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Did Karl Marx have a theory of race and capitalism? Not exactly, but he theorized on these issues over four decades and much of what he wrote still speaks to us today. At a time of global and U.S. struggles for liberation in the face of a deeply racialized fascist threat, these writings are worth revisiting.
Marx’s most important writings on race center on slavery, capitalism, and the U.S. Civil War of 1861–65. While some of these are widely known, like several key passages in the first volume of Capital, a number of his most important reflections can be found in his letters or the documents of the First International. Comprehensive compilations of his writings on the Civil War have appeared in several different collections over the years, starting with one published in 1937 under the auspices of the U.S. Communist Party. The introduction by historian Richard Morais (Richard Enmale, a transparent pseudonym evoking Frederick Engels-Marx-V. I. Lenin) evoked Popular Front themes like “the progressive forces of the nation” versus the reactionaries and stressed that “Marx supported the bourgeois republic in its struggle against the slave oligarchy.” In his introduction to a recently published collection of these writings, historian Andrew Zimmerman stresses instead that, for Marx, “the Civil War was not a bourgeois revolution, but a workers’ revolution carried out within a bourgeois republic that was finally undermined by that bourgeois republic.” Zimmerman also holds that Morais “emphasized unity within the Union cause rather than the disjunctures over the issues of slavery and race” that Marx “highlighted.”1
Echoes of what Marx and his radical abolitionist comrades called the “slave power”—a coalition of slaveowners, their political representatives, and the wider economic interests that profited from them—can be heard in today’s Republican Party, with its defense of a mythic white United States and a Trumpist mob’s use of the Confederate flag in its assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, during the final recording of the 2020 presidential election ballots. Largely forgotten in the debates over what amounted to a fascist coup attempt, with all the talk of two hundred years of peaceful transition of power is broken, are the events surrounding the 1860 election of the mildly antislavery Abraham Lincoln. Not only did this touch off secession and civil war, hardly evidence of a peaceful transition, but at one point an early version of January 6, 2021, also transpired. As historian Ted Widmer recounts, an eerily similar event occurred as the votes for Lincoln were to receive their final tabulation in early 1861, also in the U.S. Capitol. Egged on and organized by the proslavery politicians like the governor of Virginia, armed militias descended on the Capitol to block the tabulation. However, the existing state apparatus responded differently than in 2021, as heavily armed soldiers sealed off the area, preventing the proslavery mob from approaching.2
