Through a Telescope Darkly: Marx and Slavery

Abstract

Conventional text-and-context approaches operate within a biographical genre that removes Marx from his “everyday” self as he was “in his own times.” This is because the reception of Marx as a thinker controls these familiar narratives teleologically. This article argues that this path-dependency obscures the political activism that was immediately important to Marx and his comradely associates, whereas an “everyday” approach to over-familiar texts by Marx can yield surprising and counter-intuitive results. In this way I use overlooked comments on slavery from an activist text of the 1840s to challenge common claims and commonplace exculpations—that Marx’s thinking was unself-consciously Eurocentric, even racist.