Fw: [marxmail] WERE MARX AND ENGELS WHITE RACISTS?: THE PROLET-ARYAN OUTLOOK OF MARXISM
Yusuf Nuruddin
----- Forwarded Message -----From: "Michael Pugliese via groups.io" <pugliesemichael76=gmai...@groups.io>To: "marx...@groups.io" <marx...@groups.io>Sent: Sat, Dec 6, 2025 at 8:36 PMSubject: [marxmail] WERE MARX AND ENGELS WHITE RACISTS?: THE PROLET-ARYAN OUTLOOK OF MARXISMA rather polemical article from the Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Join JSTOR for free to be able to read up to 100 articles a month.
Exchange: Marxism as a Prolet-Aryan OutlookVia https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/did-marx-defend-black-slavery/
"In the course of demonstrating the falsity of this interpretation, we will be led into an exploration of Marx and Engels’ comments on free black workers, those of Jamaica in particular and of the Americas and the Caribbean in general. To my knowledge, this specific topic has virtually never been discussed in Marx scholarship.[viii] We will thus also give the lie to some of the claims of J. Lorand Matory in his recent book, The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make, where among other things he asserts that ‘Black “wage slaves”’ – i.e. free black wage-labourers – is ‘a category Marx fails even to acknowledge.’[ix] What might to some seem a trivial exercise in Marxology has in fact profound symbolic importance. It is no coincidence that both Carlos Moore – the black Marxist turned anti-communist Pan-Africanist – and Charles Mills – the late black Marxist turned ‘black radical liberal’ – each marked their departure from the Marxist tradition with an essay seeking to show that Marx and Engels were anti-black racists. As Moore recounts in his recent memoir Pichón:My definitive break with communism in all its forms took place at the end of the 1960s when I drafted an essay on the Marxist position on race, Were Marx and Engels Racists? It appeared in 1972 to general condemnation from the left. I was confirmed by many as an unrepentant stooge of American imperialism. However, severing my last tenuous links to world communism was an act of personal liberation.[x]
And for Mills, writing ‘in what was to be my last paper explicitly within the Marxist tradition’,[xi]
Marx and Engels’ colorless, raceless workers are actually white … we must ask whether their contemptuous attitude toward people of color does not raise the question of whether they … should not be indicted for racism and the consignment of nonwhites, particularly blacks, to a different theoretical category.[xii] …
So, I would support that the subsumption of the experience of the colonized and the racially subordinated under orthodox Marxist historical materialist categories is doubly problematic. These raceless categories do not capture and register the specificities of the experience of people of color; and though they are now deployed race-neutrally, they were arguably not intended by the founders to extend without qualification to this population in the first place.[xiii]
As Manning Marable put it in his explanation of ‘Why Black Americans Are Not Socialists’, ‘Part of the rationale for some black nationalists’ fears that Marxism is a form of “left-wing racism” must be attributed to the writings of Marx himself.’ Citing the 1853 passage I will examine in this paper, henotes that such ‘blatantly racist statements by the early proponents of socialism must give pause to many contemporary would-be black leftists.’[xiv] Thus, the alleged anti-black racism of Marx and the place black workers occupy in his historical materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and black liberation..."
Another excerpt : "Finally, Marx again invoked the ruthless crushing of the Jamaican rebellion the following year in 1869. Writing on behalf of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association ‘To the Workmen of Europe and the United States’ about ‘The Belgian Massacres’, he opposedhis own explanation of the clashes, based in class struggle, to the view that the Belgian authorities, under French Imperial influence, were looking for a pretext to justify French intervention:Other politicians, on the contrary, suspect the Belgian ministers to be sold to the Tuileries, and to periodically enact these horrible scenes of a mock civil war, with the deliberate aim of affording Louis Bonaparte a pretext for saving society in Belgium as he has saved it in France. But was Ex-Governor Eyre ever accused of having organized the Negro massacre at Jamaica in order to wrest that island from England and place it into the hands of the United States? No doubt the Belgian ministers are excellent patriots of the Eyre pattern. As he was the unscrupulous tool of the West-Indian planter, they are the unscrupulous tools of the Belgian capitalist.[xlvii]
How mistaken was Carlos Moore, then, when he averred in the 1970s that ‘to Marx and Engels,’ the struggles of black workers in Jamaica and elsewhere
were, above all, only “nigger” events. This is seen in Engels’ short reference to the Jamaican insurrection of 1865, led by Paul Bogle. In a letter to Marx, dated December 1, 1865, Engels expressed no more than an amused “sympathy” for the “pitiful” struggle against British bayonets and rifles on the part of these “unarmed Niggers.”[xlviii]
We have seen that there was far more to their commentary on events in Jamaica than Moore was and is ready to admit. For doing so would seriously jeopardise his mission to paint Marx and Engels as ‘Aryan’-style white supremacists. Wulf Hund, who thinks Moore treats the issue of Marx’s anti-black racism ‘denunciatively’ from a ‘distortive perspective’[xlix], nonetheless himself argues that Marx ignores the Haitian revolution because for Marx, ‘On the eve of revolution, the black slaves there were predominantly not a “native product” (as in the United States) but “freshly imported barbarians” (as in Jamaica)’[l]. Thus Hund employs precisely the same reasoning as Moore: Marx ignored the Haitian revolution, as he ignored all the other uprisings of black workers, including in Jamaica, because these were mere ‘n-word’ or ‘barbarian’ events. But if, as I have tried to show, this argument fails in the case of Jamaica and the Morant Bay Rebellion, why should it succeed in the case of Haiti and its revolution? Although Marx had little to say about the Haitian Revolution, he clearly sided with ‘the insurgent Negroes of Haiti’[li] in their struggle to free themselves, recognised Haiti as a ‘Negro Republic’[lii], and noted the pivotal role played by Haiti and its president Alexandre Pétion in ‘the South American revolution’ – by providing Simón Bolívar with arms in exchange for Bolívar’s promise to emancipate black slaves[liii] (an event Anténor Firmin later adduced as evidence of Haiti’s world-historical significance in his Equality of the Human Races[liv]). So, while Hund’s query about Marx’s relative silence on the Haitian Revolution remains an important one, his contention that it stemmed from Marx’s anti-black racism – specifically the belief that Haitian blacks were ‘barbarians’ incapable of making history – is firmly refuted by the textual evidence..."
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