Why Is Karl Marx Integral To Our Understanding Of Black History

Karl Marx has been influential in our understanding of African- (insert nationality or geographic region here) history more because of circumstance than one might imagine. His works were of the time, when in America, slavery stood as what he referred to as a “pedestal” for the wage-earning practices of Europe (Marx & Slavery). Marx spoke of the Haitian Revolution, from which other revolutionary and intelligent free men of African origin emerged, with the words he spoke like a life raft towards true freedom. One might argue that the greatest crisis of the time was the issue of slavery, especially in the western world, and there was Karl Marx, reminding everyone that the proletariat need not be the slave, but that slavery existed within the

Although slavery in the New World was not the focus of his work, slavery in the New World was a major issue of the time, and few can argue that the slave-owner/ slave relationship is a perfect example of his theory of class separation. These, then, the timing of western slaveries, the Haitian Revolt, Afro-centrism's birth, rising African intellectuals in the Caribbean and in America, all are reasons why we consider Marx integral to our understanding of “Black” history.

Our understanding of Black history begins with the Haitian Revolution and the early works of free blacks in America. When we say ‘Black’ history, or, African history, for that matter, it always begins with the Atlantic slave trade to the western world, I have found. Despite what was surely a long and storied history prior to the advent of the colonization of eastern N. America, the very question of: ‘how useful is Marx for understanding Black history’ must mean either African-American history or else French-African, etc., since there is very little understanding of ‘Black’ history prior to the slave trade capitalistic adventure between African nations and the European slave traders, and its eventual demise. In “Karl Marx on

While Marx laid out an argument that was hard to argue with, the lives and losses of such a large group in the backyards of modern Americans and Europeans holds up the mirror that defines Marxism. Cedric J. Robinson, in Black Marxism, says that the histories and “destinies’ of “African people” have been shaped by the policies and economics of European nations (72). In this context, a new idea emerges, of European nations as the bourgeois and African nations as the proletariats. A combination of colonialism, especially in Africa, India, and other ‘less European’ areas in the world, and capitalism, the constant creation of the profit, does tell the history of Blacks in America and in Europe, as well as all other points of the globe. It is almost as if the creation of capitalism itself depended on the availability of an original producer of profit with zero means of holding the