2025/06/11 by Anisha Sankar · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Political Economy and Marxism #Political and Social Issues
paper · doi:10.1080/1462317x.2025.2514922
openalex publication_date 2025/06/11 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/16
This paper considers racial slavery to be a problem for the Marxist philosophy of history. I begin with an exploration of the “peculiar historicity of race” in the way racial slavery is accounted for in the value-form. Then I read for how Marx (and Engels) rely on a teleological ‘necessity’ to describe the revolution between slavery and communism. This is followed by engaging Marx’s “positive debt to Hegel” qua the latter’s speculative theology. In inheriting this debt, racial abstractions at work in the Marxist philosophy of history emerge as an obstacle to theorizing the racial quality of racial slavery, accounting instead for only its historiographical and/or economic conditions, which implicates how communism is thought. To conclude, I argue that a return to Hegel surfaces the way that race comes to constitute the very substance of historical movement itself: race is the condition of possibility for history at all.