I believe there is ample evidence to make a strong case that Karl Marx was both an antisemite and a racist. That does not, of course, settle the broader question of how these attitudes should be understood in the context of nineteenth-century Europe, nor does it diminish the importance of distinguishing between Marx's personal prejudices and the substance of his economic and political theories. But the evidence for the prejudices themselves is difficult to dismiss.
Here is Marx in his own words.
It is difficult to interpret this passage from his 1844 essay On the Jewish Question in any other way:
“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.… Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities.… The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.… The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”
The language is plainly hostile and relies on stereotypes associating Jews collectively with money, commerce, and financial exploitation. There is considerable scholarly debate about whether Marx's On the Jewish Question should be classified straightforwardly as an antisemitic text in the modern sense, particularly because Marx was attacking what he regarded as the social and economic structures of his time rather than simply making a theological argument against Judaism. Nevertheless, the antisemitic imagery he employed is unmistakable.
Here is Marx again, in an 1856 article entitled The Russia Loan:
“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.”
Again, the language is difficult to defend as anything other than a negative stereotype of Jews. Marx was not merely criticizing an individual Jewish financier; he was generalizing about Jews as a group.
There is also evidence of racial prejudice in Marx's writings.
In Revolution in China and in Europe (1857), Marx wrote:
“It would seem as though history had first to make this whole people drunk before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity.”
The passage is referring to the Chinese and reflects a distinctly contemptuous characterization of an entire people.
Marx also made comments about slavery that can be deeply uncomfortable to modern readers. In a letter to Engels, he wrote:
“As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of (the) proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.”
He went on:
“Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry.… Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.”
This passage requires some qualification. Marx is primarily making an economic and historical argument about the relationship between slavery, colonialism, cotton production, world trade, and industrial capitalism. He is not necessarily expressing approval of slavery as a moral institution. Indeed, his broader writings contain extensive criticism of exploitation and slavery. Nevertheless, his description of the “good side” of slavery and his reduction of the institution to an economic category can certainly strike the modern reader as profoundly disturbing.
There are also examples of Marx expressing a form of German cultural superiority. In a contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, reviewed by Friedrich Engels in Das Volk on August 6, 1859, Marx wrote:
“The Germans have long since shown that in all spheres of science they are equal, and in most of them superior, to other civilised nations. Only one branch of science, political economy, had no German name among its foremost scholars.”
Again, this is not necessarily evidence of racial theory in the strict sense. It is more accurately described as national or cultural chauvinism. But it is relevant when considering Marx's broader attitudes toward different peoples and nationalities.
The larger point, therefore, is not that Marx was uniquely prejudiced by the standards of nineteenth-century Europe. He was certainly not. Nor is it that his economic theories can simply be dismissed because he held prejudices that we would regard as racist or antisemitic today.
The more interesting question is whether we should acknowledge the contradiction between Marx's universalist political aspirations and the prejudices expressed in some of his private and published writings.
Marx envisioned a society in which class divisions, exploitation, and economic domination would ultimately disappear. Yet some of his writings contain sweeping and derogatory generalizations about Jews, Chinese people, Slavs, and other groups. His personal correspondence also contains language about particular individuals that is unmistakably racist and sometimes viciously antisemitic.
It is therefore perfectly reasonable to conclude that Karl Marx expressed both antisemitic and racist attitudes. The more complicated historical question is what weight we should give those attitudes when evaluating Marx as a political philosopher, economist, and historical figure.
That distinction matters. We should neither pretend these passages do not exist nor assume that their existence, by itself, settles every question about Marx's intellectual legacy.
Additional Reading
Nathaniel Weyl, Karl Marx: Racist.
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