It is my contention that the perpetuation of non-class divisions based on race and sex is the key mechanism sustaining capitalist relations of production, and therefore the key mechanism for upholding class society. That is my starting point. But class cannot be understood without understanding the dynamic interconnection between oppression and exploitation. Because it is only through oppression, an oppression based on race and gender, that capitalist relations of production can be maintained.

Now, that means that we do have to accept that class exists. I think that is a vital thing that we have to do to start with, because there are so many who are indicating that somehow or other we have never had it so good, and actually what we are talking about is structure and not classes. That's the sociological view. It's not a Marxist view. Marx was quite right when he said that the relentless tendency of capitalism towards greater and greater monopoly would in fact polarize society into two classes. That has taken a long time to happen. There have been middle strata, properly referred to, the petty bourgeoisie and so on, but even they are now being forced away and out because of the Wal-Marts of this world and in England Tesco, a similar sort of company. All small shopkeepers don't really stand much of a chance.

We've also had, in class society, different modes of production existing alongside each other. In this country, for example, you had slavery and capitalism existing alongside each other at the same time. However, what we have to recognize is that class is vital and a vitally important thing. It is vitally important for the ruling class to pretend to us that somehow it doesn't exist. And the reason that they had to pretend that it doesn't exist was that if we really understood it, we would really do something about it, because we wouldn't consent. Ninety percent of the population would not consent to being exploited by 10 percent of those who own and control everything. It's absolutely barmy.

So how do they do it? Well, my argument is that somehow or other the relations of production, the capitalist relations of production, i.e. what seems to be a matter of us voluntarily sacrificing ourselves and being exploited, can only exist through division. And the chief means of dividing workers throughout history, and certainly within capitalist society, is through the most obvious means, and that is through skin color and through gender. It is not men who are doubly oppressed; it is women.

I am very glad this is an all women's panel, by the way. But there is no accident that it is women. It is not just making special pleading to say this. It is only relatively recently that women have stopped being treated like chattels even in Western capitalist society. We go on and on about how dreadful it is for women wearing burkhas (and it is dreadful actually), but when you think about it, when did women have rights to vote? In England, women only had the right to vote in 1930 and in France in 1946. It is recent. Women were seen as the property of their husbands.  So the long march for women's equality really hasn't finished. It has, in my opinion, just begun, and the same is obviously true of Black people. So understanding how women enter into production already unequal because of their role in the family, because of the private nature of reproduction and the social nature of production, shows why it is easy for women to be exploited.

Marx quotes cotton manufacturers who said that they delighted in the fact that they wanted to employ women in the factories, in the so-called 'dark satanic mills,' which fueled Britain's industrial revolution (which of course was based on slavery). They preferred to use married women because they were more docile, because they needed to procure the necessities of life to bring up their own children. And that's true.

Women have always been paid lower. If you look at wage indices in this country or anywhere else, women earn 2/3 of the pay of men. So all this nonsense about women making it just because we have 100 women MP's and you've got lots of women on the television – it's nothing. What about working-class women? And they are the majority. So I'm sure that's a very obvious point that people understand, but my point is this, that the relationship, that reproducing the relations of production, is absolutely dependent on maintaining these divisions.

Now, if we understand class in its broad sense, which I think we should do, that everybody who sells their labor power for a wage is – whether they know it or not or they like it or not – a worker, because we are all subject to the vagaries of the system. We do not own or control the means of production. We are forced to sell our labor power. Now of course people want to blind us into thinking that just because you earn a bit more, therefore you're middle class. What does that mean? It means you can still get the sack. It means you've still got nothing. It doesn't really mean anything, except in terms of an ideology which kind of blinds us.

I hope PA Editor Joe Sims won't mind if I am slightly critical of something I read in Political Affairs, where the author said that class really does need to be understood, that in America at long last people are talking about class ('Why Class Isn't Just Another Ism,' June 2006). But he says quite rightly that people have got it wrong here, because they are just talking about income, status, power, but they are not talking about class as an economic relationship. And he also deplores the fact that this new thing is emerging called 'classism,' whatever that means, and he is quite critical of that, but he then goes on to quote Marx, Engels and Lenin defining class.

Now I think this is where we have gone wrong. We have relied far too much on quoting the canons and not developing our theory in common to fit the circumstances in which we are in. In other words, I think we have been relying on a dogmatic and ossified form of Marxism, and I think Marx would actually turn in his grave if he knew what we were doing. Probably he is turning in his grave right now. But my point really is that if Marxism means anything, and if we are socialists, we have to develop the theory. We have to develop historical materialism to understand what is happening, what is new, what is changing and what is happening within the working class today. And the key aspect, the key issue facing all workers today is to look at the composition of the working class, which for too long we have considered, and socialists have considered it to be, white and male, and it isn't. It never has been, and we've just about begun to wake up to that, but we haven't woken up to it theoretically. The theory must encompass a real understanding that class is fundamentally related to the divisions, the major divisions that I have just mentioned.

My view is that if we try to understand class without understanding what is happening to women and Black people, we get into a real pickle. We completely misunderstand the main motor of capitalist production both at a material and an ideological level. First of all, we only ever understand half the working class. In Britain, the Marxist historians, the people I call the 'mainly manly Marxist greats,' people like E. P. Thompson wrote The Making of the English Working Class and didn't mention women except in about three pages.

Women were actually the motor. They were the core of the working class. How can you forget this? And it's not just being carping and silly and niggling to point it out; it is fundamental. But if you don't do that, you also ignore one of the chief means of capitalist profit. Because throughout the world capitalism has maintained massive profits through the super-exploitation of women and Black people, not only nationally but also internationally. The British Empire was the prime example of how Black people were completely not just exploited, they were triply and a zillion-fold exploited, in order to meet the needs of British capital, a process that helped in some respects to mystify for British workers what really was happening. In other words, racism.

You can only exploit a huge empire if you have an ideology, an ideology of superiority. That ideology of superiority was inculcated very thoroughly in the minds of British workers quite deliberately throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. That comes to the second aspect of the way in which class relations of production are reproduced through divisive ideologies, like racism and sexism, and of course in this country you have massive examples of that. But I do think that we mustn't forget the question of sexism. Just because aspects of the women's movement forgot working-class women and forgot Black women didn't mean that the issues that they raised weren't vitally important and are still important. I can only cite Engels, when he said that in the family the man is the bourgeois, the woman is the proletarian, and that family relations, or the monogamous family, developed to coincide with the development of class society. It mirrored the needs of those who had property, so that they could pass their property onto children of undisputed parentage. So basically, if you want to talk about the global economy as well, or imperialism on speed, then the issue of the super-exploitation of Black and women workers is absolutely critical to maintaining capitalist superprofits. It is so linked – class and the maintenance of capitalism – that it can't be overlooked.

Now let's just look at it the other way round. Can you really understand oppression without understanding class? I think you can't. I think that leads to confusion. Because I am using oppression in a specific way, but if you think that all we're talking about is, just poor downtrodden people whom we should all feel sorry for and perhaps put some pennies or dollars into a collecting box, then that's not the issue. Understanding oppression without understanding class leads to a confusion between oppression and discrimination and they are different. Oppression is endemic in the way that I am using it. Discrimination of various sorts based on age, maybe, and all sorts of things, capitalism can use it when it wants too, but what I am talking about, race and women, are absolutely integral to the maintenance of capitalist relations of production.

If we do not understand that, what then happens is people attempt to understand the issues related to sexism and racism by using the notion of equality, which I think is poor, very poor, indeed, because equality really only means partial gains under the law. It is a juridical form. Not that I think that it's unimportant, because at a certain point we have to fight for those rights, but they are limited rights. They are limited by capitalist property relations, because they fail to reveal the real roots of oppression, which of course are property and class society itself. I think that is what people like bell hooks were coming absolutely smack up against in the period when the Black liberation movement was strong, and she actually used the term oppression. Marx also uses the term, but it has never really been developed by Marxists.

The big problem, if we do not understand the relationship of oppression to class, is that we are going to be blinded also by the new wave of 'feel sorry for us' politics, which is called diversity. The diversity agenda, which seeks to atomize all of us, is a form of identity politics, which in a way seeks to minimize the collective struggle of all Black people to end oppression, all women to end oppression, and to link the two things.

Now the failure of the labor movement, and there has been a failure, and we have to be honest about it, is that they have not understood this until now. They have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Women are half the work force. Black people are half the human race. There can be no progress whatsoever unless we understand these questions. It should be totally impossible for anybody who says they are a socialist not to be an anti-racist or not to be a feminist. I don't expect every woman or every Black person to be a socialist, however, but in the course of struggle, it is very likely that that is what will happen. It is likely that we, if we don't continue in this silly way that we have been doing for ages with the separate spheres of race, gender and class all doing their own thing, that we will be able to have a comprehensive and unified struggle, which respects the autonomy of the oppressed to organize separately. We are educated enough to let that not happen.

Nevertheless it has to be encompassed within a united labor movement, and a labor movement which begins to really not just understand these questions for partial gain, not just for opportunistic reasons, but understands that at its heart there can be no progress unless these things are taken within and completely made the agenda of the working-class movement.

So the first prerequisite, and it might seem a weak thing to say, but actually I think it's a strong thing to say, is that we have to have a definition of class, which understands fully that women and Black people are not just non-class entities, they are not just out there as new social forces. That is not to say that we want to unite with all women, but it's really understanding the nature of those hugely oppressed groups and the relationship of that form of oppression to class exploitation. In so doing we will have contributed to what Engels wanted us to do, that is to understand the three areas of struggle, economic, political and ideological, and it's the ideological struggle that we have to take up sharply.

I think it is wonderful there are four women on the platform. There are few meetings I ever go to that I see four women on the platform. Maybe that is a sign of things to come. Let's hope it is.