0
Was Karl Marx really racist?
(lemmygrad.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2023
0 points (NaN% liked)
Comradeship // Freechat
2124 readers
148 users here now
Talk about whatever, respecting the rules established by Lemmygrad. Failing to comply with the rules will grant you a few warnings, insisting on breaking them will grant you a beautiful shiny banwall.
A community for comrades to chat and talk about whatever doesn't fit other communities
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I wonder if the original German uses an equivalent term or if the translation is just off
During this period Marx's writings are very annoying to read in their original German language because he has the tendency to constantly mix in English vocabulary and expressions. He had been living in England for about a decade at this point. It seems in doing so he also adopted some of the Anglos' nasty linguistic habits.
It kinda reminds me of the polish word "Murzyn". It's pretty archaic, ethymologically come from latin "maurus" either though german "Mohr" (for people of Maghreb) or from polish "murzyć" ("to blacken something"), due to not much historical contacts it really means something roughly similar to "negro" and just as that word it was and still used in very different contexts. And due to that, it was deemed not racist enough for racists and so an entirely mirror to n-word was coined ("czarnuch", this one have only one context).
Today, it is officially (by Polish Language Council for example) unadvised to use the word "Murzyn", since it became more and more pejorative in recent 3 decades, though it's still a bit ambigous since even some black people living in Poland defended it.
Conclusion, such words can be loaded even in one's native language, and he should know better to throw in foreign slang he might heard on the street.