DSW, #5
Laura Marx, daughter of Karl and Jenny Marx, and an activist in the French socialist movement; born 26 September 1845, died 26 November 1911.
Also her husband, Paul Lafargue, author of The Right to be Lazy, born 15 January 1842, died 26 November 1911.
What’s the deal with the antisemitism of “Le droit a la paresse”?
↓ Quote | Posted 26 November, 2006, 2:07 pmI don’t remember it as an antisemitic text, but it’s a while since I read it. What were you thinking of?
Lafargue didn’t come out of the Dreyfus affair especially well, if I remember correctly: he and Guesde pushed the view that it was nothing to do with the workers, so the party should stay out of it.
↓ Quote | Posted 26 November, 2006, 3:56 pmJust two bits. First:
‘”Monsieur Bonnet, voici vos ouvrières ovalistes, moulineuses, fileuses, tisseuses, elles grelottent sous leurs cotonnades rapetassées à chagriner l’oeil d’un juif…”‘
And then:
‘Tant que le fabricant a du crédit, il lâche la bride à la rage du travail, il emprunte et emprunte encore pour fournir la matière première aux ouvriers. Il fait produire, sans réfléchir que le marché s’engorge et que, si ses marchandises n’arrivent pas à la vente, ses billets viendront à l’échéance. Acculé, il va implorer le juif, il se jette à ses pieds, lui offre son sang, son honneur. “Un petit peu d’or ferait mieux mon affaire, répond le Rothschild, vous avez 20 000 paires de bas en magasin, ils valent vingt sous, je les prends à quatre sous.” Les bas obtenus, le juif les vend six et huit sous…’
These references to “the Jew” seems to have been ommitted from the english translation at the Marxist Internet Archive, but not the French.
(See http://dialecticalconfusions.blogspot.com/2006/10/lost-in-translation.html).
↓ Quote | Posted 26 November, 2006, 10:06 pmI’m sorry, DC, that your comments get delayed before appearing on the site: the WordPress Akismet anti-spam filter, which is generally excellent, clearly thinks you’re a spammer, and so chucks your comments in the spam filter until I rescue them. I wish it wouldn’t, but I don’t think that I can do anything about it. (Usually you have to include multiple URLs or use the word “levitra” a lot in order to get filtered.)
Thanks for this: when I read The Right to be Lazy it was in that MIA version, so didn’t notice what you noticed. I’m guessing that that kind of casual anti-semitism was fairly common in the workers’ movement in the late nineteenth-century – and not just in the workers’ movement – and it’s interesting to see it coming from Lafargue, whose background was of mixed race (which is why Marx — Karl, not Laura — didn’t like him), and one of whose French grandparents was Jewish.
↓ Quote | Posted 27 November, 2006, 9:45 amI do recall from Francis Wheen’s biography Marx’s using what one would have to call some pretty vicious racist (including antsemitic) rhetoric in his more scabrous letters.
I have been wondering why my comments seemed to dissappear, as I saw it. Would it help if I put in my real email address?
↓ Quote | Posted 27 November, 2006, 7:40 pmYes — it could be that. You are supposed to enter a real email address in order to comment at the site — which doesn’t become public anywhere. I hadn’t noticed that: I thought that either the name “DC” or your IP address had somehow entered the filter’s Lexicon of Spam.
There’s quite a bit of racist (and homophobic, etc.) stuff in the Marx-Engels correspondence, in particular. I’m not sure it’s a huge deal, in what was basically a thoroughly racist and homophobic society, but some people try to make a big deal of it from time to time.
↓ Quote | Posted 27 November, 2006, 9:09 pmI’ve changed the email address, we’ll see how this goes.
Agreed that in context the casual racism isn’t that big a deal. Do people make a big deal about Engels being, if I’m not mistaken, a Manchester capitalist, or Marx employing a maid? These do seem problematic to me, if only in a small way.
↓ Quote | Posted 27 November, 2006, 10:10 pmProblem solved.
↓ Quote | Posted 27 November, 2006, 10:11 pmI’ve seen older feminist literature on Marx that makes quite a big deal out of the fact that he probably had an illegitimate child with the maid, but that was a long time ago, and I’m not sure I could stump up a reference.
↓ Quote | Posted 27 November, 2006, 10:13 pmThat doesn’t help matters, no.
↓ Quote | Posted 27 November, 2006, 11:22 pmAnd didn’t Engels have a fairly long-term affair with Mary Burns, one of the female workers in one of his father’s Manchester factories — whose sister Lizzie he eventually married, some time after Mary’s death (despite his attacking marriage as oppressive to women)? (Though actually, a quick google turns up no evidence that Mary worked in the Engels family’s factories, so the above may be inaccurate and unfair to poor old Engels)
↓ Quote | Posted 29 November, 2006, 1:12 amWasn’t it of something written by Paul Lafargue that Marx said “If that’s Marxism, I am not a Marxist”?
↓ Quote | Posted 1 December, 2006, 12:43 amAh — on the matter of Freddy, see here.
↓ Quote | Posted 6 January, 2007, 4:03 pm