The Fathers of Communism Were Racist

From The Daily Signal.com (July 13, 2020):

There are plenty of good reasons to abandon the teachings of Karl Marx.

Chief among them is how Marx’s noxious communist ideology has led to suffering and death on a mass scale and has been the ideology at the heart of some of the most brutal and inhumane dictatorships of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Unfortunately, some still try to peddle communism as right in principle if troubled in implementation.

Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the outbreak of protests and then riots across the country, Black Lives Matter the organization rose quickly alongside black lives matter, the statement.

Patrisse Khan-Cullors, a founder of the Black Lives Matter organization, had no problem defining herself and at least one of the two other founders, Alicia Garza, as “Marxists.” (Opal Tometi is the third founder.)

“The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame,” Khan-Cullors said in a 2015 interview with Real News Network. “Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists.”

In addition, there is no question that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has a radical and Marxist agenda, if one goes by its official 2015 platform, which calls for the end of the nuclear family, among other extremist suggestions.

It’s interesting to see this organization embrace Marx at a time when so many are calling for a historical reckoning for wide swaths of once-venerated heroes.

We’ve seen an explosion of calls to remove symbols of America’s past in the name of “anti-racism.”

Previous generations and historical figures have been subjected to a ruthless “presentist” standard by which almost all fall victim.

But if George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Theodore Roosevelt must fall, why not the fathers of communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels?

Though Marx and Engels are perhaps most known for their ideas about class conflict and revolution, they both dabbled in theories—increasingly popular at the time—about race and racial hierarchies.

Not only that, but their private correspondence demonstrated an even larger degree of hostility to black-skinned people, as their writings were littered with racial slurs.

In an 1887 letter, Engels wrote that blacks were closer to “the animal kingdom” than the rest of humanity, in a reference to his mixed race son-in-law. [read more]