In the book for which he is best known, Caste, Class, and Race (1948), Oliver C. Cox (1901-1974), like many leftists at the time, anticipated the demise of capitalism as a result of both the Great Depression and World War II. Roughly fifteen years later in the third volume of his trilogy on the capitalist world economy, Capitalism as a System (1964), Cox no longer looked to the working class of the industrialized West to initiate the global transition to socialism, but rather to the working populations of the extra-European world. My contribution will trace Cox's intellectual evolution between 1948 and 1964 and address, among other points, the degree to which his departure from a more orthodox Marxism ultimately posed new theoretical dilemmas to which Cox was not always able to offer adequate responses.

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