Red and Black Tragedy

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Front Page Magazine:

Editor’s note: The following is a background report to Paul Kengor’s The Communist. Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor. It is written by Spyridon Mitsotakis, who is Professor Kengor’s research assistant.

Despite the rhetoric, there are few, if any, ideological movements that have caused more racism, ethnic repression and ethnic bloodshed than Communism – going all the way back to Karl Marx himself. Not long before he produced the Communist Manifesto, Marx expressed his support for “the slavery of the Blacks” in a letter to a Russian acquaintance:

There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. 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 proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

 

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. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilization. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World.

As is usually the case with Marx, his economic analysis is completely backward. As Thomas Sowell points out, societies with forced labor create an atmosphere where hard work is looked down upon, thereby ruining a society’s potential by stigmatizing the work necessary to realize that potential – something that had for a long time produced a noticeable difference in the prosperity of northern states to the poverty of former slave states.

In addition to his support for slavery, Marx was also a racist. Expressions of bigotry by Marx were so frequent they could fill a whole book – and in fact, they have. Former Communist Nathaniel Weyl filled 283 pages with examples of Marx’s hatred in his 1979 book, Karl Marx, Racist.

Even though American Communism itself has had limited influence, it has had lasting effects on the poor economic and social status of black Americans.