[PEN-L:8712] Re: Re: Re: Re: (Fwd) Review of *Hegel and Marx After theFall of Communism*

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:53 PM 6/30/99 -0700, you wrote:
>I think it would be hard to find any major European thinker before the
>twentieth century who did not write vile racist claptrap.  Marx may have
>been better than some, but his comment (whose cite I can't recall at the
>moment) about the "abundance" of the tropics inducing sloth and being
>responsible for the lower level of economic development of the tropics
>borders on VRC.

it's important to remember that overt racism, antisemitism, etc. were
_very_ mainstream in most advanced capitalist countries until about 1945,
when Hitler made it unfashionable. (Hitler's nonsense of course was partly
based on US eugenics and "scientific" racism.) Strictly speaking, it was
the civil rights movement that made overt racism unfashionable, just as it
was the feminist movement that made overt sexism unfashionable.

When reading Marx, Hegel, or whomever in the past, it's important to not
just use our current standards of morality alone. The morality of the time
must also be taken into account. Considering the latter, Marx was damn
good. And as Louis writes: >The best thing about Marx and Engels is that
they provided a methodology which would allow a critique of all forms of
racism to be mounted. <

BTW, Hal Draper has a neat little essay on Marx's antisemitism (as an
appendix to volume I of his KARL MARX'S THEORY OF REVOLUTION, I believe) in
which he demonstrates that _all_ major thinkers of Marx's day were
antisemitic.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html