>>8479012>Yeah dude was mad racistNo, not in the least; the exact opposite, in fact.
When he used the ‘N’ word in private correspondence it wasn’t considered a racist term in the UK at that time (even though it began to take on those connotations well into the next century). In the 1930s, British crime writer, Agatha Christie, had even used the ’N’ word in the title of one of her best selling books, the title of which was later changed to “And then there were none”: (
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/why-is-amazon-still-selli_b_11967894.html?guccounter=1)
UK conservatives were still using this word in the 1960s in electioneering slogans (“If you want a n*gger for a neighbour vote Labour”):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/15/britains-most-racist-election-smethwick-50-years-onIt was in that decade in the UK that the ’N’ word came to be viewed as unequivocally racist (largely as a result of the Civil Rights Movement). The furor over the Tory use of this word showed that public opinion was changing.
Indeed, Marx’s articles on the US Civil War show he was on the side of emancipation from the get go.
“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 emancipate itself in the white skin when in the black it is branded.” – Karl Marx
Furthermore, his comments about the Jews weren’t racist either, but were an attempt to analyse the economic role they had been forced to adopt by the Roman Catholic Church (which viewed usury as a sin), and later by capitalism, because of this.
