How “class” came to Marx – taking a longer view on “race”-“class” conjunctions and disjunctions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Contrary to some assumptions, “race” and “class” share a common genealogy, as a longer view on the history of notions of “race” and “class” will demonstrate. Elaborating concepts of “class” and of “class struggle” was one of Marx’s projects between the years 1844 and 1848. He transcribes the tropes of French Restoration and English historiography, viz. those of racially based “conquest,” into the idea of “class struggle.” Like “the war of the races” before, Marx’s idea of the fundamental social antagonism varies according to whether it is located internal to, or at the outer limits of the State. There is a third possibility, a hybrid combining both positions, in the form of “two nations.” The idea of “two nations” that had a place in the historiography of conquest, comes to the fore again in anti-colonial struggles. Where it is not subsumed under dictates of “national unity,” this archipolitical historiography instates an anti-narrativist counter-history, calling out the original injustice – as opposed to a narrative history of the present.