Marx credited French historians for the origins of his class struggle idea

Evidence

After all, it should not be forgotten that toward the end of his life, Marx told Engels in a letter written in 1882 that “You know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle.” — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 2457

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Directly grounds Marx’s class struggle in the counterhistory of race struggle — a key bridge between race-thinking and class analysis that Islamophobia scholarship carries forward.

Related

• Marx derived the idea of class struggle from race-struggle historiography (similarity 0.95)
• Class struggle derives historically from the earlier discourse of race struggle (similarity 0.87)
• Marx treated France as the paradigm case of bourgeois revolution and class conflict. (similarity 0.81)
• The Revolution’s class struggles were reinterpreted as race history (similarity 0.80)