I just wanted to speak to Chris B's and James F's discussion of Marx's "On The Jewish Question".
Here's an important part:
"The state as state annuls private property, for example, as sonn as man declares in a political manner that private property is abolished, as soon as he abolishes the requirement of a property qualififcation for active and passive participation at elections, as has happened in many North American states. Hamilton interprets this fact from the political standpoint quite correctly: 'the masshaves thus gained a victory over the property owners and monied classes'. Is private property not abolished ideally speaking when the non owner has become the lawgiver for the owner? The census is the last political form of recognizing private property. "And yet the political annulment of private property has not only not abolsihed private proerty, it actually presupposes it. The state does away with differece in birth, class, education, and profession in its own manner when it declares birth, class, education, and profession to be unpolitical differences, when it summons every member of the the people to an equal participation in popular sovereignty without taking the differences into consideration, when it treats all elemetns of the people's life from the point of view of the state. Nevertheless the state still allows private proerty, education and profession to have an effect in their own manner, that is as private property, as education, as profession, and make their particular natures felt. Far from abolishing these factual differences, its existence rests on them as a presupposition, it only feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality by opposition these elements... "The perfected political state is by its nature the species life of man in opposition to his material lfie. All the presuppositions of theis egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside of the sphere of the state, but as proper to civil society. . When the political state has achieved its true completion man leads a double life, a heavenly one and an earthly one, not in thought and consciousness but in reality, in life. He has life both in political community, wheree he is valued as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, treats other mane as means, degrades hmself, to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. The political state has just as spriritual an attitude to civil society and overcomes it in the same manner as religion the limtiiations of the profane world, that is, it must likewise recognize, it, reistate it, and let itself once more be dominated by it. Man in the reality that is nearest to him, civil society, is a profane being. Here where he counts for himself and others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man counts as a species being, he is an imaginary particpant in an imaginary sovereignty, he is robbed of his real life and filled with an unreal universality."
But in these North American states which Marx prefers to Prussian rule, property qualifications were not soon abolished; black codes, grandfather clauses and literacy tests were imposed. On a racially discriminatory basis, families were not allowed the privilige of reunification and quotas on immigration were directly imposed--so entry into the political state remained racially biased and hardly universal. Women's entry into the political state was delayed by almost 75 years (?) after Marx wrote these words, and gays were similarly excluded from the polity.
The cooperative and universal species life allowed or the illusion allowed thereof by the putatively perfected political state in the north american states has always marred by an exlusivist logic-- at times only a few steps aways from barbaric racial utopia taken to its logical conclusion in Germany, 1933-1945 (see Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945).
Rogers Smith reviews the North American history in his Civil Ideals.
What Marx intimates here is nontheless helpful. Chris B has introduced projection/introjection into the discussion. Here Marx seems to underline what is projected onto political life due to its denial and frustration in bourgeois civil society. It is almost as if Marx is suggesting that the state serves needs once met in religion itself reduced to merely a private affair in the secular world of money, contracts and profits.
Perhaps in the modern, rationalized, and secular world; the state serves the need for membership in a communal grouping through which one's immortality is secured. The late Detlev Peukert has argued this in his study of the eschatological needs meet by the Nazi state.
If political membership has had such a religious function, then perhaps it becomes explicable why such exclusions have *de facto* haunted the state; through such exclusions to the polity, the citzenry frees itself from those elements that would compromise its strength, salvation and immortality.
The logic of the modern nation state is thus less "unreal universality", as Marx would have it, but barbaric racial utopias through which community and immortality or the illusion thereof are secured.
yours, rakesh