Karl Marx

by Jonathan Sperber

  The formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which . . . possesses a universal character through its universal suffering and raises no claims to a particular right, because no particular injustice but injustice pure and simple is done to it . . . which does not stand in a one-sided antagonism to the consequences of the German state system, but in an all-sided antagonism to its presuppositions, a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man, thus can only regain itself through the complete regaining of man. This dissolution of society as a particular [social] order is the proletariat.28

  In this paragraph, the working class appears as the moving force behind, and the subject of, history. It is the successor to Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, Bauer’s human self-consciousness, and Feuerbach’s human species essence. Marx, one could say, invented the working class for political reasons: to realize the aspirations emerging from his frustrating encounters with authoritarian Prussian rule. His political reasons were shaped by the Young Hegelians’ philosophical efforts to find a human and material version of Hegel’s cosmic unity of the development of Absolute Spirit, and by French radicals’ and socialists’ criticism of the post-revolutionary order in their country. Marx’s personal acquaintance with the actual working class, with its own suffering, actions, aspirations, and ideas, was barely beginning when he placed his revolutionary hopes in it.

  The essay concluded with an express articulation of Marx’s portrayal of the link between his philosophical-political aspirations and the working class: “The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot realize itself without the abolition of the proletariat and the proletariat cannot abolish itself without the realization of philosophy.” The final word was an articulation of the project of the Franco-German Yearbooks: “the day of the Germans’ resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallic rooster.” A forthcoming radical revolution in France would lead to an insurrection in Germany; or perhaps, as one might imagine from a native of Trier, a new revolutionary war by a revolutionary French government, along the lines of the one in the 1790s, would bring revolutionary changes to Germany.

  The goal of this even more radical revolution, the “universal human emancipation” it would bring in its wake, remained vague. The other essay of Marx’s published in the Franco-German Yearbooks, “On the Jewish Question,” began to elucidate this point, articulating for the first time Marx’s understanding of human emancipation as involving an end to capitalism. In doing so, he identified capitalism with the Jews, in derogatory fashion, so that his critics frequently charge him with being an anti-Semite. The charges have been awkward for Marx’s defenders, who have tiptoed around the essay in embarrassed fashion.29 The problem with the whole debate on the essay is the almost irresistible temptation to read it in the light of twentieth-century German history, and the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Understanding what Marx had in mind when writing the piece means removing it from the twentieth century’s totalitarian regimes, mass murders, and racial anti-Semitism, and putting it back into its original context of the 1840s—in particular, the debate over the “emancipation” or granting of legal equality to the Jews, and the linked ideas of liberal Protestant theologians and Young Hegelian philosophers on the topic.

  The essay Marx wrote was a critical review of, and commentary on, two works by Bruno Bauer, both written in 1843, in which he had opposed the emancipation of the Jews. These had stirred up a large controversy, and Marx’s comments were one small piece of a much wider debate, which Marx himself followed closely.30 Bauer’s own position, at least at first glance, seemed out of place in the question of Jewish emancipation. Much of the opposition to this emancipation in central Europe had come from political and religious conservatives, who saw both the individual German states and a broader German nationality as deeply permeated with the divinely revealed principles of Christianity, making it impossible for Jews, who rejected such principles, to be citizens or subjects with rights equal to those of Christians, or even to belong to the German nation at all. One might have expected the Young Hegelians, who perceived both divine Christian revelation and the Christian divinity it revealed as the alienated expression of humanity’s self-consciousness, to support Jewish emancipation.

  Bauer, though, employing his Hegelian interpretation of religion, took the opposite position. Christianity, he asserted, demonstrated human self-alienation in its highest form, since its divinity, its externalized and alienated human species self-consciousness, was Jesus Christ, a human being. Theological reflection on the fact that Christianity understood “man, a consciousness, as the essence of all things” led ultimately to the Enlightenment, and to the emancipatory, Hegelian critique of human self-alienation in religion. By contrast, Bauer continued, in religion the Jew “was much too concerned” with “satisfaction of natural needs . . . washings, purifications, his religious selection and purification of daily foods, that he could even think about what man is, altogether.” Jews were a particular, self-absorbed group. Their Sabbath observance was solely for them, and they found nothing wrong with letting “Christian servants or neighbors” do their work on the Sabbath, or Christian employees perform business deals. Bauer worked himself into a rage on this point, describing Jewish religious attitudes as “the mere cleverness of sensual egoism,” as “crude and repulsive,” as “hypocrisy.”31

  This particularist, self-centered religious attitude, Bauer contended, made Jews unfit for potential citizenship. Even actions by Jews demonstrating a different perspective—and Bauer referred explicitly to the argument of Gabriel Riesser that Jews had participated in the German nationalist uprising against Napoleonic rule—did not serve to qualify them, since these actions involved an arbitrary dispensation from the Jewish laws of ritual purity, and were therefore in themselves hypocritical. As Bauer put it, the Jew “is and remains a Jew, in spite of his being a citizen and living in universal human relations: his Jewish and limited essence always wins out over his human and political obligations.”32

  For Bauer, Christianity, even if it was an expression of human self-alienation, was at least a step on the road to human emancipation. Judaism, on the other hand, was a historical dead end, not even potentially compatible with human emancipation. This conclusion was the Hegelianized and radicalized version of an argument against emancipation frequently articulated by liberal Protestant theologians, the intellectual milieu from which the Young Hegelians had emerged. Such liberal theologians could not argue that Judaism was an inferior religion because Jews did not accept the divinity of Jesus, since these liberal theologians did not accept the divinity of Jesus either. Rather, they described Judaism as ethically inferior to Christianity. It was particularist, limited to a Chosen People, instead of being universally available. It was focused on the performance of ritual practices rather than on the examination of conscience and moral decision making. Germany’s liberal Protestant theologians would repeat this invidious comparison well into the twentieth century. During the mid-nineteenth-century debate on Jewish emancipation, their theological position was politicized. It was used to condemn Jewish economic practices as self-interested, immoral, and exploitative, and to assert that individuals tied to a self-centered and particularist faith could not act as citizens of a wider polity, along with people not sharing their religion. Both criteria led to a liberal opposition to Jewish emancipation.33 This attitude was one response to the question with which Heinrich Marx had wrestled for a substantial portion of his life: what would be the place of the Jews, a “nation” of the society of orders, after that society had come to an end?

  While this was a difficult question for Heinrich, his son, who had learned liberal Protestant theology both in its original form and in its secularized Young Hegelian version, had no difficulty in accepting its perception of Judaism as
a historically backward and ethically inferior religion. He wrote to Arnold Ruge in 1843, specifically in reference to Bauer’s attitudes, that the “Israelite faith is repulsive to me.” But the political consequences Marx drew from this view were the opposite of the attitudes of Bauer and liberal opponents of emancipation, namely, an explicit endorsement of equal rights for Jews.34 In his essay on the Jewish Question, Marx suggested that the very same reasoning granting Jews equal rights led to the demand that society be transformed in a communist direction. This may seem like a puzzling conclusion, but it was a result of the combination of Marx’s study of contemporary history and society done in Kreuznach, his attitude toward religion expressed in his other essay in the Franco-German Yearbooks, and his efforts to envisage a future social and political order in a space beyond the world created by the French Revolution.

  To make his point about Jewish emancipation, Marx turned to an unexpected source, the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville about the United States.35 In that country, as the French traveler had observed, a multitude of religions flourished, all of which were separated from a secular state. This “emancipation of the state from Judaism from Christianity, from religion altogether,” Marx asserted, was the “political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, of the religious person in general.” In contrast to Bauer, who understood emancipation in terms of religions’ similarity to modern, Enlightened, public-spirited, atheist ideals, Marx saw the realization of atheism in the secularization of the government. By making it possible for adherents of all religious confessions to be citizens, Marx asserted, the government was annulling religion in regard to politics and public life, just as (again explicitly referencing the United States) by introducing universal manhood suffrage, it was annulling the role of property in politics.36

  Marx was not, of course, asserting that the United States of the 1840s was a communist country, any more than it was an atheist one. Just the opposite, he noted, faithfully following Tocqueville, in private life both religion and property had a very vigorous existence. His point was to contrast the particular existences of civil society—different religions, different social classes, with different amounts and kinds of property—to the universal position of a democratic state, where all citizens were equal under the law, and all had the right to vote. If Marx had stopped there, arguing that emancipation of the Jews was part of the creation of a democratic state, and an important step in the direction of such a state, no one could have accused him of anti-Semitism. Marx, though, was not content with the contrast between a state, even a democratic and republican one, representing the universal public interest, and a civil society, where different individuals and groups, including social classes with very different amounts of property and personal possibilities, pursued their own particular interests. Rather, such circumstances, as Marx had explained in his published and unpublished accounts of Hegel’s philosophy of law, were a form of human alienation he was seeking to overcome.

  This was where Marx introduced the distinction between “political emancipation” and “human emancipation.” The latter form, abolishing human self-alienation within civil society, going beyond even the radical ideas of the French Revolution, was the “emancipation of humanity from Judaism.” Using Feuerbach’s language, Marx stated that he was concerned not so much with Judaism as a religion but with the “genuine Jew” in his practical life. Reiterating Bauer’s hostile opinions, Marx described the “worldly basis” of the Jews as “practical need, self-interest.” The “worldly cult” of the Jew was “haggling and bargaining,” the “worldly God” was money. “The emancipation from haggling and from money, thus from the practical, real Jewry would be the self-emancipation of our time.”

  Having identified Jews with capitalism, Marx conversely identified capitalism with the Jews. If egoism and practical need were principles of Judaism, they were also principles of civil society. These principles were articulated as money, “which is the essence of man’s labor and his being that has been alienated from him. That alienated being dominates him and he worships it.” This alienated world of the Jews “reaches its high point with the completion and perfection of civil society, but civil society is first perfected in the Christian world. . . . It is thus not only in the Pentateuch or the Talmud that we find the essence of today’s Jew but in contemporary society . . . not only as the narrow, limited existence of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrow, limited existence of society.” The end to this state of affairs, Marx suggested, would occur when society succeeded in abolishing “the empirical essence of Jewry, haggling and its presuppositions,” when the “conflict of individual-sensual existence with the species existence of humanity is abolished.” The very last sentence of the piece reads: “The societal emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Jewry.”37

  In this essay, Marx explicitly endorsed the view of Judaism as an ethically inferior religion, and the practical consequences of this religion for everyday life articulated by liberal Protestant theologians and their Young Hegelian interpreters. Unlike them, he did not see these ostensible moral failures as a reason to deny Jews civic rights. Instead, Marx understood the emancipation of the Jews as the implementation of universal human rights developed in the eighteenth-century French and American revolutions, interpreting these rights, as he interpreted most aspects of politics, society, and economics, in Hegelian terms.

  Marx did use this negative picture of the Jews as a way to attack capitalism. He did not, as would be the case with most anti-Semites, identify capitalism or the worst aspects of capitalism with the Jews; but he did perceive capitalism as arising out of Jewish economic practices. This perception appeared in other writings of his from the time, including his first essays on economics, the so-called Paris manuscripts. There, Marx denounced capitalists for constantly seeking to invent new products in order to get money from their customers. For the capitalist, he wrote, “every product is a bait to lure the essence of the other, his money . . . every genuine or possible need is a weaknesses which leads flies to the flypaper.” The capitalist “incites pathological desires [in his customer], ferrets out every weakness in him,” in order to receive money for the sale of his products. While today we might think of this condemnation in terms of advertising and consumer capitalism, in mid-nineteenth-century central Europe, well before the consumer era, such attacks were frequently levied against Jewish peddlers and moneylenders, who were accused of exploiting their peasant customers in just this way, by “outfitting them . . . with every possible, superfluous, useless and defective need. . . .”38

  This view of capitalism as a Jewish creation, but one not limited to Jews, reaching its high point when Christians took over “Jewish” capitalist attitudes, was common to a number of Marx’s contemporaries. Moses Hess had submitted an essay on money to the Franco-German Yearbooks, making points about Jews, money, and capitalism very similar to those Marx used in his piece. Hess’s work was not published in the Yearbooks, but Marx had read it before writing his essay on the Jewish Question. Hess had also told Arnold Ruge that following the abolition of capitalism and the creation of a new communist society, it would be necessary to guillotine “just a few . . . property owners, stubborn bankers, Jews, capitalists, landowners and landlords”—a drastic identification of Jews with a capitalist social order. Another of Marx’s Parisian acquaintances, Heinrich Heine, had described Hamburg, Germany’s preeminent commercial center, as a “city of hagglers” inhabited by “baptized and un-baptized Jews (I call all Hamburg’s inhabitants Jews). . . .”39

  Marx, Hess, and Heine all came from a Jewish background, although they had all distanced themselves from the Jewish religion. Marx is often described as a self-hating Jew, but it would be difficult to say the same of Hess or Heine, since the latter had an ironic, detached attitude toward Jewishness, and the former became a proponent of a proto-Zionism.40 It would be more appropriate to say that in the 1840s all three were living in an era when being Jewish was understood primarily in terms of
religious affiliation or as membership in a “nation” of the society of orders. Later on in the century, with the rise of Darwinist ideas, conceptions of Jews as a biologically distinct group of common descent, a “race,” whose membership was involuntary, would become the rule; but it would be incorrect to apply the intellectual paradigms of the 1880s and 1890s to the period four or five decades earlier. By mid-nineteenth-century standards of Jewishness, Marx was the least Jewish of the three. He had been baptized as a child, and received a Protestant religious education. Heine, by contrast, was not baptized until adulthood, and Hess, although breaking with his family’s Orthodox Judaism, never became a Christian.

  Marx’s identification of Jews with capitalism certainly provided ammunition for later anti-Semitic attitudes within the labor and socialist movement, but there is another aspect of his thought, more important for Marx’s own political aspirations, that the essay on the Jewish Question reveals. Marx believed that Jews should have equality of rights as citizens. Their emancipation was a goal worth fighting for, and an important indicator of a democratic political order. He also believed that the movement from a democratic and republican order to a communist one would involve eliminating from society those obnoxious Jewish characteristics that enemies of Jewish emancipation were using to disqualify Jews from citizenship in the first place. There was a certain disjunction between Marx’s initial, democratic and republican political goals and his further communist ones. The disjunction was not limited to the Jewish Question, but would run through Marx’s political aspirations as articulated in the Communist Manifesto, and would dog his efforts at political change, from the Revolution of 1848 to the Paris Commune of 1871.