This paper recognizes the contribution made by Robert Miles to marxist scholarship on 'race' and class in Britain but it suggests that his central thesis is flawed in that a consideration of gender and community should be as central to the analysis as that of social class. TOWARDS A MARXIST THEORY OF RACISM Robert Miles, in my opinion, has provided the best marxist analysis of'race' in Britain today.l However, his central thesis that Black people represent a racialised fraction of the working-class has to date not to my knowledge been subject to critical appraisal. In this paper I will therefore attempt such an appraisal. Although in Marx's time there were Black people living in Britain, it was not until after the Second World War that Black workers entered Britain in substantial numbers. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere, Marx noted that whereas the state went 'naked' in the colonies, at home it tended to assume 'respectable forms'.2 For these reasons, it is understandable why racism directed at Black people did not figure prominently in Marx's writings.3 However, given the theoretical structure of classical marxism, it is perhaps unlikely that he would have centralised 'race' even if there had been substantial numbers of Black workers in Britain when Marx was writing.4 How then might an approach based on marxism proceed? Rather than beginning with a search for empirical evidence of discrimination or the expression of racism or analysing 'the problems' of Black people, a marxist approach begins with an analysis of the material processes themselves, the complex relationship between the state and capital and between capital and labour and the way in which racism is ideologically constructed. The British Journal of Sociologe Volume 40 Number I This content downloaded from 157.55.39.215 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:57:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 'Race' and class or 'race', class gender and community? 119 THE RACIALISED FRACTION OF THE WORKING-CLASS THESIS Following Miles (p. 167) I would argue that migrants from the Caribbean and Indian sub-continent did not enter a neutral political and ideological context when they came to B