>Every Marxist knows of Marx's negative view of the Jews. 'Their God is
> money
> ', he wrote. Naturally, he was not a racist and believed that a person of
> Jewish origin (like he was) can break with the Jews. [...]
>But these people
> (like Trotsky, Marx or Spinoza) do not belong to Jewry. Moreover, they
> speak
> up against 'the Jews'...
[...]
>Instead of proclaiming unity of the Jews with the rest of the
> ruling
> classes, the Left should promote strife among them. The sad developments
in
> Palestine, the quagmire of the Iraqi War provide an opportunity for the
> Left. From this point of view, Lyndon La Rouche the Democrat and Buchanan
> the Republican should be supported in their fight against the Jewish
Lobby.
Perhaps I am misreading something, but according to my understanding of Marx's "The Jewish Question", from which Shamir gets his quote, it was in fact a DEFENSE of the Jews in opposition Bruno Bauer's argument against their political emancipation.
Marx points out that what was signified in the ‘Jew’ is actually universal in ‘Christian’ society; it in fact is an intrinsic part, if not the core of the society:
“Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another” (Marx: 1844)
It is through the externalizing and projecting onto the Jew, both on an ideological level and in practice (where historically only non-Christians could take interest payments and such), of the idea of greed and the essence of commercialism, that the perception of social cohesion is continued:
“Just as man, as long as he is in the grip of religion, is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something ‘alien’, something fantastic, so under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of and entity—money—on them.” (Marx:1844)
Marx is saying that it is the designation and placement of ‘Jew’ in the symbolic matrix, which allows the system itself to function. The naturalization of the egoistic man, and his codification through the Rights of Man can be seen as functional on a social level only through the expulsion of the dross onto something which is seen both as internal and external to that society--in this case the Jew. This reading of Marx is backed by his connection, on the one hand, of Christianity and Judaism as merely two sides of the same coin, which are really the same thing:
“Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism; Judaism is the common practical application of Christianity.” (Marx: 1844)
On the other hand, this can be seen in Marx’s statement on the core definition of Judaism (and here we have the quote from Shamir):
“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.” (Marx: 1844)
Going back to the above statement, we now see the connection: “in the grip of religion [a man] is able to objectify his essential nature only by turning it into something ‘alien’.” (Marx: 1844)
By projecting the materialist aspects of life onto the ‘Jew.’
And further: “under the domination of egoistic need he can be active practically, and produce objects in practice, only by putting his products, and his activity, under the domination of an alien being, and bestowing the significance of an alien entity--money--on them.” (Marx: 1844)
Again by externalizing these onto the ‘Jew.’