Engels chides socialists for their Anti-Semitism

In a letter from 1890, Karl Marx’s colleague takes up the widespread anti-Semitism in their movement.

My favorite line: “anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture.” (Still true 130+ years later.)

Further from Engels:

“Hence anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that. The very fact of its existence in a region is proof that there is not yet enough capital there.”


Written: by Frederick Engels, April 19, 1890; SourceKarl Marx and Frederick Engels Correspondence 1846-1895, London 1934; First published: in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, No. 19, May 9, 1890.

Related: My primer on Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, in the Philosophers, Explained series.

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