Hamjatta,
I have not been able to make an earlier reply to this topic due to many
things beyond my control.At this present pressing moments in the political
life of our country,a struggle which is not only political,but also as
some one pointed it out here,that the battle of Ideas is as important as
the political.Such an understanding of the political situation in the
Gambian
would have save us from unnecessary discussions.Bringing Marx in such a
discussion will be futile unless one understand in what role he has to play
in our political struggle,calling him a racist is a proof of not having any
basic understanding of what his ideas where all about.Even sincere and
serious liberal
African thinkers,some of them very reactionary will discuss Marx in relation
to their social condition and from their own point of view.Take Senghore as
a typical example,his discussion on Marx,whether hidden or open is in
relation to the struggle of the African people and at that time.I have been
reading many times,Sheik Anta Jobe`s "Civilisation or Barbarism"In the
chapter were he was
discussing Marx's analysis of primitive accumulation of capital,Jobe was
confronting Marx on  concrete issues that I believed was and is a very great
contribution to the battle of ideas he was involved with,not only with
Marxist but also with his own intellectual African brothers and sisters,even
though
this is the only critic of Marx I have seen by him,it is a very serious
one.These are the discussions that our generation needs more than anything
else,this ,in my opinion,is a precondition to the progress of  our people.I
hope Mr Mboge you will involved your self more to such type of
criticism of Marx(using such methods) this I believed will be of more use in
our
struggle for total freedom.
If I should tell my Jewish friends that in my country,in our urban languages
the word "Jew" is very commonly use in describing a negative
behaviour of a friend or a foe,I just wonder if he will not say that we are
racist,are we?If we can answer this question then we will be able to solve
the lie that Marx was a racist,since all of us,at one time or another have
used the word.
The American civil war ; the contribution of Marx both as a correspondent
for New York Tribune and or as a political activist are very central to
understand that conflict from a radical point of view.Marx was, if not the
only,but among the few,writer who defended Jon Brown and predicted that his
death was going to have a signal effect.
In defending  Wendell Phillip,Marx wrote for the Vienna Presse,"Together
with Garrison and G.Smith,Wendell Phillips is the leader of the
Abolitionists in New England.For thirty years he has without intermission
and at the risk of his life proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves as his
battle cry,regardless alike of the press,the enraged howls of paid rowdies
and conciliatory representations of solicitous friends...in the present
state of affairs Wendell Phillips speech is of great importance than a
battle bullet".
And still you are convince that he was against the liberation of the black
slaves,and listen to what the man of the proletarians has to say,   "In the
united States of North America,every independent movement of the workers was
paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic.Labour cannot
be emancipated in the white skin  where in the black it is branded....."
Labour was the central thing in all of Marx's analysis,whether black or
white and this is why he told the "White" Working class in the North  ,"
whiles the working men,the true political power of the North,allowed slavery
to defile their own republic,while before the Negro,mastered and sold
without his concurrence,they boasted it the highest prerogative of the
White-skin labourer to sell himself and choose his master;they were unable
to attain the true freedom...."
The pathological lie that Marx was only concern with the liberation of the
White skin is not only  a distortion of this great thinkers ideas who have
spent much time in Africa to learn and write about conditions far away from
home,in his effort to trace the origin of one the most important aspect of
human history and development  and this was the man both his Family and
close friends were referring to as the "Moor".
Marx saw slavery to be another stage of  the economic crisis of the
bourgeoisie economy and he in no way defended slavery,this is how he said
it:
"The discovery of gold and silver in America,the extirpation,enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginals population,the beginning of the the
conquest and looting of the East Indies,the turning of Africa into a warren
for the commercial hunting of black-skin signalled the rosy dawn of the era
of capitalist production.These idyllic proceedings are chief momenta of
primitive accumulations......"
And this is why he saw the liberation struggle in America as the greatest
historical movement that was happening in the world,he wrote:
 "In my opinion the biggest things that are happening in the world today are
on
the one hand the movement of the slaves in America started by thedeath of
John Brown........"
And he continues, "I have seen in the tribune that there has been a fresh
rising of the slaves in Missouri,naturally suppressed.But the signal effect
has now been given" and he even predicted ,in a letter to Engel's,"I do not
thing that all is up...a single Negro regiment would have a remarkable
effect on Southern nerves...a war of this kind must be conducted on
revolutionary lines......"
Marx's tempered attack on Lassalle was among other things his very arrogance
towards this great world event that Marx was turning all his attention
to,that is,the Civil war,and in reporting on Lassalle views,Marx wrote,"The
Yankees have no "ideas".`Individual liberty`is merely a `negative
idea`etc,and more of this old,decayed,speculative rubbish",there is much
more in Marx criticism of Lassalle than the fact that he called him a "black
Jew" a word which as said above all of us did use against our own brother or
sister.
Even long before me great African thinkers,who have read and understood much
more than I do,became Marxist not out  of mere foolishness or sentiments,but
out of good conscience,whether this was Edward Francis Small,Dixon
Colley,Franz
Fanon,Cabral etc,if these People were not able to discover the racism of
Marx and blindly followed his ideas,then I am sorry  and god bless Africa.
To conclude,to know much about Marx's and his relationship to both the
American Civil War,the colour question,I will refer you to the works of the
American Hegelian Marxist Philosopher,Raya Duayevskaya,even though she did
not attend University,she was good not only in digesting reality,she
developed to become a great thinker.

For Freedom
Saiks










> > 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
> Engel's 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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