Not Just Capital and Class: Marx on Non-Western Societies, Nationalism and Ethnicity

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Notes

1. For reasons of space, I have largely eschewed references to the wide-ranging commentaries on Marx on the issues under discussion here. These and other related issues are discussed in my Marx at the Margins (2010).

2. Although this was a multilinear theory of history, it did not directly address contemporary societies like India and China under the impact of capitalism and colonialism.

3. Few editions of Capital – and none in English – take these textual variants seriously. One exception is the recent Persian translation, which carries the alternate texts from the French edition as marginal notes (Marx 2008). Primary translator Hassan Mortazavi's introduction is available in English: http://iranianvoicesintranslation.blogspot.com/2009/07/translators-preface-to-new-persian.html

4. See also the non-Marxist Saul Padover's collection, often translated with greater fluidity (Marx 1972).

5. Although I refer to the standard edition of this letter in MECW, I have altered the translation after consulting the German original. I will do so occasionally below with respect to texts originally written in German or French.

6. Elsewhere, especially in Capital, he lashed out against the brutal massacre of the indigenous population by the American colonists, an issue not addressed here.

7. In a letter to Engels of August 7, 1862 that was marred by the use of the n-word (in English in the midst of a German sentence), Marx hit out strongly on this point: “A single nigger-regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves” (MECW 41: 400). This is an instance of Marx using a racist phrase to make an anti-racist point. This use of the n-word was revealed to readers of English in Padover's edition (Marx 1972) and was subsequently included in MECW; it had been rendered as “Negro” in Marx and Engels (1937).