Were Marx and Engels white racists pamphlet

[Huey P. Newton]

Years ago i found a pamphlet questioning wetheter Marx and Engels were white racists, I did not take any notice then but i would not mind giving it a read now.
Do you think they could have been racist after all the world was a very different place in the 1800s.

[Kwisatz Haderach]

They shared some of the common prejudices of their time, but they argued for the unity and equality of all the workers of the world - hardly a "racist" position.

[Ali Bumaye]

Any prejudice is disgusting, i am dissapointed they were even slightly biggoted.

[Ali Bumaye]

why is he a troll.
i have wondered the same thing

[Ali Bumaye]

alot of white people dont like asking these questions do they.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I don't think that's a troll question - I don't see why the OP isn't sincere about the question. In most colleges, professors and radical liberals like identity politics activists argue that Marx and Engels were racist. I hear that a lot from allies who don't know much about marxism first hand.

In the US there is a stereotype that socialism and anarchism are "white people's politics". This comes from two things: one, a conscious attempt to divide radical politics from working class people - particularly people from oppressed groups. Two, there is some real history of betrayals on the part of socialist and communist groups in regards to fighting against racism. The most damaging in the US is the downplaying of anti-racist demands by the US CP when the CP was trying to keep ties with the Democrats in the 40s and 50s. This idea that the CP was not really interested in fighting racism can be read in "The Invisible Man" for example.

Even the example of the CP, I think needs to be seen in context - the CP was also betraying labor at that time and calling for labor peace and no-strike policies during the war. I think the CP did some amazing things to fight racism during the 30s when no other interracial groups were doing anything along the lines of confronting racism in unions or racism in the court system. So their betrayal, in my opinion, has nothing to do with racism and more to do with following the lead of the Comintern and softening their politics in order to side with the democratic party.

Anyway, in regards to Marx and Engles, while their language is often archaic, I think they are pretty clearly on the side of all oppressed people. Marx wrote of the American Civil War as a (bourgeois) revolution and argued it was about slavery when many people then (and today) argued that slavery was not a central part of the conflict.

Engels wrote a private letter which is completely vile in it's attack on some politician's homosexuality. That's the only example I can think of where either one repeated the "bigotry of the day" in a really blatant way.

The important thing is that the groundwork they helped lay created a framework for really fighting against oppression of particular groups in society as well as the exploitation for the majority.

[BOOTS BERGEN BUSHMASTER]

no the important thing was if they were fighing for the oppressed or not, and by bashing homosexuals, i have no respect for engels, do not make excuses like it was the bigotry of the day, there were plenty of people who knew that homophobia was a disgrace.

[Jimmie Higgins]

no the important thing was if they were fighing for the oppressed or not, and by bashing homosexuals, i have no respect for engels, do not make excuses like it was the bigotry of the day, there were plenty of people who knew that homophobia was a disgrace.

I don't excuse it, I said it was vile. But to say that people knew that homophobia was a disgrace before the Oscar Wilde trial is crazy. Oscar Wilde himself said that he was "diseased" because of his attraction to men. Was Oscar Wilde a homophobic bigot?

You say that it only matters if they were fighting against homophobia? Who in the Victorian era was fighting against homophobia? Homosexuality wasn't even coined as a concept until the end of the 1800s! But people were fighting against anti-semitism and slavery and other forms of bigotry and on these issues Marx and Engles were pretty clearly on the side of liberation. Demanding that they also fight against homophobia at that time would be like demanding that they fight against transphobia in the 1860s! It would be like demanding that Marx and Engels denounce Stalinism in the 1860s. Homosexuality was just emerging as an concept of a sexuality distinct from heterosexuality - there was no real "homosexual community" at this point and no one to make demands for rights.

While Engles wrote this bigoted letter (a private letter by the way, not like he wrote a pamphlet decribing that Homosexuality was some crime or something) his writing on the role of women in capitalism and the role of the nuclear family can help fight against homophobia. The groundwork laid out by Marx and Engles about how the ruling class uses oppression of certain groups to strengthen it's rule over all workers and how it forces groups into certain roles in society (like gender norms) and their commitment to personal freedom on personal matters is 100% solid.

[BOOTS BERGEN BUSHMASTER]

cool bruva

[ComradeOm]

I don't think that's a troll question - I don't see why the OP isn't sincere about the questionReally? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/revolutionariesi-t121906/index.html)

[BOOTS BERGEN BUSHMASTER]

i dont either but i think comradeom is either a racist motherfucker or just a troll himself

[Jimmie Higgins]

Really? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/revolutionariesi-t121906/index.html)Well the question itself didn't seem trollish - like I said, it's not an uncommon perception.

The fact that Huey, Ali, and Boots started posting at the same time and only comment one liners on the same threads makes me think it could be one person though. Or that there is no follow up discussion, just a series of posts and claims about radical politics make me think there could be some trollin' around.

[BOOTS BERGEN BUSHMASTER]

no its three members of the same family.
though only i am worthy to post on revleft

[Искра]

http://images.encyclopediadramatica.com/images/7/7b/Obvioustroll.jpg
This is Goblin not troll. Stop being racist!

[plan1915]

The pamphlet first asked about was by Carlos Moore. He is an Afro-Cuban supporter of the Cuban Revolution who has long held specific critiques of Fidel even while supporting the broader efforts in Cuba.

It is a good piece to read as it raises important questions about not such much the "content" of Marx and Engels' views, but rather the premises and presuppositions from which they depart. So while Moore still holds that they did indeed provide important analysis and lessons of how capitalism works and what working-class struggle might look like, we still need to ALSO fundamentally rethink their premises as those that depart from a particular view of the world, and that in essence impose themselves as a false universal. This is not to say that they are not relevant for the rest of the non-European world, but rather that their view come from a specific location as Marx himself noted before his death, while Engels still insisted on Marxism as a universal science to be applied everywhere. In making this case, Moore essentially argues that while they "suspend" dialectical thinking with regards to their own positioning in the world...

Definitely worth reading! It is an early version of an argument also found in Walter Mignolo's Local Histories, Global Designs, and Chakravorty's Provincializing Europe...

[Homo Songun]

It would be like demanding that Marx and Engels denounce Stalinism in the 1860s

Trolls trolling trolls. Nice

[here for the revolution]

`Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded`-Marx