Permanently Deleted
Asking Jews not to be self-hating is like asking the sun not to shine or the birds not to sing
this is a cherished tradition, allow us it
I'm white and in 200 years someone will read my writings and brand me as a vehement anti white racist.
You do know Marx lived in the 1800s right? The era where the prevailing scientific consensus was that there were multiple races hierarchically arranged from inferior to superior, where the greatest minds and thinkers of the day like Emmanuel Kant or some other dumb fuck euro nerd literally based their understanding of the world from wild tall tales told to them by the failsons of upper society after they came back from being pedophiles in India or almost dying from shitting themselves while trying to find a fake-ass city made out of solid gold in Latin America. The same era where these bumblefuck's grandparents were killing cats and jews for spreading plague and witchcraft because they didn't correlate washing their dicks with not getting sick? Isn't it possible that people in the past had shitty opinions based upon the information or lack thereof they had in their time period? Does it occur to you that most people not even 20 years ago were screaming to the high heavens of the Buddha that legalizing gay marriage would destroy America and that it was societally acceptable to the point that mass media produced it throughout the entertainment medium that sexual assault was an acceptable punchline to a comedy? Maybe we should examine the time periods people lived in to understand their thought processes on what and why they did stuff. Maybe we should put their works into the historical context and background it came from to parse what the fuck they're saying before making a judgement call... what would we call that kind of examination process?
HISTORICAL AND DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM MOTHERFUCKER, DO YOU THINK IT?
I heard these accusations when I first started looking into Marx. I looked into them, and found the racism/antisemitism charges to be pretty weak. The only piece I've ever seen that tries to justify "racism" is his letter to Engels about Lassalle, in which he mocks Lassalle's "racial science" views by sarcastically applying them to him. A translation of this letter uses the N word, but the N word of course doesn't exist in German. I can't find the original German version of this letter. He was also very much pro-abolitionist and supported the cause of abolition during the US Civil War. Also, as others have noted, his pamphlet "On the Jewish Question" in context criticizes Judaism, but isn't particularly antisemitic, and Marx was Jewish of course on top of that. I suspect the accusations have been pushed as an op to try to dissuade certain groups from reading and adopting Marx's ideas.
Even in the UK, the N word wasn't considered problematic or derogatory in the same way as the US (though of course it was and TERF island is just horribly ignorant) as late as the 1940s. There's a couple of deeply problematic lyrics in some filmed G&S productions of the time.
If it isn't with a hard R and it was written before 1970 it isn't racist
Marx was ethnically Jewish he can have any opinion he wants about Jewish people. Anyone that brings it up always fucking leaves out the fact he is speaking about his own people.
It's pretty critical information. There's a huge difference between a white person saying a bunch of problematic shit about black people and a black person saying a bunch of problematic shit about black people. One is racism, the other is deeply engrained brainworms.
It completely changes the way you interpret a situation.
I'd dispute the relevance of this. He wasn't raised Jewish, I'm not even sure if he knew of his Jewish ancestry. His parents converted and he lived and died as the son of Lutherans.
In Prussia Jews had an unequal status. When the Rhineland was taken this meant jews there could no longer serve as lawyers, judges, civil servants, university lecturers or schoolteachers – unless they converted to Christianity.
Marx's father was affected by this. They converted through coercion, not desire.
There is absolutely no way Marx was not aware of this. Or the fact his grandparents were Rabbis. How would you not know what your grandparents do or did during their lives? You'd have to be incredibly disconnected from your family for that information to just disappear in 2 generations.
I’m not even sure if he knew of his Jewish ancestry
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/de/thumb/4/4f/MarxA.jpg/1600px-MarxA.jpg
His grandfather was Rabbiner, his grandfather's father was Rabbiner, his uncle was Rabbiner, his wife's father was Rabbiner, he put his son to rest on a Jewish graveyard... obviously he was aware of his Jewish ancestry.
As people have said the literally one example of Marx being "racist" against black people is the one letter where he uses the German word that also translated to "Negro", which was the contemporary term for black people
Here's a summary of "On 'The Jewish Question'" I saw recently that was good:
On The Jewish Question moves between summarizing the original Bruno Bauer Essay and then responding to it. So there are moments where if you're not aware of what is happening you might thing he is endorsing anti-semitism. But then he turns around and shoots the arguments down.
You can think of the essay as coming in with two parts. One being the Jews aren't free of they are given their own laws by the State. Or that they have a political distinction as Jews. But as Marx writes this distinction of being Jewish, when the State identifies as something else (Christian) renders the Jew an eternal guest at the mercy of the Christian State. So for the Jew to be politically emancipated the State must necessarily have no identification with X or Y thing.
The next is the emancipation of Judaism as a social relation, which comes with its own issues of stereotypes associated with Judaism. To be Jewish is to be associated with, or made out or made to be a greedy Jew. So the social emancipation of being Jewish is to liberate the idea of Jewishness from this, so the Jew may freely associate with their Jewishness free of stereotype.
Where as in Bauer's arguments the Jew is free if they abandon Judaism and convert, or the State makes atheists of all men. But as Marx says enforced atheism or state enforced anything replicates the same sort of oppressions as before. So the solution is a state that does not identify itself with an identity, and an identity comes to be free of preconceived notions.
tl;dr - "Bauer, du hast cringe posten." -Marx
What Marx was legitimately bad with was Orientalism. His stuff on the "Asiaticmode of production" is rather embarrassing
He's also writing it in response to anti-semites hiding under the guise of socialism in Germany
I don't know that I would characterize Marx as orientalist (his theory isn't orientalist in the slightest, much to the chagrin of Edward Said), but he definitely did not understand east Asian societies. Engels wrote about this later in life once more information became available to European historians. Most of what Marx thought about Asian societies came from Hegel, e.g. in the Philosophy of Right, which was so deeply flawed as to be useless.
To be fair, given the "totally not doing an opium genocide here guys" propaganda of the time, it's hard to see how he could have been right at the time without literally going to east Asia for a decade.
Lets check the track record on Marxism and racism and see how that looks.
What are you talking about specifically? I've only heard this said by liberals in reference to his essay On the Jewish Question, which as I've understood it is just a critique of the liberal conception of rights.
Overall I don't really care about Marx the person, I only care about the theory that Marx generated.
He wrote one offhanded Jewish joke in all of Capital which is amazing considering it's length and it's topic.
There's a reason people only cite that one short passage from On the Jewish Question when discussing Marx's alleged antisemitism. How is it he can write a whole essay literally titled "On the Jewish Question" and they can only find one paragraph that is antisemitic? Perhaps because Marx was not actually antisemitic.
The entire purpose of the essay also is to defend the Jews right to have actual political rights without being made to convert and assimilate away from their beliefs and culture.
If you're talking about "On the Jewish Question" I don't really know what's so bad about that pamphlet.
It uses some tropes, but it honestly reads more like him criticizing Jewish culture being intertwined with capitalism in the same way Christianity is (even more so now). It's got some "edgy atheist teen" vibes here and there, but his thesis is basically that religion is a barrier to liberation.
I think there was a significant lack of information on indigenous civilization at the time, so I don’t read too much into their notable absence in his analysis
This is why Proudhon is the better theorist, because he is the one who said that he dreamed of a society that would guillotine him for his shitty views.
