Karl Marx and Whiteness
I like to check out the websites for CNN, MSNBC, and FoxNews and just scroll through the headlines wondering if somehow their reporters live on three different planets. Today, I came across a fascinating opinion piece on MSNBC.com that corresponded well with another interesting read a friend posted recently, a letter from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels.
In case you aren’t familiar with these two, they were Germans living in the 1800s who wrote works such as The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. They pushed for a political philosophy known as “Marxism,” which basically taught that capitalism causes some people to get rich while others remained poor, so workers should all revolt and “blow up the system.” Their writings have led to such utopian societies as the USSR, North Korea, Communist Romania, China, and Cuba. You can be the judge of whether the millions of murders committed by these regimes were better or worse than having to pay someone who might make money for their families from the goods and services you purchase from them.
Back to MSNBC. This article on whiteness, while filled with a lot of other stuff, has some interesting historical points, namely the invention of the modern concept of “race” by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who lived in Germany (where Karl Marx lived) and died when Karl Marx was twenty-two.
“Blumenbach based his classification on skull measurements and divided humanity into five ‘varieties,’ which he laid out according to his aesthetic preferences.
At the two extremities Blumenbach placed the skulls he considered ugly, the African and the Asian. Next to the African was the Tahitian. Next to the Asian was the Native American. In the middle was Blumenbach’s “most beautiful skull’ — of a young Georgian woman who had been a sex slave in Moscow, where she died of venereal disease. Her beautiful skull became the basis for the name given to white people; a native of the South Caucasus (between the Black and Caspian Seas), she inspired the label ‘Caucasian.’”
Now, what does this guy have to do with Marx? In this letter to Engels, after Marx complains about the “sons of Belial” (evil capitalists) who are charging him for things like, rent, renting his piano, meat, tea, bakery items, and vegetables, he goes on a rant about a “Jewish n___” who won’t lend him money. Why did he need money? Because he spent all of his time writing about evil people who were charging him for basic goods so that they could feed their families while refusing to work a job that might feed his.
But let’s look at what he says on down in the letter about the man who accuses him of being too, “abstract to understand politics.”
It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a n----- ). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also n----- -like.
If you read Marx’s letter to Engels, I’m sure you noticed the “Note from History as a Weapon” at the top of that letter:
It has come to our attention that this page is very popular with right-wingers who delight in Marx and Engel's use of racial slurs to discredit Marxist thought. Unfortunately, Marx and Engels were Europeans of the nineteenth century and in that period of time, racism was commonplace and permeated the political, scientific, religious, literary, and social spheres.
I can certainly say that I don’t “delight in Marx’s use of racial slurs,” but I do believe they are one of many ways in which we can see his character. It is interesting to me that people today who want to tear down a system created by men who would fit into this same classification of being “products of a different time,” are fine replacing it with a historically oppressive and ruthless system inspired by a man who was a far worse product of this time.
Photo in thumbnail take from Wikipedia.
