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What did Marx say about blacks?

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JimboSaturn · 56-60, M
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/did-marx-defend-black-slavery/

It can be intrepreted he backed slavery.
Over the past forty years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning Black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipa- tion was conditional on the level of ‘civilisation’ attained by Black slaves.2 The most recent incarnation of this interpretation is the scholar of communism Erik van Ree’s piece ‘Marx and Engels’s Theory of History: Making Sense of the Race Factor’, which, given its wide availability online, has even been picked up by the likes of the conservative ir magazine The National Interestto help make the case that ‘Karl Marx Was a Total Racist’.3 It has also been cited on the Left by the sociologist of racism Wulf D. Hund, who employs it to help make sense of Marx’s relative silence on the Haitian revolution.4 I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defence of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitiv- ity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets.