Abstract

This paper revisits an aspect of Charles Mills’s work that is usually overlooked, namely, his early engagement with the tradition of analytical Marxism, particularly in From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003). This collection of essays is important not only because it marks Mills’s intellectual trajectory, but also because, as I aim to show in the following, it allows us to trace the source of Mills’s radicalism. I argue that Mills’s radicalism locates the causal source of social change in the material conditions of oppression. I then show how this analysis of Mills’s radicalism can help in clarifying his critique of ideal theory and his insistence on the importance of nonideal theory. I end by considering the relation between class and racial oppression in Mills’s early Marxist work.