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Marx and Engels's Theory of History: Making Sense of the Race Factor UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Marx and Engels's theory of history. Making sense of the race factor. van Ree, E. DOI 10.1080/13569317.2019.1548094 Publication date 2019 Document Version Final published version Published in Journal of Political Ideologies License CC BY-NC-ND Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): van Ree, E. (2019). Marx and Engels's theory of history. Making sense of the race factor. Journal of Political Ideologies, 24(1), 54-73. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2019.1548094 General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). 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UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:27 Sep 2021 JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 2019, VOL. 24, NO. 1, 54–73 https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2019.1548094 Marx and Engels’s theory of history: making sense of the race factor Erik van Ree Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ABSTRACT This article argues that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’stheoryof history contained racist components. In Marx and Engels’sunder- standing, racial disparities emerged under the influence of shared natural and social conditions hardening into heredity and of the mixing of blood. They racialized skin-colour groups, ethnicities, nations and social classes, while endowing them with innate superior and inferior character traits. They regarded race as part of humanity’s natural conditions, upon which the production system rested. ‘Races’ endowed with superior qualities would boost economic develop- ment and productivity, while the less endowed ones would hold humanity back. Marxist race thinking reflected common Lamarckian and Romantic-Nationalist assumptions of the era. This article explores the racist components in the thought of Karl Marx and of Friedrich Engels. Their numerous horrendous comments on Slavs, ‘Negroes’, Bedouins, Jews, Chinese and many others are well known, but the logic behind these comments has not been sufficiently examined. Marx and Engels applied the term Rasse, or the English race, to a wide variety of human collectives – from skin-colour groups to ethnicities, nations and even to social classes. It is tempting to assume that they were applying the term loosely and that they were only unthinkingly repeating the stereotypes and prejudices of the day. On the contrary, I will argue that this common interpretation means to miss the serious points they were making. Whereas formal definitions and theories of race indeed cannot be found in their writings, their scattered comments add up to quite a coherent position on the question. Let me state at the outset that I will not take a position in the old debate about the degree of identity of views between Marx and Engels; this article is not intended as a contribution to that debate. My conclusion on the issue at hand will be that both men were racializing human collectives but that they did not see completely eye to eye on the question of the emergence of race. The subject of Marx, Engels and racism remains a difficult one. Intellectually, it is counter-intuitive to assume that the authors of a worldview defining production and class as history’s motive forces could have nurtured racist assumptions in any serious way. Politically, too, this is a fraught issue. The fact that Marx and Engels continue to be controversial figures easily stands in the way of balanced conclusions. Carlos Moore’s CONTACT Erik van Ree [email protected] © 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. JOURNAL OF POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES 55 and Nathaniel Weyl’s unconvincing characterizations of the founding fathers of mod- ern communism as racists of the Aryanist type, and racists first and foremost, are cases in point.1 The issue is particularly problematic for scholars of the Marxist persuasion. Their plight might be compared to that of present-day Lutherans who somehow must come to terms with the anti-Semitic outbursts of the founder. It would be unfair to accuse the Marxists of covering up Marx’s and Engels’s derogatory and abusive language. On the contrary, they roundly condemn it.2 The problem with Marxist analysis lies rather in its failure to make intellectual sense of Marx’s and Engels’s views of race. Most effort is invested in showing what these views were not; it is held that they were mere Fremdkörper, elements incompatible with the overall drift of the two men’s thinking. The question of how we should interpret their racist observations, apart from their being troubling and disturbing, remains largely unanswered. This intellectually thin way of handling the problem was pioneered by the Austromarxist Otto Bauer, who in 1907 rejected Engels’s view that the small nations of the Habsburg Empire were doomed always to remain ‘nations without history’. Bauer insisted that Engels’s writings against the South Slavs were incompatible with the materialist method Engels himself had pioneered with Marx.3 Roman Rosdolsky, Michael Löwy and Kevin Anderson follow in Bauer’s footsteps. These scholars suggest that Marx’s and Engels’s abusive comments on the South Slavs and on other nations and races were either politically motivated ad hoc products or residues of Hegelian idealism. No effort is spent on further exploring the logic behind these comments, which only makes sense if there is no underlying logic in the first place.4 In an exceptional Marxist contribution, Ephraim Nimni argues that Engels’s treat- ment of the South Slavs was compatible with the materialist worldview. Nimni reinter- prets Engels’s shocking outbursts in socioeconomic and demographic terms. The latter’s real point would have been that the small size and peasant nature of some of the Central-European nations prevented these nations from establishing economically viable nation-states and therefore doomed them to play a counter-revolutionary role in history.5 Nimni’s point is a valid one but, on the downside, this scholar makes the racist aspects of Engels’s argumentation disappear from view altogether, and we are no closer to understanding them than we were.6 The Marxist sociology of race, race relations and racism focuses on the question of how historical materialism can be made to serve the study of these phenomena in the contemporary world. There is little to no discussion of Marx’s own views of race in this literature.7 To make theoretical sense of the racist elements in Marx and Engels, two problems must be addressed. First of all, how could they have found a place in history for race, if class and production came first? To my knowledge, Weyl stands alone in having offered a solution for this problem. This author suggested that ‘historical materialism might be superimposed on certain more fundamental conditions which shaped man’s fate’.If Marx assumed that people of different races differed in ‘ability and hence in civilization- potential’, then ‘The more capable peoples would be expected to move more swiftly through the dialectically determined phases of the historical process and this would in turn stimulate their civilizational level’.8 Weyl suggests, in other words, that Marx 56 E. VAN REE regarded race as an element underlying the economic basis of society. I will return to this extraordinarily fruitful suggestion later on.9 Second, all this remains speculation as long as it remains unclear whether Marx could have believed in the reality of racial communities with hereditarily defined ‘civilization-potential’ at all. Fortunately, this is a question that has been discussed in the literature at some length. In Solomon Bloom’s reading, Marx regarded racial–ethnic character traits not as immutable or inborn but as a product of economic and other environmental factors and permanently in flux, which is why he could not have been very concerned with race and biology.10 Iring Fetscher acknowledges that Marx accepted inborn racial character- istics, but he would have been little concerned with them, as he believed inborn differences in due course would be erased.11 If Marx and Engels made the human character flexible and dependent on the environment, racism seems to be ruled out. Yet M.M. Bober and Diane Paul suggest that, if human nature could be moulded by environmental factors, so could, possibly, the underlying human heredity. Thus, in Marx’s imagination, it is precisely the environment that might have been instrumental in
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