In a message dated 14/07/2001 09:11:52 GMT Daylight Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:
> << **How can any serious
> intellectual argue that Karl Marx was a racist**. Marx spent his entire life
> time espousing for social justice and all he can get is for nonentities like
> Hamjatta trying to distract us from his immense contribution to social
> science. This clearly confirms that Hamjatta is still a political toddler
> who is not well read to understand the essence of the doctrine of Karl
> MARX. >>
Upon first reading this correspondence, all my instincts were to ignore this
writer and his irresponsible comments on my person. On second thoughts, i
think it would be ill-mannered to ignored him and his off-the-wall remarks.
Besides, i have yet to be accused of snobbery.
Invectives aside, this writer is the typical violent-prone fanatical Marxist
cocooned in the metaphysical fantasies and illusions of certainty that
Marxism since Marx seemed to imbibe in so many and in the process, inducing
and lulling them to a slumber only death can awaken them from. The question
as to whether Marx was a racist had adequately been answered by me in a
correspondence with Saiks. I will herein provide again the same evidence i
offered to Saiks. This is Karl Marx in a letter to Friedrich Engels on his
contempt for Ferdinand Lassalle and all he stood for:
"As the shape of his head and the texture of his skin suggest, he is
descended from the negroes who joined Moses in his exodus from Egypt (unless
his mother or paternal grandmother were crossed with a nigger). This union
of Jew and German with its negro source was bound to produce a strange
hybrid. The fellow's importunity is also negro" [Karl Marx, Letter to
Engels of 30th. July 1862, in Works, Vol. 30, pp. 257-9, East Berlin, 1974.]
To crown it all, he ended by calling Lassalle a "Jewish nigger". Some
non-racist inclusive internationalist, huh? Worst, Marx at some stage was
opposed to the abolition of slavery in America on the grounds that freeing
blacks from slavery would adversely hinder the progress of working class
white Americans from pre- industrial working class status to industrial
proletarian status without which the violent end he had prophesised for
capitalism would not come to be. Saiks, Marx was not only a racist creep, he
was a sexist as well. I would like to see you refute this. The workers of the
world that Marx had in mind and was calling upon to unite and free themselves
from the shackles of "capitalism" were not blacks, browns, yellows and women;
but exclusively proletarian white males.
As i intimated earlier above, the writer of the piece i'm responding to
writes like the typical Marxist fanatical obsessive with low opinions on
anyone who thinks differently. Why is it that people who profess the Marxist
philosophy are so virulently, contemptuously and absurdly opposed to opposing
viewpoints? Aside from learning from the character failings of the old
incendiary himself, Karl Marx - their ideological forebear - Michael
Ignatieff has written what amounts to the best wiseacre on Marxist
fanaticism. In a review of the late reconstructed Marxist scholar, Francois
Furet's autopsy of communism/marxism/socialism, Ignatieff observed:
"Rage, self-loathing, and aesthetic disdain combined to generate an
eschatological longing for an escape from what Marx called the "narrow
horizon of bourgeois right." Though it purported to be a science of history,
communism actually promised its believers an escape from history, a leap
beyond the flat horizon of bourgeois life into a realm of justice and
equality, abundance and fraternity. This vision of communist paradise may
have been wholly unrealistic, but it certainly mobilized the emotions of true
believers and sustained their abiding hatred of the world as it was. Fascism
shared the same furious hatred of the bourgeoisie, the same loathing for
bourgeois civility and order and profit and prudence, the same intoxication
with political violence and ideological extremism"
This explains not only the ideological excesses and illusions of this writer
but the breath-taking and pathological disdain the writer seems so full of
for me - just because i happen to see things differently. I have again stated
the evidence that indicts Marx as a racist. Those who see it differently
ought to come up with respectable antitheses grounded in evidence instead of
deluging this List with a plethora of uninformed rhetorical pieties on a
decisively repudiated philosophy like Marxism. As far as i'm concerned, and
despite the insights Marx had made on human existence and relations and the
relevance of some of these insights, the edifice he erected with his
philosophy remains a decisively repudiated one - morally, economically and
politically.
As i said to Saiks in my last correspondence, this debate has reached the
point where we ought to respectfully agree to disagree and move on. None of
us is likely to change the viewpoint of the other. If people want to refute
my evidence that Marx was a racist, i strongly recommend they send it to me
privately. As far as i'm concerned, i'm through with this debate on Marxism
and related issues - on this List anyway!
Hamjatta Kanteh
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