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Gender, Race and Marx's Whiskers

Roediger, David
http://solidarity-us.org/atc/195/marx-roediger/

Publisher:  Against the Current
Date Written:  01/07/2018
Year Published:  2018  
Resource Type:  Article

Roediger juxtaposes James and Marx quotations and discusses the iimplications for how Marx’s limits and his forward motion regarding race and gender might be understood together.

Abstract: 

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Excerpts:

One point of departure is the gendered language in both quotes. They both unsurprisingly posit "men" as the history makers. For Marxists there is ample reason to desire to push this to the side as inconsequential and/or as a mere convention of the language of the time(s).

Thus, I myself have a record of simply silently correcting the gendered language of a Marx, James, or W.E.B. Du Bois by silently shoving words outside quotations — thus men and women "make their own history." Elsewhere I have resorted to awkward, graceless brackets: "[wo]men make their own history." You know, bringing things up to date.

While defensible in some ways -well, not the brackets -such amendments cause us to minimize the extent to which humanity's nightmares weighed on the brains of a James or a Marx too. An eloquent acknowledgment of this came when James himself followed up on a 1971 talk at Atlanta’s Institute of the Black World on "How I Wrote Black Jacobins" four days later with "How I Would Rewrite Black Jacobins."

Things do change, the world does teach, and we do get to move beyond boundaries.

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