Humanistic Perspectives on History and Society: Marx and Race

"What shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro?," Du Bois once asked. His answer was that "it must be modified," not because Marx was wrong but because Capital is one of the four "books in the world which every searcher for truth must know." To know Capital to be true, in this seminar, is to understand how Marx, after the American Civil War, learned to include in his work the most brutal facts of capitalism: chattel slavery, servitude, and extraction in colonies across the globe. "Race," and everything signified by this four-letter word, completes Marx's own expansive account of modernity.