Материал: Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

Marx had brought with him from Kreuznach an essay entitled 'On the Jewish Question', a distillation of his reading the previous summer on France and America. His central problem was still the contemporary separation of the state from civil society and the consequent failure of liberal politics to solve social questions. The question of Jewish emancipation was now of general interest in Prussia where, since 1816, the Jews had enjoyed rights far inferior to those of Christians. Marx himself had been thinking about this issue for some time. As early as August 1842 he had asked Oppenheim to send him all the anti-semitic articles of Hermes, editor of the Kolnische Zeitung, who favoured a sort of apartheid for Jews in Germany. Marx made little use of this material but in November 1842 Bauer published a series of articles on the problem in Ruge's Deutsche Jahrhiicher. Marx considered that Bauer's view were 'too abstract',42 and decided that a lengthy review would be a convenient peg on which to hang his criticism of the liberal state. In his articles Bauer had claimed that, in order to be able to live together, both Jews and Christians had to renounce what separated them. Neither Christians nor Jews as such could have human rights: so it was not only Jews but all men who needed emancipation. Civil rights were inconceivable under an absolute system. Religious prejudice and religious separation would vanish when civil and political castes and privileges were done away with and all men enjoyed equal rights in a liberal, secular state.

Marx welcomed Bauer's critique of the Christian state, but attacked him for not calling into question the state as such - and thus failing to examine the relationship of political emancipation (that is, the granting of political rights) to human emancipation (the emancipation of man in all his faculties). Society could not be cured of its ills simply by emancipating the political sphere from religious influence. Marx quoted several authorities to show the extent of religious practice in North America and went on:

The fact that even in the land of complete political emancipation we find not only the existence of religion but its living existence full of freshness and strength, demonstrates that the continuance of religion does not conflict with or impede the perfection of the state. But since the existence of religion entails the existence of a defect, the source of this defect can only be sought in the nature of the state itself. On this view, religion no longer has the force of a basis for secular deficiencies but only a symptom. Therefore we explain the religious prejudice of free citizens by their secular prejudice. We do not insist that they abolish their religious constraint in order to abolish secular constraints: we insist that they abolish their religious constraints as soon as they have abolished their secular constraints. We do not change secular

questions into theological ones: we change theological questions into secular ones. History has for long enough been resolved into superstition: we now resolve superstition into history. The question of the relationship of political emancipation to religion becomes for us a question of the relationship of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by criticising the secular construction of the political state without regard to its religious weaknesses.43

Thus political emancipation from religion did not free men from religious conceptions, for political emancipation was not the same as human emancipation. For example, citizens might still be constrained by a religion from which a state itself had broken free. What Bauer had not realised was that the political emancipation he advocated embodied an alienation similar to the religious alienation he had just criticised. Man's emancipation, because it passed through the intermediary of the state, was still abstract, indirect and partial. 'Even when man proclaims himself an atheist through the intermediary of the state - i.e. when he proclaims the state to be atheistic - he still retains his religious prejudice, just because he recognises himself only indirectly - through the medium of something else. Religion is precisely man's indirect recognition of himself through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and his freedom.'44

Similarly with private property: in America it had been abolished as far as the constitution was concerned by declaring that no property qualification was necessary for voting. But this, far from really abolishing private property, actually presupposed it. The result was that man's being was profoundly divided:

When the political state has achieved its true completion, man leads a double life, a heavenly one and an earthly one, not only in thought and consciousness but in reality, in life. He has a life both in the political community, where he is valued as a communal being, and in civil society where he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, degrades himself to a means and becomes a tool of forces outside himself.45

Political democracy was not, however, to be decried. For it was a great step forward and 'the final form of human emancipation inside the present world order'.46 Political democracy could be called Christian in that it had man as its principle and regarded him as sovereign and supreme. But unfortunately this meant

man as he appears uncultivated and unsocial, man in his accidental existence, man as he comes and goes, man as he is corrupted by the

whole organization of our society, lost to himself, sold, subjected to domination by inhuman conditions and elements - in a word, man who is no longer a real species-being. The fantasy, dream and postulate of Christianity, the sovereignty of man - but of man as an alien being separate from actual man, is present in democracy as a tangible reality and is its secular motto.47

Having shown that religion was more than compatible with civil rights, Marx now contested Bauer's refusal to acknowledge the Jewish claim to human rights, the rights of man. Bauer had said that neither the Jew nor the Christian could claim universal human rights because their particular and exclusive religions necessarily invalidated any such claims. Marx refuted Bauer's view by referring to the French and American Constitutions. Firstly, he discussed the distinction between the rights of the citizen and the rights of man. The rights of the citizen were of a political order; they were expressed in man's participation in the universality of the state and, as had been shown, by no means presupposed the abolition of religion. These rights reflected the social essence of man - though in a totally abstract form - and the reclaiming of this essence would give rise to human emancipation. Not so the rights of man in general: being expressions of the division of bourgeois society they had nothing social about them. As exemplified in the French Constitutions of 1791 and 1793 and in the Constitutions of New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, the rights of man did not deny the right to practise religion; on the contrary, they expressly recognised it, and Marx quoted chapter and verse to prove it.

Marx then asked: Why are these rights called the rights of man} Because they were the rights of man regarded as a member of civil society. And why was the member of civil society identified with man? Because the rights of man were egoistic and anti-social. This was the case with all the constitutions in question, even the most radical; none succeeded in subordinating 'man' to the 'citizen'. All the rights of man that they proclaimed had the same character. Liberty, for example, 'the right to do and perform what does not harm others', was, according to Marx, 'not based on the union of man with man but on the separation of man from man. It is the right to this separation, the right of the limited individual who is limited to himself.'48 Property, the right to dispose of one's possessions as one wills without regard to others, was 'the right of selfishness... it leads man to see in other men not the realisation, but the limitation of his own freedom'.49 Equality was no more than the equal right to the liberty described above, and security was the guarantee of egoism.

Thus none of the so-called rights of man went beyond the egoistic man separated from the community as a member of civil society. Summa-

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P A R I S

rising some of the more detailed analyses of his Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx showed that political emancipation involved the dissolution of the old feudal society. But the transition from feudal to bourgeois society had not brought human emancipation: 'Man was not freed from religion; he was given religious freedom'. Marx finished his review by declaring:

The actual individual man must take back into himself the abstract citizen and, as an individual man in his empirical life, in his individual work and individual relationships become a species-being; man must recognise his own forces as social forces, organize them and thus no longer separate social forces from himself in the form of political forces. Only when this has been achieved will human emancipation be completed.50

In the same article Marx included a much shorter review of an essay by Bauer entitled 'The Capacity of Present-Day Jews and Christians to Become Free' which was published in Herwegh's Twenty-one Sheets from Switzerland. Bauer's theme was that the Jew was further removed from emancipation than the Christian: whereas the Christian had only to break with his own religion, the Jew had also to break with the completion of his religion, that is, Christianity: the Christian had only one step to make, the Jew two. Taking issue again with Bauer's theological formulation of the problem, Marx developed a theme that he had already touched on in the first part of his article: religion as the spiritual facade of a sordid and egoistic world. For Marx, the question of Jewish emancipation had become the question of what specific social element needs to be overcome in order to abolish Judaism. He defined the secular basis of Judaism as practical need and self-interest, the Jew's worldly cult as barter, and his worldly god as money. He stated in conclusion:

An organisation of society that abolished the presupposition of haggling and thus its possibility, would have made the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would dissolve like an insipid vapour into the real live air of society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognises this practical essence of his as void and works for its abolition, he is working for human emancipation with his previous development as a basis, and turning himself against the highest practical expression of human selfalienation.51

The Jew had, however, already emancipated himself in a Jewish way. This had been possible because the Christian world had become impregnated with the practical Jewish spirit. Their deprivation of nominal political rights mattered little to Jews, who in practice wielded great financial power. 'The contradiction between the Jew's lack of political rights and

his practical political power, is the general contradiction between politics and the power of money. Whereas the first ideally is superior to the second, in fact it is its bondsman.'52 The basis of civil society was practical need, and the god of this practical need was money - the secularised god of the Jews:

Money is the jealous god of Israel before whom no other god may stand. Money debases all the gods of man and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal, self-constituted value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, human as well as natural, of its own values. Money is the alienated essence of man's work and being; this alien essence dominates him; and he adores it."

Judaism could not develop further as a religion, but had succeeded in installing itself in practice at the heart of civil society and the Christian world:

Judaism reaches its apogee with the completion of civil society; but civil society first reaches its completion in the Christian world. Only under the domination of Christianity which made all national, natural, moral and theoretical relationships exterior to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, tear asunder all the species-bonds of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-bonds and dissolve man into a world of atomised individuals hostile to one another.54

Thus Christianity, which arose out of Judaism, had now dissolved and reverted to Judaism.

Marx's conclusion outlined the idea of alienated labour that he would shortly develop at length:

As long as man is imprisoned within religion, he only knows how to objectify his essence by making it into an alien, imaginary being. Similarly, under the domination of egoistic need he can only become practical, only create practical objects by putting his products and his activity under the domination of an alien entity and lending them the significance of this alien entity: money.55

It is largely this article that has given rise to the view that Marx was an anti-semite. It is true that a quick and unreflective reading of, particularly, the briefer second section leaves a nasty impression. It is also true that Marx indulged elsewhere in anti-Jewish remarks - though none as sustained as here. He was himself attacked as a Jew by many of his most prominent opponents - Ruge, Proudhon, Bakunin and Diihring; but there is virtually no trace of Jewish self-consciousness either in his published writings or in his private letters. An incident that occurred while Marx was in Cologne throws some light on his attitude: