A Talk with Dr. Vanessa Wills

Trinidadian-born Claudia Jones engaged in socialist and anti-racist organizing in the U.S. from the 1930s through the 1950s, until her deportation to the UK, where she remained active. She is buried in Highgate Cemetery, her gravestone just to the left of Karl Marx's.

Among Jones’s most important contributions to Marxist theory is the notion of “triple oppression.” This concept describes how the oppression of working-class Black women--as women, as Black, and as workers--makes them particularly ripe for economic exploitation.

In this talk, I will offer a critical reconstruction of Jones's "triple oppression" concept and explain its relationship to so-called "orthodox" Marxism. Jones's work disproves the common presupposition that class-based analyses are incompatible with coherent and effective approaches to understanding and resisting identity-based oppression.