******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
Most of you probably don't know who he is but I got to know him as a
regular and very smart commenter on my blog as Hylozoic Hedgehog. It
turns out that he had adopted that name after beginning to post attacks
on Larouche's movement so as to protect himself against retaliation. He
showed up after I began writing a series of posts on Larouche myself. He
is the author of a book titled "Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker
Yockey & The Postwar Fascist" that is obviously related to his interest
in the American ultraright.
The last I heard from him was on February 14th. After I had written
something about Victoria Woodhull versus Friedrich Sorge for
CounterPunch, he told me about a project he had abandoned years ago.
This will give you an idea of how consumed he could become in his research:
Hi Louis,
Some years ago, I began a huge project on Marx and the 19th century.
Although my main interest was in the "Great Game" involving England,
Russia, and the Ottoman Empire (Marx was a Turkophile), I did get
diverted into the Marx/race issue. One reason is that one centerpiece of
my study was Marx's totally obscure book Herr Vogt. Karl Vogt was a
leading scientific racist as well as an 1848 revolutionary.
In a way, this project ironically mimicked Capital, which Marx basically
gave up after Volume One. I gave up for a lot of reasons, including my
belief that I was writing for a Left that no longer existed. The deeper
I got, the more I felt this stuff was simply too esoteric for a movement
whose intellectual depth was like an inch deep. It just became too big
and too depressing.
In any case, here are three draft sections from the book. The first is
on Marx and the South and the debates over slavery. I think Marx is
awful, but he does evolve a bit from the nadir which is in the
1840s-1850s. But he is terrible.
I also began research into Engels and I spent a bit of time in
Manchester. I was trying to find out more about his firm Ermen and
Engels. They were a cotton textile firm and Engels was supported in a
way by black slave labor as the firm got its cotton from the South. At
one point, Engels was even supposed to visit New Orleans.
The second section is on the 1848 radicals and how some of them backed
the South. It goes to my investigation of Karl Vogt, a key ideologue of
scientific racism and a mentor of Agassiz if I can even remember what I
wrote. IN my book, I write as a historian and not a cheerleader. Nor did
I find much to cheer about. I entered the project inspired by Hal
Draper. At the end, I was amazed at how Draper could write five books
and Marx comes out as the hero every time. It felt preposterous.
Section three is on a weird French racial writer who believed geography
is destiny that Marx liked and Engels rightly thought was crazy.
Anyway, it's been over a decade since I abandoned the project as it had
grown so massive that it was crushing me for no real purpose that I
could see except bringing me down while further isolating me. But I'm
sending you these excerpts. If nothing else, I have a lot of great
sources in the footnotes.
Again, I have not looked at all this for over a decade. I have no idea
if I can defend everything I wrote and I'm also sending you first
drafts. Don't read it as an argument; just read it for background.
Frankly, when I was copying sections of it, I could not even remember
writing some of them. But I can see from your interest in this topic
that there may be leads or suggestions that you might find worthwhile.
Cheers,
Kevin
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
