Marx & the Jewish Question

James Farmelant farmelantj at juno.com
Wed Feb 17 11:03:10 PST 1999


On Wed, 17 Feb 1999 08:02:39 +0000 Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org> writes:
>At 12:39 16/02/99 Greg Nowell wrote:
>>I've been reading Szporluk at the instigation of Rakesh
>>and came across a rather disconcerting paragraph on
>>Marx and the Jewish question. I wonder whether anyone
>>could fill me in a bit more on Marx's views.
>
>
>I regard "On the Jewish Question" as one of the most difficult and
>seminal
>of all Marx's work. On the surface the problem is whether some of his
>remarks, transposed across time and space to the present, are
>anti-semitic.
>I will leave that till later.
>
>The more important feature is its dialectical analysis of civil
>society.
>Contrary to soft Gramscianism (of which I am in many ways an
>adherent),
>civil society is not just a wide sphere for the contesting of
>ideological
>hegemony alongside the struggle for political power. Certainly some
>gains
>can be made by persistent and imaginative use of the possibilities,
>and a
>few weeks ago Hinrich Kuhls posted an interesting lament from
>capitalists
>about how "civil society" is used as a banner to harass their diligent
>and
>productive efforts.
>
>But "On the Jewish Question" clearly shows Marx analysing civil
>society as
>the necessary counterpart of the triumph of commodity exchange. The
>individual members of bourgeois civil society are as essentially
>fragmented
>as commodities in a large capitalist market. They attempt to preserve
>their
>fragmented individual bourgeois civil rights, finding themselves in
>constant battle with everyone else. He contrasts this more "sensuous"
>and I
>think by implication, interdependent social relationships, which
>perhaps
>might be found in an alternative society.

Marx in his "On the Jewish Question" presented one of his earliest critiques of liberalism. His analysis obviously owes much and builds upon Hegel's analysis of civil society. Marx among other things exposes the inadequacies of rights talk, and of what Isaiah Berlin would have called "negative liberty" - that is liberty as the absence of coercion. As Chris points out Marx always retained the essentials of this analysis and it is echoed in his _Critique of the Gotha Program_.


>
>Lest anyone think that this difficult text is better pushed to the
>back of
>the shelf as an aberration of Marx in his early developmental phase
>(it
>certainly was developmental and grew out of criticism of others, as
>did all
>his work), notice the echoes of the same analysis 40 years later in
>the
>critical references to bourgeois right in the Critique of the Gotha
>Programme.
>
>Therefore I submit if we are fully to orientate ourselves in the even
>more
>complex global civil society that is sweeping across the world, it is
>essential to have a dialectical understanding of the possibilities and
>the
>difficulties. Otherwise we are just radical bourgeois democrats. (Not
>bad
>as human species go, but lacking direction).

Chris seems to be echoing some of the themes that Andy Austin has been pursuing in regards to globalization. Andy sees globalization as a confirmation of predictions that Marx had made concerning the longterm evolution of capitalism a 150 years ago in The Communist Manifesto.


>
>I would also add that this essay by Marx has some very important
>dialectical observations about religion, which make it clear that
>religious
>motivation should not be treated with contempt by dialectical
>materialists
>even though there are many mechanical materialist marxists who do so.
>
>I am deliberately coming last to the controversial passages suggestive
>to
>our eyes of anti-semitism.
>
>The work is laden with sarcasm and irony. The significance of
>particular
>passages is very difficult to discern without understanding the whole
>context. Real scholarship needs to be done by university departments
>(probably more than one) into this article together with the series of
>polemical articles at the same time on the same theme, preferably
>including
>an analysis of his opponents.

I would suggest that in "On the Jewish Question" the passages that seem to be anti-Semitic examplify Marx's dialectical irony. Marx plays upon the popular identification of the Jews with commerce and the commercial spirit and he shows that commercialism is an increasingly dominant feature of modern society. Christians are by no means immune to commercialism. On the contrary those anti-Semites who were most strongly opposed to Jewish emancipation (on the grounds that Jews were "money grubbers" and "economic parasites") were themselves most infected with the commercial spirit. Marx can be seen as exposing the role of projection (to use a Freudian term) that underlied much of the anti-Semitism of the day. What Christians most hated in themselves, such as greed they projected onto the Jews. As I read him Marx turns the anti-Semitic prejudices of his day on their head by showing that gentiles possess all the negative qualities that they attribute to the Jews. For Marx all this was the consequence not of the qualities of individual persons or groups of persons but of the social relations of production.

Marx's language is hardly P.C. by contemporary standards. In light of the Holocaust it is difficult to play off anti-Semitic stereotypes the way that Marx did. It should be pointed out that Marx was hardly the only Jewish intellectual of his time who wrote about the Jews in this manner. Marx's friend, Moses Hess, the man who converted Marx to communism and the man who is considered to be the father of Socialist Zionism, often used similar language in his own writings.


>
>Furthermore I would posit that although Marx was not a social
>anthropoligist as we now know them, nor a member of a department of
>psycho-social studies, he had a keen understanding of symbolic social
>roles. I will jump to recall a comment in the early years of
>marxism-space
>(1994-5) from a wise old member of the South African communist party,
>who
>said that when trying to explain capitalism to the people of
>indigenous
>African descent in the prevailing language (I cannot remember whether
>it
>was Xhosa or Zulu) the nearest word was linked etymologically to that
>of jew.
>
The Belgian Trotskyist Abram Leon, during WW II, attempted to develop a Marxist analysis of the Jews that built upon Marx's "On the Jewish Question" and upon Kautsky's writings. One of his theses was that in pre-capitalist societies, Jews flourish in the insterstices as merchants and money-lenders, activities that in such societies were reserved for pariah groups. As capitalism developed, there developed a class of Christian capitalists who began to move into these niches that had been previously reserved for Jews, the result was an explosive growth in anti-Semitism as the new Christian bourgeoisie attempted to eliminate the Jewish competition.

Leon held that historically the Jews were a a kind of nation-class which in pre-capitalist societies occupied roles in commodity exhange that were parasitic on the existing mode of production.


>I would suggest a wider explanation of these far flung facts has to go
>into
>the special, precarious, and creative role the jewish community played
>in
>precapitalist societies (as did also the merchants) with special
>license to
>go outside the conventions of social solidarity expressed in the usury
>laws. As a separate community suspected of its own internal
>communications
>and special form of trust, at times of economic crisis, the mistrust
>between them and the majority community would become acute and was in
>great
>danger of being expressed in antagonistic form.
>
>In his article Marx places the political thrust of his criticism
>actually
>against crude assimilationism into the all engulfing bourgeois civil
>society. But Marx also criticises the distorted roles that the Jewish
>community have come to hold, and I would suggest he is struggling too,
>to
>express its highly contradictory role as symbolising capitalist
>accumulation in the distorted image of individual greed.

Marx's polemic was in large degree directed against his friend Bruno Bauer who had argued against Jewish emancipation on the grounds that it was a diversion from the real struggle for human emancipatation. Marx held on the contrary that the struggle for political emancipation including the struggle for Jewish emancipation was a necessary precondition for human emancipation.


>
>I have not rechecked the text before writing this and I would be in no
>position to have an extensive discussion about individual passages
>with
>anyone who wanted to argue that Marx must be denounced as an
>anti-semite.
>But we have to use e-mail as a collective endeavour and maybe others
>can
>take this forward if necessarily critically.

Marx certainly made use of anti-Semitic language in a way that would be hardly acceptable for us but it must be kept in mind that when he used such language there was always a strong element of dialectical irony.


>
>
>I do think any serious published scholarly analysis should probably
>discuss
>the contradictions of Marx's own position. Marx was the dearly loved
>son of
>an accomplished member of the German intelligentsia who happened to be
>of
>Jewish extraction who got the best educational chances his father gave
>him
>(cf Einstein and his father who was actually a small capitalist and
>similarly rather rebellious in an indirect way). He takes his place
>without
>equivocation among the foremost intellectual thinkers of the European
>intelligentsia. That is what he claims and that is what he does not
>yield
>ever.

An even more interesting comparison might be with the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was the son of a Jewish industrialist who had converted to Catholicism (just as Marx was the son of a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Lutheranism). Wittgenstein was like Marx similarly conflicted over his Jewish heritage. As a schoolboy he read the book _Sex and Character_ by the young Austrian Jew, Otto Weininger who had killed himself in accordance with the arguments laid out in his book. Weininger, among other things condemned what he saw as the cultural decadence of his times which he associated with Jewishness. Wittgenstein was profoundly influenced by Weininger's book, and he remained a lifelong admirer of him. He too shared with Weininger a conflicted view of his own Jewishness. In other words Marx's conflictedness over his Jewishness was hardly unique to himself but seems to have been characteristic of a broad stratum of emancipated Jewish intellectuals in central Europe of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The sources for this must be sought out by analyzing the contradictory nature of their position in society.

Jim Farmelant


>
>This was an intellectual climate in which respect and esteem were
>often
>expressed in social or personal attributes. Also affection: Engels
>customarily called Marx, "Moor" (not "Jew"). To pose the question that
>there was a latent racism if not anti-semitism in Engels' towards Marx
>implied in this superficially friendly epithet, I suggest is to be
>transhistorical.
>
>Marx would however have carried within him some of the painful
>contradictions, and it may be that some of the wording in "On the
>Jewish
>Question" conveys that passion as he asserts his own identity.
>
>In this context I would like to draw attention finally to the dramatic
>assimilationist nature of his school-leaving certificate from the
>Gymnasium
>at Trier at the age of 17:
>
>"Karl Marx
>
>from Trier, 17 years of age, of evangelical faith, son of a
>barrister-at-law, Herr Justizrat Marx in Trier, was five years at the
>gymnasium in Trier, and two years in the first class.
>
>I Moral behaviour towards superiors and fellow pupils was good.
>
>II Aptitudes and diligence. He has good aptitudes, and in ancient
>languages, German, and history showed a very satisfactory diligence,
>in
>mathematics satisfactory, and in French only slight diligence.
>
>III Knowledge and accomplishments
>
>1. Languages:
>
>[Detailed comments follow in turn on German, Latin, Greek, and
>French.]
>
>In Hebrew ... [nothing is filled in.]
>
>
>I submit that this absence is not accidental. On the contrary it is
>over-determined, in both the colloquial and the more specialised sense
>of
>the term!
>
>But the more important question is the contradictory nature of
>bourgeois
>civil society and bourgeois right.
>
>
>Chris Burford
>
>London
>
>

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