You Have Only Your Chains to Lose (Unless You Are African) June 19, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Karl Marx was a prolific author. The complete works of Marx and (his companion) Engels run to an almost unbelievable fifty volumes (including letters). In these volumes Marx said many clever things, some wise things, a good deal of stupid things, and some utterly, utterly bonkers things. Beach has recently been enjoying a selection of Marx’s most outrageous comments, worth hanging out there for any who might be tempted abroad the great ship Communism. In many parts of the world that vessel, it must be remembered, is still gently chugging along, machine guns primed on the bow, covered in bits of human offal from its last attempts to establish universal happiness.
There are outrageous comments in Marx on violence (some of which are rather witty), on religion (most of which are dull), but above all on race the subject of the present post. What follows has taken a great deal of time because sources are so difficult to ground. Many racist comments in Marx appear on sites that are politicized and that cannot be taken at face value: many of the ‘outrageous’ comments become a lot less outrageous when placed in context; with some Beach has the suspicion that they have been doctored. All this is made still more difficult by the fact that the Marxists Internet Archive seems unaccountably not to have included a number; presumably a bit of paternal censorship for the good of the proletariat? However, the ones below have been verified. Take this sentence from chapter two of The Poverty of Philosophy ‘an early work’. In it Marx seems, the horror, to advocate slavery:
Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.
Perhaps this can be understood in the context that a capitalist North American will lead to progress and that progress will lead to localized and then world revolution? Remember that Marx would never have dreamt that his revolutions would have started in Eastern Europe, let alone China: he was expecting the most advanced portions of the world to jump on the HMS Vanguard first.
But if we can (kind of) let Marx off the hook for those rather frightening sentiments (he was young, he is artfully vague) what about this letter to Engels, 7 Aug 1866, Marx writes approvingly of Tremaux who
[p]roves that the common Negro type is only a degeneration of a much higher one.
In the nineteenth-century this was, unfortunately, a fairly common, even a default view among ‘the civilised’, so, sigh, let’s move on. But consider now this letter on Ferdinand Lassalle (obit 1864) a German socialist who Bismarck defended as ‘one of the most intelligent and likable men I had ever come across’. Marx did not share this opinion. The letter in question (to Engels) dates 30 July 1862:
It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his [curly?] hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt (assuming his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a n*****). Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also n***** like.*
The n-word was used more frequently in the nineteenth-century than today, but make no mistake its connotations were unpleasant and they were certainly meant to be here. We can hardly ignore a writer’s life work because he is nasty in his private correspondence, but, the terms in which Marx hatchets Lassalle do shed a rather nauseous light on the world liberator. The most appalling comment on race comes though in a letter from Engels: 26 April 1887 to Laura Lafargue (Marx’s daughter). The subject of this part of the missive was Paul Lafargue (obit 1911: Laura’s husband), who allegedly had an eighth African blood (factual or some amateur anthropology on the part of the trouble twins?). Engels (again this is not Marx) enjoyed the fact that Paul was standing in elections for the part of Paris with the Jardin des Plantes and the zoo:
Being in his quality as a n***** a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.
The most spirited defence of (some of) this material Beach has found is by JoanofMark, a likeable Marxist blogger. Joan points out at the end of her piece that ‘Marx wasn’t a god or an infallible source. He was a man and is open to criticism.’ This is true but, of course, most Marxists have treated Marx as a divinity. It is enough to read Lenin where debate (hah!) is not about truth but about the correct interpretation of the Biblical KM.
Other Marxist thoughts on race: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
*Note the asterisks are mine to spare my blushes.
