive labour as secondary to productive work). Instead, Jones demonstrates that capitalism requires heteropatriarchal household organisation precisely because it externalises reproductive costs while maintaining control over labour reproduction. ⁴⁴

Violence, intimacy and state power

Jones’s analysis refuses to treat intimate violence as separate from economic exploitation or state repression. Instead, she reveals how violence operates across scales forming an integrated apparatus of domination. Her discussion of rape in ‘An End to the Neglect’ makes this explicit:

As a further expression of the daily violence perpetrated against the Negro woman, one notes those many cases of rape of Negro women by police and other state officials, the sadistic persecution of Negro mothers in prisons throughout the United States, in which they are refused the right to have their children with them or even to see them throughout the period of their incarceration. ⁴⁵

This passage connects sexual violence by state officials to prison policies separating mothers from children, connecting intimate assault to institutional cruelty. The point is that these are not distinct problems requiring separate solutions. Instead, they are expressions of a unified system that operates through gendered and racialised violation. The capacity of police to rape Black women with impunity demonstrates state power’s investment in maintaining racial-sexual order, while prison policies separating mothers from children reveal how institutions weaponise intimate bonds to inflict punishment.

Jones’s analysis anticipates contemporary scholarship on carceral feminism and intimate violence. She demonstrates that treating sexual assault as a criminal justice problem requiring police intervention ignores how police themselves are perpetrators of gendered violence. The state cannot protect Black women from intimate violence because the state itself deploys intimate violence as a technology of racial control. This diagnosis requires reconceiving what safety means and how it might be achieved, questions that have been taken up by contemporary abolition movements. ⁴⁶

James’s work contains less explicit attention to gendered violence but reveals parallel insights about how colonialism operates through intimate regulation. In The Black Jacobins, he documents how French colonisers used rape as a weapon of terror, how enslaved women experienced sexual violation as routine rather than exceptional, how the plantation system organised reproduction through forced breeding. ⁴⁷ These are not tangential details but rather central to how slavery functioned as a system of domination.

Yet James’s analysis also contains blind spots. His treatment of revolutionary leadership emphasises masculine figures, such as Toussaint, Dessalines and Christophe, while treating women as a background presence. When women do appear, they are primarily wives and mothers rather than political actors in their own right. This is not simply historical accuracy (military leadership was predominantly masculine) but reflects how James’s framework privileges certain forms of political action while marginalising others.

Jones’s work illuminates these limitations. Where James theorises revolution as seizure of state power through military action, Jones demonstrates that decolonisation requires transforming intimate relations, household organisation and reproductive labour, domains traditionally feminised and devalued. Her analysis suggests that any revolutionary movement failing to address these sites of domination will ultimately reproduce patriarchal structures even while transforming economic relations. ⁴⁸

Heteropatriarchy as colonial means of rule

Synthesising James’s and Jones’s insights reveals heteropatriarchy as a colonial technology, not a residual form of cultural tradition. The nuclear family organised around masculine authority, feminine domesticity and compulsory heterosexuality was imposed through colonial law, missionary education and economic incentives, each serving specific functions within racial capitalism’s accumulation requirements. ⁴⁹ Colonial administrators recognised that controlling reproduction required regulating sexuality and household formation. Laws against interracial marriage, criminalisation of same-sex intimacy and stigmatisation of non-nuclear family structures were less moral preferences and more means for maintaining racial stratification and ensuring the intergenerational transmission of property and status. The colonial household thus served as a site for reproducing both labour power and social hierarchy.

Jones’s analysis of triple oppression makes visible how this system operates through Black women’s positioning. Excluded from white middle-class domesticity’s protections while required to perform domestic labour for white families, forced into wage work under exploitative conditions while maintaining their own households with inadequate resources, experiencing sexual violence as routine rather than exception, Black women’s experience reveals heteropatriarchy’s violence when stripped of its ideological justifications. ⁵⁰ This analysis connects to contemporary queer-of-colour and transnational feminist scholarship that has theorised heteronormativity as colonial imposition rather than universal human organisation. M. Jacqui Alexander, Gayatri Gopinath and Jafari Allen have demonstrated how Caribbean postcolonial states deployed homophobia and transphobia to consolidate nationalist projects, continuing the colonial regulation of sexuality and gender while claiming independence. ⁵¹ Reading Jones alongside this scholarship reveals continuities between colonial household regulation and postcolonial heteropatriarchy. Both operate to extract reproductive labour while maintaining hierarchies of race, class and citizenship.

Multiculturalism and the management of difference

The decades following James’s and Jones’s most productive periods witnessed capitalism’s remarkable capacity to incorporate resistant practices while neutralising their transformative potential. What began as decolonial demands for structural transformation became, under neoliberalism, a multicultural celebration of diversity within unchanged power relations. This transformation requires careful analysis if we are to avoid romanticising James’s and Jones’s legacies while grasping what remains vital in their work.

Consider the fate of Jones’s Caribbean Carnival. What emerged in 1959 as working-class Caribbean resistance to racist violence has become the Notting Hill Carnival, which by the twenty-first century is Europe’s largest street festival. The festival currently attracts millions of participants, generating substantial tourist revenue, celebrated by municipal authorities as a demonstration of London’s multicultural character. ⁵² The Carnival’s incorporation into official multiculturalism exemplifies what Jodi Melamed terms ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’: the state’s recognition of cultural difference as a valuable commodity while refusing structural redistribution. ⁵³ This is not to dismiss Carnival’s continued significance for Caribbean communities or to claim that state recognition automatically negates resistant practice. Rather, it is to acknowledge how neoliberal capitalism deploys cultural recognition as a substitute for economic justice. The state celebrates diversity while managing intensified inequality, acknowledges historical injustice while refusing reparations, incorporates resistant aesthetics while criminalising resistant politics.

James’s cricket analysis illuminates these dynamics. His insistence that Caribbean cricket excellence challenged colonial hierarchies anticipated how postcolonial states would deploy sports achievement as a nationalist spectacle, producing Black athletic heroes while maintaining class stratification and economic dependency. The West Indies cricket team’s dominance in the 1970s and 1980s became a symbol of Caribbean pride even as structural adjustment programmes devastated regional economies. ⁵⁴ Cultural achievement, in other words, became compensation in lieu of perpetual liberation.

The professional-managerial class and identity politics

Neoliberalism’s incorporation of decolonial thought operated not only through cultural commodification but through the production of what Barbara and Karen Fields call ‘racecraft’, the discourse and practice that acknowledges racism while obscuring capitalism’s class dynamics. ⁵⁵ The proliferation of diversity initiatives, antiracism training and identity-based social movements has coincided with intensifying inequality, an apparent paradox that James’s and Jones’s analysis helps illuminate.

Jones’s critique of what she termed ‘Negro reformism’ anticipated how antiracist politics could become a vehicle for professional-class advancement rather than working-class liberation. She warned that civil rights gains benefitting educated Black elites (access to previously segregated universities, professional employment and political office) could proceed while the material conditions of most Black people, particularly Black women workers, deteriorated. ⁵⁶ This is precisely what occurred under neoliberalism where the growth of a Black professional-managerial class occurred alongside mass incarceration, unemployment and immiseration of Black working-class communities.

Some contemporary antiracist discourse frequently treats racism as an attitudinal problem (individual prejudice, implicit bias, microaggression) requiring cultural intervention (education, representation, allyship) rather than as a structural feature of capitalism requiring economic transformation. This represents exactly the kind of reformism that James and Jones rejected, ameliorative measures that manage to stave off the abolition of domination. Their insistence on totality challenges this fragmentation. Racism cannot be addressed apart from capitalism. Gender oppression cannot be deferred until after class struggle. Cultural recognition cannot substitute for material redistribution. ⁵⁷ The theoretical consequence of this shift is not merely political moderation but the erosion of critique’s capacity to apprehend capitalism as a social totality, replacing structural analysis with a moralised description and managerial intervention.

The rise of intersectionality as an academic framework and activist vocabulary presents a particular challenge for recovering Jones’s legacy. While contemporary intersectional analysis often cites Jones as a precursor, her concept of triple oppression differs fundamentally from how intersectionality has been institutionalised. This critique is not directed at the full range of intersectional scholarship, which is internally diverse and often politically incisive, but at its dominant institutionalisation as a framework of additive identity rather than as a theory of capitalist social relations. Jones theorised super-exploitation as a structural position within capitalism, not multiple identities but a unified system of domination where race, class and gender determinations fuse into a qualitatively distinct form of exploitation serving specific accumulation functions. Contemporary intersectionality, by contrast, often treats these as separate systems that intersect at certain points, reproducing exactly the fragmentation Jones’s analysis refused. ⁵⁸

Decolonial horizons and revolutionary humanism

What resources, then, do James and Jones offer for imagining liberation beyond neoliberal incorporation? We argue that their most vital contribution is what we term decolonial humanism, a conception of human becoming that refuses both liberal individualism and identity essentialism while insisting on collective transformation through struggle. ⁵⁹

For James, humanism names not abstract universal subjectivity but an historically specific capacity for creative praxis, what he calls in Notes on Dialectics the ‘invading socialist society’ already present within capitalism’s contradictions. ⁶⁰ This is humanism without Man – rejecting Enlightenment claims about European civilisation while affirming human capacity for self-transformation through revolutionary action. Put differently, the Haitian revolutionaries were not approximating European humanity but enacting new forms of being human, creating through struggle what Aimé Césaire would call ‘a humanism made to the measure of the world’. ⁶¹

Jones’s revolutionary humanism emerges through her vision of full equality. Full equality is not equal access to existing structures but transformation of the structures themselves. When she demands ‘full equality for women’, this is not liberal feminism’s demand for women’s inclusion in capitalist labour markets or political institutions but rather transformation of work, politics and social reproduction. ⁶² Full equality requires abolishing the conditions that produce inequality such as private property, wage labour, racial hierarchy and heteropatriarchal household organisation. It requires, in other words, creating new forms of human association beyond capitalism’s alienated sociality.

This decolonial humanism has several key features. First, it is materialist, grounded in an analysis of how people actually live, work and struggle rather than in abstract philosophical anthropology. Second, it is collective, theorising liberation as social transformation rather than individual achievement or recognition. Third, it is insurgent, emerging through struggle against domination rather than philosophical speculation or moral persuasion. Fourth, it is prefigurative, glimpsed in moments when people organise alternative relations. Each of these key features is captured in James’s insistence that ‘every cook can govern’ and in Jones’s enactment of them through Carnival and the West Indian Gazette. ⁶³

Crucially, this humanism refuses the colonial logics structuring liberal universalism, the claim that European modernity represents universal human achievement to which others must aspire. Instead, James and Jones demonstrate that the colonised, the enslaved and the super-exploited possess knowledge and capacities that dominant groups cannot recognise precisely because recognising them would undermine their own self-understanding. The Haitian Revolution revealed that enslaved Africans could organise liberation without European tutelage; Black women’s triple oppression analysis revealed that gender cannot be understood apart from capitalism’s racial order; and Caribbean culture demonstrated that colonised subjects create beauty and meaning despite domination’s violence.