I’ve seen a few people claim that he was, is this true?
Based off a noticeable number of instances of questionable verbiage in his works I’m very inclined to say he was racist, yeah. A guy that says some of the things he says would likely get thrown out of any self respecting Communist party. You can kinda say Marx himself wasn’t Marxist enough.
But, Marxism is a constantly evolving and changing thing which is why we shouldn’t just stop with Marx. Just as numerous physicists contributed to the science after Newton, numerous revolutionaries contributed to Marxism after Marx.
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.
I can’t remember if it was F.D. Signifier or lil bill who had it in one of their recent videos, but there IS a correspondence between Marx and Engels somewhere out there with a whole lot of hard-r’s for someone people try to defend as not racist.
I wonder if the original German uses an equivalent term or if the translation is just off
During this period Marx’s writings are very annoying to read in their original German language because he has the tendency to constantly mix in English vocabulary and expressions. He had been living in England for about a decade at this point. It seems in doing so he also adopted some of the Anglos’ nasty linguistic habits.
It kinda reminds me of the polish word “Murzyn”. It’s pretty archaic, ethymologically come from latin “maurus” either though german “Mohr” (for people of Maghreb) or from polish “murzyć” (“to blacken something”), due to not much historical contacts it really means something roughly similar to “negro” and just as that word it was and still used in very different contexts. And due to that, it was deemed not racist enough for racists and so an entirely mirror to n-word was coined (“czarnuch”, this one have only one context).
Today, it is officially (by Polish Language Council for example) unadvised to use the word “Murzyn”, since it became more and more pejorative in recent 3 decades, though it’s still a bit ambigous since even some black people living in Poland defended it.
Conclusion, such words can be loaded even in one’s native language, and he should know better to throw in foreign slang he might heard on the street.
There was that one time he called Lassalle a Jewish n word in a letter to Engels.
Edit: This is the one. CW: multiple n bombs
