Determinism

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Fri Jun 28 22:30:58 PDT 2002



>by the way, does anyone care to comment on Marx's anti-Semitism? or have
>i missed that discussion?
>
>R
>

Read Hal Draper's discussion of On the Jewish Question to deflate that particular myth. This is in his big four volume work KM's Theory or Revolution, I think in an appendix to one of the first two volumes. The long and short of it is that Marx opposed Moses Hess's position of dealing with disenfranchisement of Jews by giving them group rights, and urged instead that all people be given civil and political rights; but he felt that this would not solve the democratic deficiencies as long as society was based on commerce--this was a very early formulation, pre-Marxist, as it were. He thought that Hess was ignoring the social and economic problem. Because he was writing at the time (1843) as a Young Hegelian, in the context of the critique of religion, he expressed himselself in those terms, leading to some unforunate formulations ("dirty Jewish" and the like). But there is abolsutely nothing in Marx's life or later writings to lead one to think that he was an anti-Semite like Bakunin (to name one), who hated Jews or thought they should be treated worse than non-Jews. He hated religion of all sorts of course. jks

_________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list