IN SEARCH FOR BIGOTRY, KARL MARX’S RACISM HAS BEEN IGNORED
BY
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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Throughout
the country there is an effort to identify those in our history who
have been guilty of bigotry. Even Abraham Lincoln, whose Emancipation
Proclamation ended slavery, has been identified as a guilty party. One
historical figure identified by many on the left as an heroic figure has
been exempted from the kind of examination devoted to Thomas Jefferson,
George Washington and James Madison, among others. That is Karl Marx.
The
image of Karl Marx as a “humanist” concerned with the plight of the
under-privileged, the downtrodden and the “masses” is one which has been
carefully cultivated in the years since his death. The facts are quite
different.
Much has been
written in recent years about the fact that Marx, though of rabbinical
descent on both sides of his family, was an extreme anti-Semite. In
fact, his book “World Without Jews” is considered by many to be a
forerunner to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Little, however, has been written
about Marx’s racial views, the contempt in which he held not only
non-whites, but whole groupings of Europeans, especially the Slavic
peoples.
In his book
“Karl Marx: Racist,”. Nathaniel Weyl showed how Marx privately developed
an entire racial hierarchy and racial view of history by the 1860s. In
the middle of that decade, Marx was casting about for some scientific
or pseudo-scientific justification for his racial notions, which he
found in the work of P. Tremaux. He and his friend and financial
benefactor Friedrich Engels went so far as to advocate wars of
extermination against Slavic peoples and the destruction of Russia. How
ironic that Russia later called itself a “Marxist” state.
“Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels,” Weyl writes, “were neither
internationalists nor believers in equal rights of all races and
peoples. They opposed the struggles for national independence of those
races and peoples they despised. They believed that the ‘barbaric’ and
‘ahistoric’ peoples who comprised the immense majority of mankind had
played no significant role in history and were not destined to do so in
the foreseeable future.”
They
regarded these peoples as obstacles to the forward sweep of history.
They considered them as objects rather than subjects. They were people
who ought to be conquered and exploited by the more advanced nations.
Some of these inferior stock “were people who ought to be eradicated and
swept from the surface of the earth.”
Marx
took from Georg Hegel, another German philosopher, the idea that
certain races, peoples and nations were “ahistoric.” Either they had
never played any role in history and never would, as in the case of the
“African Negro,” or they were insignificant peoples whose history was
irrelevant, or they were frozen at civilizational levels at which the
more advanced portions of mankind “ had already left them behind.”
“These
were ideas,” Weyl notes, “which Marx would adopt and
transform…Publicly, and for political reasons, both Marx and Engels
posed as friends of the Negro. In private, they were anti-black racists
of the most odious sort. They had contempt for the entire Negro race, a
contempt they expressed by comparing Negroes to animals, by identifying
black people with ‘idiots’ and by continuously using the opprobrious
term ‘nigger’ in their private correspondence.”
Marx,
for example, wrote to Engels on July 30, 1862 about one of the leaders
of socialism in Germany and his rival, Ferdinand Lassalle, who he
referred to as “that Jewish nigger Lassalle.”
He
wrote: “It is now completely clear to me he, as is proved by his
cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined
Moses’ exodus from Egypt (assuming that his mother or grandmother had
not interbred with a nigger). Now this Union of Judaism and Germanism
with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The
obtrusiveness of the fellow is also Nigger-like.”
In
1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a
council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed
that Lafargue had “one-eighth or one-twelfth nigger blood.” In a letter
to Lafargue’s wife, Engels wrote: “Being in his quality as a nigger, a
degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he
is understandably the most appropriate representative of that
district.”
Marx also
championed slavery in North America. When Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
probably the leading French Socialist at the time, published a book
called “The Philosophy of Poverty,” Marx replied with a vitriolic
rebuttal entitled “The Poverty of Philosophy.” Proudhon had been
childish enough to advocate the emancipation of slaves in the United
States.
Marx answered
contemptuously: “Without slavery, North America, the most progressive
of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out
North America from the map of the world and you will have anarchy—-the
complete decay of modern conference and civilization. Abolish slavery
and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”
Here,
Marx makes it abundantly clear that he has no interest whatsoever in
the fate or welfare of black people. Then there is his unusual
prediction that, were slavery abolished, America would become a
“patriarchal country.” What does that mean? A country of primitive
shepherds?
American
Socialists, early in the 20th century, adopted Marx’s racist views. On
September 14, 1901, the Social Democratic Herald characterized black
Americans as “inferior, depraved elements” who went around “raping
women and children.” In an article in the paper dated May 31, 1902,
Victor Berger, one of the national leaders of the Socialist Party, wrote
that, “There can be no doubt that the Negroes and mulattos constitute a
lower race.”
Marx’s
philosophical successors shared his thoughts on blacks and other
minorities. Che Guevara, in his 1952 memoir “The Motorcycle Diaries,”
wrote: “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends is money on
frivolities, whereas the Europeans are forward-looking, organized and
intelligent.”
Marx called
the Slavic people a “rabble” and looked forward to the time when
Germany, with Hungary and Poland, would destroy Russia. He wrote on
June 12, 1848, demanding “a war with Russia…in which Germany can become
virile.” While people who call themselves “Marxists” today claim that
they are against “imperialism,” Karl Marx himself supported the control
of non-white peoples by white Europeans and Americans. He supported
British control of India and French control of Algeria. Concerning the
annexation of California after the Mexican-American War, Karl Marx wrote
in 1894:
“Without violence nothing is
ever accomplished in history…Is it a misfortune that magnificent
California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do
with it?…All important nations must in the last analysis owe a debt to
those who, under the laws of historic necessity, incorporate them in a
great empire, thus allowing them to take part in an historic development
which would otherwise be impossible for them. Evidently, such results
cannot be achieved without crushing a few sweet little flowers.”
Marx,
more a chauvinistic German nationalist than most men of his era, urged
German control over Belgium, the Netherlands, Silesia and
Alsace-Lorraine. Yet, most of Marx’s biographers, like the Marxist
scholar David McLellan, blandly informs his readers that “Marx was not
an anti-Semite.”
In an
important article written in 2020, Walter Williams, the respected black
economist who was chairman of the Economics Departmeng at George Mason
University, used the headline, “Did You Know That Karl Marx Was A Racist
and Anti-Semite?” He wrote, “Marx is a hero to many labor union
leaders and civil rights organizations, including groups like Black
Lives Matter and Antifa…It is easy to be a Marxist if you know little of
his life. What most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and
anti-Semite.”
Ironically,
Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of Black Lives Matter, defined herself
and at least one of the other founders, Alicia Garza, as “Marxists.”
In a 2015 interview with Real News Network, Khan-Cullors said, “Myself
and Alicia, in particular, are trained Marxists.”
Writing
in The National Interest, Jarrett Stephan notes that, “By the standards
of modern ‘anti-racist’ ideologies, Marx, Engels and the whole body of
their work should be canceled, not celebrated.”
Whatever
their faults and shortcomings, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln
created a society that has steadily expanded freedom for men and women
of every race and background. Those societies which followed the
philosophy of Marx and Engels succeeded in doing the precise opposite,
imposing tyranny upon men and women of every race and background. How
sad that so many Americans know so little history that this will come
as surprising news.
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