Saiks,

The principal defect in your piece was one of presentation of evidence and
its concomitant effects of a logically disjointed sequence of arguments. You
tendered chunks of quoted passages as evidence but never gave directions as
to where they come from; insofar as this is case, one is in constant limbo as
to the head and tail of your argument that Marx wasn't a racist creep. This
made reading you very difficult. Since i do not, as a matter of principle,
make wholesale comments on issues that need clarifications or on which i have
my doubts, i will refrain from commenting on the evidence you have tendered
until i get the evidence slotted in context and it is properly sourced.

Be that as it may, i have a feeling that you did a very poor reading of the
letter i quoted from Marx to Engels revealing his racist bigotry. Herein, i
suspect the poor reading is as a result of my failure to explain why Marx'
despicable racist attacks on Lassalle - which can be refuted on the grounds
of Jewish self-hatred or jeudischer Selsthass [its German equivalent and
forerunner coined by Theodor Lessing, a German-Jewish writer of distinction]
- is in fact, sui generis, an oeuvre of racism. Let me bring the aforesaid
quote again albeit in a simpler language and i'll explain appropriately the
racist context:

"It is now quite plain to me - as the shape of his head and the way his hair
grows also testify - that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied
Moses's flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandfather
interbred with a nigger). Now,  this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on
the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give
rise to a peculiar product. The fellow's importunity is also niggerlike."
[Letter of 30 July 1862, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Works, Vol. 30 (1974),
pp. 257-9]

Now, it is a typical intellectual fashion amongst Marx hagiographers to
downplay the racism here and start on the false premise that the worst that
could be said of Marx here is Jewish self-hatred and most likely he was just
suffering from bouts of snobbery when he was stereotyping Lassalle in the
aforequoted passage from an 1862 letter to Engels. This is nonsense. As
Isaiah Berlin commented on this same passage quoted here, Marx, at the very
least, is justly accused of anti-Semitism:

"There is somthing odd, to say the least, in the assertion made in a
publication of the Marx-Engels Institute in 1943 that 'Marx denounced
anti-Semitism in the strongest terms.' It is difficult to resist Thomas
Masaryk's judgement that Marx is justly described as anti-Semitic." [Isaiah
Berlin, Benjamin Disraeli and Karl Marx in Against the Current, p. 278,
Pimlico, 1997]

To my mind and moral appropriations, anti-Semitism is justly described as
racism. Therewith, and to my knowledge, none has explored the reasons why
Marx invoked the Negro stereotyping here to make his point against Lassalle;
or what the relevance, if any, was the Negro stereotyping Marx alluded to
Lassalle to make his point. For Marx certainly was aware that Lassalle has no
known Negro ancestral lineage or one that he [Lassalle] proudly proclaims.
For instance, Lassalle was never known - unlike Marx - to suffer from
inferiority complex, especially when it comes to his Jewish origins. Indeed,
Lassalle was amongst the few prominent intellectual German-Jews of that
period who, albeit being assimilated, never ridiculed or gave up their
ancient Hebrew culture; Lassalle proudly tells anyone who would listen that
he is Jewish. So it stands to reason that if Lassalle did have Negro origins
he wouldn't have shun from it. Of course, in appearance it is true that
Lassalle was certainly not a German blond with blue eyes; rather, he most
certainly was darker in complexion to any other German and his hair was curly
and dark. But i have read no historian, as of yet, positing that Lassalle's
ancestors intrebred with Negroes which explains his dark complexion or curly
hair to warrant the 'niggerlike' stereotyping that came from Marx. I'm all
ears.

To understand why Marx was a racist, especially from the tendered evidence,
we ought to question: What is the Negro or 'niggerlike' connection that Marx
waxed lyrical and indignant to make his point about Lassalle? The answer lies
partly in this sentence from the tendered evidence: "The fellow's importunity
is niggerlike." Importunity - a nounal construction meaning here someone
persistently and pressingly pursuing something yet to be within his grasp -
especially as it relates to one who is assumed to be a "socially ambitious"
commoner. Importunity, as the nounal construction is understood by Isaiah
Berlin in Lassalle's case, refers to the "socially ambitious, at times
intolerably showy and vain." Let  me place this in a historical context and
my thesis would be clearer. Now, it is true that one way of describing
Lassalle, amongst his many laudable characteristics, is his importunity. This
is no caricature. To the extent that this is true, Lassalle did become
involve in the lenghty legal soap opera of a Countess von Hatzfeldt which
explains to some extent his importunity. Let Francis Wheen narrate the
history:

"While he was still a philosophy student Lassalle had taken up the cudgels on
behalf of the Countess von Hatzfeldt, who was fighting a celebrated divorce
case. She seemed an unlikely heroine of the socialist cause, but for this
ambitious barrack-room lawyer her plight demonstrated the larcenous villainy
of the upper classes: the Count had effectively stolen his wife's dowry, and
under German law at the time she had little chance of retrieving it. Lassalle
hurled himself into the case with a fine disregard for legal niceties -
suborning witnesses, stealing documents - until, after ten years and dozens
of lawsuits, the exhausted husband handed over the loot. Lassalle's share of
the spoils set him up for life: he installed himself in a palatial Berlin
residence, furnished in the most exotic and expensive style; his box at the
opera was next to that of the King, and no less." [Karl Marx, Francis Wheen,
p. 230, Fourth Estate, London, 1999]

As Wheen narrated above, Lassalle's importunity is easily placed in context:
ruthlessly persistent commoner using underhand tactics to gain entrance to
the world of the rich and the famous. The question becomes: how is such
importunity 'niggerlike'? This is just like me mocking Jammeh's importunity
and concluding that it is very Jola-like. Or similarly commenting that Essa
Bokarr Sey's importunity is very Tukulor-like. That is tribalism talking.
What has Jammeh or Sey's ethnicity got to do their importunity? Similarly,
what makes importunity 'niggerlike'? If this is not racist nonsense, what is
it? Imagine a Pat Buchanan or Bill Buckley saying that importunity is
'niggerlike' in today's America. Would anyone have anyone doubts about the
latent racism inherent in such a detestable caricature of black people?
Besides, why bring Negroes into something that, on the face of it, has got to
do with a Semite or their stereotype. Granted, Marx was even in that letter
playing his great past-time of being a virulent anti-Semite. But more than
virulent anti-Semitism, Marx was showing how he also believed the racist
stereotypes of that era that he uses it publicly and privately to great
effect. How else do we explain his juxtaposition or linking of importunity to
being Negroid or 'niggerlike' - as he and his racist types would put it?

On Marx and the ambivalence he had tended to extend towards the abolition of
slavery, i never said that Marx was up to the day he died against the
abolition of slavery. Rather, i merely pointed out that Marx was AT SOME
STAGE opposed to the abolition of slavery in America on the grounds that it
would impede the evolutionary progress of white American males from their
working class status to a proletarian one without which the violent he had
predicted would never come to pass. This is a sharp contrast from the
position held by free trade classical liberals like Richard Cobden; who
outrightly and unequivocally condemned slavery on moral grounds and
campaigned for it to be scrapped.

Finally, i noted how in your attempts to brush aside Marx' use of the racist
jibe, 'niggerlike', you argued that it is on the same wave-lenght as Gambians
distorting the word Jew to refer to negative attributes. Where to begin? The
etymology or historical origins of 'nigger' and 'Jew'? For starters, slavery
and the subjugation of the blackman gave birth to the word 'nigger'; whilst
the word 'Jew' has always been around: as long as the ancient Hebrew scribes
have bothered to note down the history of the Hebrew peoples. Suffice to say
that the two words are dissimilar in their etymology insofar as the word
'nigger', denotes the suppression of a race whilst 'Jew' was until fairly
recently in written history largely referred to the Hebrew peoples and most
certainly didn't denote the negative attributes ascribed to it. It was the
anti-Semitism of the late 17th century that insidiously interchanged the word
'Jew' for greed and vanity. Indeed, during this period, the German word for
'Jew' - Judentum - came to derogately refer to greed in commerce and was
always in reference to Jews. It may well be the case that Gambian immigration
to Germany in the 80s and 90s is largely responsible for the reason why 'Jew'
has come refer to derogative characterics in Gambian local parlance. This is
understandable because the anti-Semitism to be still found in Germany does
interchange 'Judentum' with the age old stereotypes of Jews, like commercial
and material greed. And Gambians might have just picked it up from there.
Which is not to say that it is acceptable. This is deplorable and should be
condemned as racist. But it is more a racist of the ignorant nature than the
one Marx was engaged. Which is not to say that anyone of them is acceptable.
Point being that most Gambians using the word 'Jew' derogatively do so
ignorant of its racist permutations or connotations; whilst Marx was always
aware of the racist permutations or connotations of the word 'nigger'.

I have always said that it was never Marx' racism that had turned me against
him; rather, my objection is a philosophical one. Being a racist doesn't mean
that people shouldn't read the relevant works of Marx. The point is that we
should never engage in intellectual subterfuges and make attempts to downplay
the racism of Marx. Marx was indeed a racist creep and no amount of
intellectual scheming and subterfuges can change that fact. I hope this time
around, i can persuade you that arguing about the relevance or lack thereof
Marxism is an exercise in futility and we can move on to other topical issues
of immediate importance. Let's for now respectfully shelve this debate until
fate blesses us with a future face-to-face conversation.

All the best,

Hamjatta Kanteh

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