“Marxism, filtered through Leninism and social democracy, has expressed the interests of a limited sector of the world proletariat, that of white, adult, male workers, largely drawing their power from the fact that they work in the leading sectors of capital industrial production.”

With those words, feminist scholar Silvia Federici captured a concern shared by many activists who feel that the Marxist tradition is solely concerned with privileged industrial workers. Today’s struggles for liberation, they argue, cannot rely on the Left’s old exclusionary strategies.

The actual history of socialist efforts to build a just society, however, has a different spirit. While granting early Marxism’s real limitations, we cannot reduce its politics and practices to the defense of white male factory workers.