I’ve seen a few people claim that he was, is this true?
He was a man of his time. Relatively progressive for the 19th century, but the information especially about black and indigenous people in the US that he was able to get was colored by white supremacy. Because that’s the kind of stuff that could be circulated wide enough to get to Europe.
This is a fair point to raise; as I’mma keep it a buck-- I can’t say I stopped to question how Marx would’ve came into this kind of verbiage… But when you look at correspondences like these, it is still an absolutely horrendous look.
That would explain the “Asiatic mode of production” that sometimes gets mentioned in his works.
I wouldn’t say that’s that racist considering the time. It probably just refers to the specific sort of feudalism that dominated most of Asia and doesn’t have much to do with the people of asia
how is it different exactly? Feudalism but instead of wheat, they have rice?
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.
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
Marx was a g*mer
@ArtBot@lemmygrad.ml Karl Marx has a temper tantrum in his gaming chair after losing a game of Fortnite.
Here are images for the prompt: Karl Marx has a temper tantrum in his gaming chair after losing a game of Fortnite.
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The first two are good but 3 is just if Santa was a fit and one legged Fortnite avatar and Idk what 4 is
Yeah kinda, but not excessively for his time. It was the 1840s, after all.
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.
I had a conversation with somebody on Reddit who seriously though that the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia would never have happened if only they knew about Marx’s comments on Slavs.
Anticommunists can’t understand how anybody can compartmentalize theories and theorists. Marx’s opinions on Slavs are about as relevant to scientific socialists as Einstein’s opinions on Asians are relevant to physicists.
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.
That’s another good question to raise; I make no bones about being angry about being an Amerikan-- so as a result, I can’t say I know German culture like that to know if there’s a lesser-degree offensiveness in the mother tongue that got changed over.
There is. Replace the first I with an E and remove one of the Gs. Nowadays it’s obviously extremely offensive but as far as I know back then - even though still offensive - it wasn’t as bad. Kind of like the English term ending with O.
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