

































Thought Leadership and Women’s Liberation Politics:
 A Book Review of Left of Karl Marx by Carol Boyce Davies

Janae Knott
University of Toronto
Rotman Commerce, Arts & Science, University of Toronto

Claudia Jones’ life and intellectual work 
have made impactful contributions in 
several spaces, including Marxist-Leninist 
ideology and anti-imperialism discourse. 
This review analyzes The Left of Karl Marx: 
The Political Life of Black Communist 
Claudia Jones written by Carol Boyce 
Davies. Davies offers valuable insight into 
Jones’ anti-imperialist ideas, which are 
layered as she believed imperialism was the 
root cause of racism and fascism. Further-
more, Davies draws upon a wide range of 
Jones’ journalistic pieces to highlight the 
impact she has had in areas like Communist 
ideology and women’s political liberation. 

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Communism, 
imperialism, international-

ism, liberation, Marxism, 
wage equality, feminism

B I O

Janae Knott is a 4th year undergraduate student at the University of Toronto. She is 
completing her bachelor’s degree in Commerce, while obtaining minors in Caribbean 
Studies and Economics. Her academic interests include political economy and economic 
development in the Caribbean, decolonization theory, and social mobility.

© 2021 Janae Knott
Caribbean Studies Students’ Union, Canada - https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cquilt/

                       This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 
                       To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

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61

 Claudia Jones' life, intellectual work, and 
organizing efforts have shaped history 
when considering its expansion of Marx-
ist-Leninist ideology and contribution to 
anti-imperialist discourse. ‘The Left of 
Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black 
Communist Claudia Jones’ written by 
Carol Boyce Davies details her life and 
career journey, outlining the ways in 
which Jones navigates through neo-colo-
nial systems as an active Black feminist 
and communist. The geographical move-
ments and displacements in her life also 
contributed to her internationalist ideolo-
gy. Although born in Trinidad, she spent 
much of her adult life in the United States 
before being deported to England. Her 
unique life and observations motivated her 
to advocate for disenfranchised people in 
various capacities, and much of her 
advocacy was done through journalism 
and community organizing. In this review, 
I will discuss Jones’ notable additions to 
Marxist theory as it relates to Black 
people, Women, and other marginalized 
groups - ultimately arguing that Jones was 
the first to bring an intersectional approach 
to Marxist and socialist theory, before 
‘intersectionality’ became widely accepted 
and well known. Furthermore, I will 
discuss her approach in combating imperi-
alism, which she suggests is the root cause 
of racism and division in modern society. 
Finally, I will discuss why her contribu-
tions are frequently overlooked, which  I 
suspect is due to the US government’s 
strategic efforts to paint her as a criminal 
and deviant.

One of Jones’ most notable contributions 
is her expansion of Marxist theory to show 
how Black people, and in particular Black 
women, are disproportionately affected by 

capitalist structures and policies. Prior to 
her time, Marxist theory simply suggested 
that class exploitation was due to factors 
including wage differentiation, which 
unfairly allow monopolists to make 
unreasonable profits. Since women are a 
part of the working class, they too are 
subject to class exploitation, but the 
exploitation was not seen to be caused by 
their gender itself. Jones proves that the 
issue is much deeper than this, where 
multiple structures work together to 
oppress groups to varying degrees: capital-
ism, imperialism, and patriarchy. There-
fore, one-dimensional analysis of the 
impact of capitalism isn’t sufficient to 
drive actual change. For example, examin-
ing the racial impact of capitalism alone 
isn’t sufficient to create a more equitable 
society, because although Black men and 
Black women both experience racism, 
Black women are oppressed by Black men 
due to structural conditions of patriarchy. 

Her contribution is important because it 
changes the benchmark of progress within 
the Marxist-Leninist framework. She 
explains that advancement can really only 
occur if Black women, as the “triply 
oppressed group,” can access better living 
conditions because this would entail 
dismantling all oppressive structures that 
drive issues like wealth inequality, power 
struggles, etc. Jones’ approach in demon-
strating the need for intersectionality was 
brilliant due to its logical approach.  To 
demonstrate that the issues within the 
capitalist society are layered, she dissects 
the issue by the layer of gender, and then 
combines race and gender together. As a 
baseline, Claudia explains that women 
face exploitation as workers and within the 
household. In work settings, women face 

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62

 lower wages and subordination to service 
positions, and in the household their labor 
goes unrecognized and uncompensated. 
Importantly, these are related as since 
household work is not respected or 
deemed as real work. The value of work 
that women do outside the household is 
simply seen as an extension of this and 
therefore they aren’t paid wages that 
reflect the output of their labor. Jones then 
used statistics to demonstrate that Black 
women are positioned economically at the 
lowest rank of society - confined to lower 
paying jobs and given few opportunities to 
become professionals. 

Disproportionate representation in service 
work led to striking disparities in wages. 
When considering comparisons between 
Black women’s wages to men’s average 
wages and then white women’s wages to 
the same, it demonstrates the issue as both 
a racial and gendered problem. The super 
exploitation of Black women was an issue 
close to Jones’ heart likely because of her 
family’s experience of her mom dying at 
37 from strenuous working conditions in a 
garment industry job. I found the approach 
she used to prove why the Black woman’s 
problem should be ‘everyone’s problem’ to 
be an interesting one. She provided the 
reasoning that since Black women are 
leaders in their households, improving 
conditions for them means creating better 
living conditions for all Black people, and 
remarkably, society in general benefits 
from the value of the labor of Black 
women. I believe Jones introduced the 
public to the basic premise of intersection-
ality through her intellectual work provid-
ed to the Communist Party of USA, as she 
introduced them to the concepts and 
language of ‘triple oppression’.

Ultimately, this was an important contribu-
tion to Communist ideology because by 
proving that capitalism, imperialism and 
sexism create unique conditions for 
different groups, the need for specific and 
targeted group-by-group solutions is 
highlighted.

Jones was firmly rooted in anti-imperialist 
politics as she found imperialism was the 
primary driver behind structural issues like 
racism and fascism. Once again, Jones 
made interesting contributors to Marxist 
theory with respect to imperialism and 
conflict. Marxist theory states that all 
modern wars are caused by competition 
for resources and markets controlled by 
imperial powers, and these wars are a 
natural consequence of the free market and 
social stratification systems we operate in. 
Jones enhanced this theory by writing 
about war’s disproportionate effects on 
Black and Brown communities, stating 
that these groups truly bear the brunt of 
this competition for resources. According 
to author Boyce Davies, Jones wrote a 
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how health, food, schooling, and 
day-to-day survival and general well-being 
are impacted when the government 
emphasizes war rather than people. 
Particular attention is given to the report’s 
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Rican families who often lived in poverty. 
The column ends by saying ‘‘Let Woman 
Today hear from its readers on what you 
are doing in your community: (1) to 
demand an end to the wage freeze and for 
immediate wage increases; (2) for imme-
diate price and rent control; (3) for a cut in 
taxes of low-incomed people.’’(Davies, 
Carole Boyce. Left of Karl Marx: The 
Political Life of Black Communist Claudia 

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63

 Jones. (North Carolina: Duke University 
Press, 2008), 81.). Clearly, Jones was 
interested in the effects of imperialism on 
particular groups, one of which was 
Caribbean countries. She defines the US 
as a covert imperialist where they view the 
West Indies as a source of advantages, 
such as food and cheap labor. Given these 
terms, she advocated for a fully indepen-
dent Caribbean federation, which was 
self-governing and safeguarded the rights 
of vulnerable people such as minority 
groups. When met with knowledge that 
made this seem unlikely, she advocated for 
the islands having labor organizations and 
unions to protect common workers from 
the interests of bourgeoisie rulers. 

Journalism helped Jones disseminate her 
anti-imperialist ideas, where she found 
that political education was key to build-
ing the consciousness of oppressed groups. 
Furthermore, she used writing as a tool to 
build a joint sense of identity amongst 
Black people of various geographies, 
drawing connections between anti-colonial 
struggles around the world as she saw all 
fights for liberation as related. Jones 
brought this internationalist perspective to 
all platforms she wrote for. For example, 
she prompted the West Indian Gazette to 
launch ‘solidarity campaigns’ with leaders 
of liberation movements in African and 
Asian countries. Similarly, she was 
instrumental in helping Caribbean readers 
in the UK to redefine their Blackness and 
separate themselves from ‘Britishness’, 
which was meaningful given they were 
regularly reminded that they were outsid-
ers, as evidenced by the Nottinghill riots 
occurring in 1958. Whilst tackling British 
racism was one of the central goals of the 
West Indian Gazette, Jones also provided 

Caribbean UK residents with exposure to 
Black artists and intellectuals from around 
the world, creating fertile ground for 
development of an African consciousness 
and unifying the Black world. Using the 
West Indian Gazette, she featured African 
American artists, interviewed W.E.B Du 
Bois & Martin Luther King, and facilitated 
events for British residents that paralleled  
those of global events. For example, she 
connected the ‘March in Britain’ to the one 
occurring in Washington DC. Jones 
personally understood the challenge of 
maintaining identity in migration, as the 
time at which she moved to the United 
States marked the initial influx of Caribbe-
an people settling in the US. Like many 
immigrants, she was immersed in Caribbe-
an culture while living in New York, and 
from observation she saw that public 
displays of culture were important to 
diasporic development and solidarity. She 
observed the Caribbean Carnival in New 
York was being resumed post-war as a 
sister event to Carnival in Trinidad, and it 
was seen as a means of bridging cultures. 
Her critique of Carnival in New York 
influenced her organizing of Carnival in 
the UK: Jones saw that the event did not 
foster any relationship to Caribbean and 
African Americans celebrating it, and it 
did not help Caribbean migrants adjust to 
their new environment in any way. Given 
the Nottinghill riots, Jones made the UK 
Carnival both symbolic of interracial 
friendship and the power of Caribbean 
culture identity, organizing a Caribbean 
Carnival Committee to help best display 
aspects of Caribbean culture like steelband 
music and art/fashion through a Carnival 
queen competition. Her effort lives on 
today as the scale of the Carnival grew and 
the event later became known as the 

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64

 Notting Hill Carnival, an event which 
attracts millions of UK residents and 
foreigners annually.

Her internationalist approach was also 
evident in her feminist politics, which 
could easily be observed by looking at her 
writing for the ‘Half the World’ column. 
Jones believed that when women became 
conscious of their exploitation and once 
empowered, they were capable of organiz-
ing amongst themselves, obtaining power 
to influence public and political activity 
that they were previously strategically 
excluded from. In the column, Jones 
recommended texts from authors around 
the world who were pursuing socialism, 
including books on women in China and 
the Soviet Union, ‘The Woman Question’ 
(which included ideas from Marx, Engels, 
Lenin, and Stalin), and biographies of 
influential Black women, including 
Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. This 
ideological stance permeated her personal 
life and relationships too, as she felt 
connected to other women in leadership 
with the same liberation ideals for their 
respective countries. For example, in 
prison Jones used poetry to communicate 
solidarity with other feminist activists like 
the Puerto Rican activist Blanca Canales 
Torresola, who was fighting for political 
liberation in Puerto Rico.

In my opinion, one reason why Jones may 
not be credited properly for her contribu-
tions to society and intellectual thought is 
the US government’s criminalization of 
her image, and consequent damage to her 
reputation in the international community. 
Since she publically branded herself as a 
communist, she was deemed oppositional 
to the American government from the 

beginning as in the eyes of the state, 
communism and radicalism were synony-
mous, and advocates for Marxist-Leninism 
were criminals rather than politically 
engaged citizens. The FBI strongly 
believed that people of her political 
orientation had intention to overthrow the 
American government, and therefore 
should be policed and silenced. The texts 
which formed the basis for her deportation 
are telling, as they highlight that American 
society is founded upon values of racism, 
sexism, and capitalism. Her article ‘Inter-
national Women’s Day and the Struggle 
for Peace’ was deemed subversive by the 
FBI, and her piece ‘Women in the Struggle 
for Peace and Security’ led to her arrest as 
it prompted American women to advocate 
for peace and end the Korean War, taking 
up a similar stance to women involved in 
anti-war and anti-fascism efforts in Latin 
America, the Soviet Union, Asia, and 
Africa. Jones was said to be violating the 
Internal Security Act of 1950, which 
condemns aliens publishing information 
that opposes the present government in 
attempts to overthrow it. This is particular-
ly interesting because Jones was involved 
in several counter-education efforts, 
educating people on the true values of 
communism to reduce stigma. However, 
her public affiliations to the Communist 
Party, Black liberation movements, and 
international feminist movements made 
her the perfect target for the FBI to 
incarcerate and deport. This criminaliza-
tion points to the struggle of Black activ-
ists with public political affiliations and 
ideological stances that differ from the 
state’s ideological orientation. 

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65

Davies, Carole Boyce. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist 
          Claudia Jones. North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2008.

Works Cited

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