Marx’s novelty was siding with workers, not recognizing class exploitation

Evidence

As Foucault recounted, neither Marx nor Engels were particularly audacious when they characterized the capitalist mode of production as voraciously exploitative. As far back as the eighteenth century, David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and numerous other nonradical predecessors in the emerging field of political economy had expressed similar doubts and unease. Hegel’s economic observations of industrial capitalism were even more immediate to the studies conducted by Engels and Marx. In the late eighteenth century, with uncharacteristic brevity and specificity, Hegel recorded: “Complete mercilessness. Factories, manufacturing, base their subsistence on the misery of one class.” What was stunning in the writings of Marx and Engels, then, was not their mere recognition of class struggle but rather their sympathies in that struggle. While Kant and Hegel threw their support to the bureaucrats as that stratum which constituted what Hegel designated as the “universal class,” Marx and Engels proposed the industrial proletariat, wage laborers. But quite possibly that was less an error in judgment (as Cox supposed) than a deceit: even in their own times, notwithstanding their different historical contexts and their specific political maneuvers, it should have been obvious that Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Engels all concealed their faith in philosophy. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 77

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s stated goal of tracing the Black radical tradition’s origin by showing how Marxist theory itself was Europe-centered from the start.