I’ve seen a few people claim that he was, is this true?
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.
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.
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.
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
