My somewhat recent interest in Zionism as a political movement and the reinvigoration of my very old interest in Nazism, led me to read a work by Marx that is infamous to say the least. For Post-Modernists it's just more confirmation of Marx's racism and for Zionists it's just more proof that Marx was a "self-hating" Jew despite the fact that he was raised a believing Christian and identified as an Atheist. Many Socialist countries did not even teach this particular work in school, and to be honest it's not a necessary work for understanding Marxism. Its possible that it is impossible to take this work as it was originally intended especially with our foreknowledge of a coming Nazi Holocaust in Germany. However, the outbreak of Israel's fascist pogram against Gaza has again put the 'Jewish question' back in the headlines. Or at least the appearance of one, as what seems like a "Jewish" question in the post-Holocaust era is just the Zionist question and only that. However, for me this work is interesting as an explication of Early Marx's views on Civil Society and dealing with internal contradictions in German society, in this case a religious one. Marx evaluates Bauer's rejection of the call for a specifically Jewish emancipation. As Marx summarizes Bauer: "The Christian state knows only privileges. In this state, the Jew has the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which the Christians do not have. Why should he want rights which he does not have, but which the Christians enjoy?" How can Jews ask to be citizens of a state that only recognizes privileges? When they ask to be treated in the same manner as Christians, will they give up the 'privileges' afforded to them as Jews? In that case their asking for the abolition of the Christian State and Bauer suggests they give up their religion and work for the universal emancipation of mankind and Germany. Marx summarizes again: "On what grounds, then, do you Jews want emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the state religion. As citizens? In Germany, there are no citizens. As human beings? But you are no more human beings than those to whom you appeal." And here again he summarizes a sentiment no less foreign to the secular Left than it is to Christian philanthropists: "We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others." While whether Bauer's attitude is inherently anti-semitic is debatable, he at least comes to a correct and admirable conclusion: "The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion."
Notice that this conclusion is quite different from Nazism program of elimination. It proposes to abolish organized religion in general and not judaism or christianity in particular, which I largely agree with. It does not advocate the physical elimination of anyone, though its not hard to see where it could be abused. To do away with oppression and misery of the Jews, it would be best for Jews to join with Christians to eliminate the Christian state. It's not hard to see where this point of view may take a patronizing bent. However, Bauer simply asks for the State to quit recognizing Christianity and Judaism from the erroneous point of view that once they are removed from their relationship to exclusive state power and civic society is made independent of anyone's whim, they will simply decline and decay. Maybe it isn't so irrational given widespread atheism, indeed we must all act in public as if God is Dead in order to respect the laws of the state. And this precludes the discussion on whether Theism or its aftermarks are still ideological operative across wide swaths of society and culture. It could even be argued that the so-called Jewish Question is on its way out, with only 14 million followers and dwindling prospects for expansion, it seems like Judaism is losing what a follower of Dawkins would call the war of memes. However, now that 'question' has been supplanted by Islam with its billion+ followers, allegedly the fastest growing religion. But I am of the opinion, given the often unnoticed secularization of the Islamic World, particularly the Middle East, that Islam may simply be the smallest loser, not the greatest expander. The "growth" is not coming from Islam's expansion into new lands but rather by population growth in Old Lands where criticism of theocratic movements, states, and culture is growing. We're not simply seeing a political abolition of religion such as what Bauer demanded, but the growing social and cultural decline of religion in regions where political forms of religion remain openly operative. Marx decodes the Bauer's meaning here: "On the other hand, he quite consistently regards the political abolition of religion as the abolition of religion as such. The state which presupposes religion is not yet a true, real state."
The true modern state is the agnostic state or deist state, like the idol of Concordia under which Roman traders and Citizens of many faiths all paid tribute to in their turn, the state's impartiality to religion is a product of its supremacy over it. Pluralism simply means submission to the state idols, and to that end commerce and exchange of commodities and even people that the state finds to its interest. Like money, deference to the state is a kind of universal commodity of exchange which makes all religions under its domains, if not mutually intelligible than at least mutually hospitable within the realm of commodity exchange. This is of course pure Hegel, those who focus on the early Marx and his 'humanism' generally do not treat deeply Hegel or his dialectic. Those who adhere to the late Marx find his youthful Hegelian side to be inconsistent with his later clinical diagnostic work, and therefore either Marx's materialist dialectic is emphasized or it is accompanied by a rejection of dialectics. Then like the debate on who ruined the Russian revolution it always comes down to the real and imagined failures of Stalin, Lenin, Engels, with Marx remaining the prophet whose pure message was 'distorted'. Only open and visceral anti-communists perceive a flaw present from the very beginning and most of these analysis are not enlightening, consisting mostly of propaganda with footnotes to quote Grover Furr. It is my personal belief that only an enchanted, supple, dialectical materialism of the kind expounded by Mao, who to be honest, had a much clearer grasp of dialectics than Marx, can save "Marxism from the Marxists" as that old saw goes. In the final instance, it will be the only way we can save Marx from the Anti-Communists, as the flaws of Marx's social democratic conception of the transition to communism is ripe for appropriation by social-fascists. That is not excluding your average tumblr social justice warrior.
It's key to realize that when Marx wrote "On the Jewish Question" in 1843, he was the ripe old age of 25 and so he is ripe for thrashing from social justice warriors because he shared some chauvinist conceptions popular at the time. Nowhere in Europe was there actually universal male suffrage, Germany would be the only country with universal male of suffrage in 1914. So many of these issues might seem tangenital or theoretical to those living at the time. However, as a stand in, Marx analyzed the conditions of America in this period, where there was universal male suffrage for whites in the North and found:
Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has become the legislator for the property owner? The property qualification for the suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to private property. Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it. The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education, occupation, to act in their way – i.e., as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of theirspecial nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being.In other words, when non-property owners elected the membership of the bourgeois state, they act in such a way to perfect the conditions of their exploitation by extirpating all the particular feudal customs and lifestyles that had hitherto governed life. Industrial Britain, which was more industrialized than the United States at the time, after centuries of economic development and multiple revolutions only slowly started to separate and take apart these barriers. But Britain was by far the state were the modern state was least contested and the most stable environment for the development of property, especially in Europe. Absolute monarchy could've had a similar 'leveling' factor in principle, due to the elevation of the King above all subjects, and thus their relative equality in comparison to his God-like point of view, but the reality of this is hard to know without more historical research. In America, the non-propertied population "voted themselves a farm" to quote Lincoln's electoral campaign. So they turned themselves into miniature capitalists by using the state to appropriate vast quantities of Indian land. However, in the South this actually led to the most profitable agricultural real estate in the country being grabbed by slavers. America's great class of petty farmers rose and fell, in inverse proportions to that of Big Business which is entitled to expect the same treatment from the state as the small peasant. Neither have, legally speaking, particular privileges such as what would've been laid out underneath the Feudal State. However, the development of capitalism often in proportion or slightly behind that of parliamentary rule (and itself in proportion or behind democracy) leads to the internal ruin of the societies that it overtakes. It magnifies inequality to unheard of positions, it leads to an idiotic state of affairs where subconsciously poor workers and peasants are treated much like billionaires, at least in theory, by the state. In other words, the spread of what Hegel would call 'absolute freedom' within the realm of commerce and occupation, even within the political sphere leads to its negation under capitalism. Engels describes at length the origin and ironies of this kind of equality:
The demand for liberation from feudal fetters and the establishment of equality of rights by the abolition of feudal inequalities was bound soon to assume wider dimensions, once the economic advance of society had placed it on the order of the day. If it was raised in the interests of industry and trade, it was also necessary to demand the same equality of rights for the great mass of the peasantry who, in every degree of bondage, from total serfdom onwards, were compelled to give the greater part of their labour-time to their gracious feudal lord without compensation and in addition to render innumerable other dues to him and to the state. On the other hand, it was inevitable that a demand should also be made for the abolition of the feudal privileges, of the freedom from taxation of the nobility, of the political privileges of the separate estates. And as people were no longer living in a world empire such as the Roman Empire had been, but in a system of independent states dealing with each other on an equal footing and at approximately the same level of bourgeois development, it was a matter of course that the demand for equality should assume a general character reaching out beyond the individual state, that freedom and equality should be proclaimed human rights And it is significant of the specifically bourgeois character of these human rights that the American constitution, the first to recognize the rights of man, in the same breath confirms the slavery of the colored races existing in America: class privileges are proscribed, race privileges sanctified. (Anti-Duhring)Aside from Lenin's brilliant inquiry into the economic origins of Modern Imperialism, this is for us a brilliant exposition of how equality could be sanctified for some in some countries while practicing the most cruel and dictatorial colonialism. It also gives us the spiral trajectory of the beginning, development and the abolition of bourgeois equality as we know it. Third Worldists have described the process by which relatively slight divergences (by modern standards) in economic fortunes between nations turned into vast gulfs, with workers in the richest and poorest countries sustaining a gap of over 72:1 (over 100:1 by some accounts). The Post-WWII era which ushered in the end of formal colonialism actually brought a kind of colonialism functioning (formally and theoretically) within the bounds of equality.
Gap between Whites, Asians, and Blacks since the de jure fall of apartheid.
As seen by the chart, its very possible for things to actually get worse since the advent of formal bourgeois political equality. In dollar terms, black south africans are doing better, but inequality is worse than it was under the apartheid regime and there are immiserating factors of post-Aparteid ANC capitalism that we will not treat here which are often not considered by dollar terms. Hence, we should be very wary of movements desiring simply formal legal political equality. While sometimes necessary, the democratic state can be an effective tactic of exploiting and repressing the people, precisely when they allegedly control the bourgeois means of oppression. If Palestinian Revolutionaries aren't careful this could be a graph of the future under a liberal democratic one state regime. The only solution is the abolition of the settler state not its democratization.
