I’ve seen a few people claim that he was, is this true?
Oh yeah he was for sure, but given the time its not too surprising. I remember near the end of his life he was turning around on his views of the Irish, so there’s that. But more importantly the mechanisms of class struggle that are concrete in our world exist independently from Marx even though the ideological frame work and philosophy that analyzes it bears his name. Electricity isn’t viable or not depending on how shitty Edison was (this is a pretty lazy example, given how much info that ghoul stole). Now it feels wrong because in the social sciences theres a human aspect. So when an incredible thinker figures out class relations and advocates for proletarian liberation, a sense of betrayal emerges from their regressive social views because of the hypocrisy.
Important thing to say. Regardless if he was personally racist and how much it was product of socialisation or real prejudice, marxism is inherently opposed to systemic racism, which was seen clearly even in Marx’s own writings, and further progressively developed by later marxists.
