Karl Marx

by Shlomo Avineri

  Philosophy is the head to this emancipation, and the proletariat is its heart. Philosophy can only be realized by the abolition [Aufhebung] of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only abolish itself [sich aufheben] by the realization of philosophy.

  These philosophical undertones are also echoed in Marx’s much later contention that the proletarian revolution will ultimately lead to the “abolition [Aufhebung] of the state”: this is meant not just as an administrative abolition of state institutions but as a claim that, once the proletariat realizes the universal message of the state as representing universal norms and not particular interests, there is no need any more for a separate institution.

  This ultimate relationship between theory and praxis is foreshadowed in the DFJ essay in what looks like a throwaway phrase but is obviously most central to Marx’s argument about the link between philosophy and historical agency:

  The weapon of criticism cannot of course replace the criticism of weapons. Material force has to be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force when it takes hold of the masses.

  Philosophy to Marx is not an academic disciple, but a vehicle for ultimate historical change, not—as he will state a bit later—just interpreting the world, but changing it. He starts with Hegel but then transcends him.

  RELIGION AND OPIUM

  Few of Marx’s statements are as famous—and, of course, draw both great admiration and scathing criticism—as his assertion that “religion is the opium of the people.” But few of those who quote it, whether approvingly or dismissively, are aware of the context in which it appears. And the context suggests that it is both more complex and more profound than its mere quotation as a staccato laconic judgment may suggest.

  One of the aims of Marx’s DFJ essay on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is his attempt to distance himself from the mainstream of the Young Hegelians, like Bruno Bauer, who had focused their writings on the critique of religion. Like many other Young Hegelians, Bauer came from a Protestant background, initially deeply anchored in theology: this, obviously, was not where Marx came from.

  To Marx, a critique of religion misses the point both philosophically and socially. Marx agrees with Feuerbach that religion is a human construct (“man creates religion, religion does not create man”). Religious thought does indeed reflect human conditions, but according to Marx these have to be viewed in concrete historical contexts, not in the abstract.

  Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being situated outside the world. Man is the world of man, the state, society. This state, this society, produce religion, an inverted world-consciousness, because they are an inverted world.

  Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in a popular form … its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.

  This historization of religious phenomena is the significant move from the critical theology of Feuerbach (and later, Søren Kierkegaard) to Marx’s historically-anchored social criticism. Marx then concludes powerfully:

  Religious suffering is at the same time the expression of real suffering and also the protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless condition. It is the opium of the people.

  Empathy, not scorn, for the suffering religious human being is what comes through very clearly here: religion is both the expression of human conditions of suffering but also a protest against them; it is not just a quietistic acceptance of quasi God-ordained suffering, but also a protest against this suffering. People seeking solace in religion are not just poor souls bamboozled by cynical ecclesiastical or political authorities: opium may not be the medicine that puts an end to pain, but it certainly alleviates it and has to be accepted and respected. At the same time, religious thinking is also a protest against inhuman conditions: “The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of the vale of tears, of whose halo is religion. … The critique of heaven is the critique of earth.”

  The analogy to opium is telling and has methodological consequences: opium may alleviate pain, but it is not a cure. Similarly, a critique of religion, much as it may point to real suffering, does not and cannot be a solution to human suffering: this can only be found, not in a critique of religion, but in an action-oriented, transformative critique of “this state, society.” Merely criticizing religion, without trying to identify the concrete social conditions that give rise to it, is to Marx shadow boxing, and unlike many other radicals, he finds it a waste of time. The battle has to be engaged against real social conditions, not against religion, which is just an expression of them. To use a later term of Marx, religion is part of the superstructure, and true radicalism has to go to the roots, to the social and economic infrastructure. This is the moment Marx parts company with the other Young Hegelians, whose trajectory continues to focus on a critique of religion: to Marx this is an exercise in futility. In a different and much more complex way, this is also his argument in the other DFJ essay, “On the Jewish Question,” to which we turn now.

  3

  “Zur Judenfrage”

  SUPPORT FOR JEWISH EMANCIPATION AND CRITIQUE OF JUDAISM

  MARX’S “ZUR JUDENFRAGE” [On the Jewish Question], published in 1844, is ostensibly a review and critique of Bruno Bauer’s two tracts on Jewish emancipation that were published in the early 1840s. Yet it is a much more multilayered treatise, in which Marx not only argues against Bauer’s views on Jewish emancipation, but also develops his own fundamental critique of the limits of the ideas and achievement of the French Revolution (“political emancipation”) as against the more radical “human emancipation.” Together with Marx’s other DFJ essay, on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, this is the first presentation of his radical critique of Left Hegelianism, calling for a socialist revolution carried by the proletariat.

  In his two essays, Bauer argued that so long as the Jews maintain their separate religion, they should not be granted equal rights. Basing his position on the Hegelian concept of the political realm, Bauer argues that the Jews cannot, on one hand, claim the universal right to participate in public affairs, and at the same time keep their particularistic identity as a religious community. Only if they give up their separateness and convert to Christianity, which is after all a universal religion, can they claim equal rights.

  Marx finds this position unacceptable, and one cannot overlook that there is a passion in Marx’s argument: it is obvious that he finds offensive Bauer’s insistence on conversion as a condition for equal rights. As noted before, we do not know how much the circumstances of Heinrich Marx’s conversion were discussed in the Marx household, but they obviously could not have been totally unknown, so Bauer’s insistence on conversion—even if, after converting, Jews may transcend Christianity by adopting a universal critique of religion—did touch upon a personal level of experience, and it would be only natural that Marx could not remain totally oblivious of this.

  The strong language of the first sentence of Marx’s essay clearly suggests his more than purely theoretical engagement for Jewish emancipation and his insistence that the issue is political and not religious: “The German Jews desire emancipation. What kind of emancipation do they desire? Civic, political emancipation.”

  The multifaceted aspects of Marx’s essay are also highlighted by its internal structure: the essay is presented by Marx in two distinct parts. Part 1 is a complex philosophical argument, steeped in Hegelian terminology, against Bauer’s position, which denies the Jews as they are equal rights; here Marx develops his views of “human emancipation,” which is a coded
reference to social revolution, going beyond the mere political emancipation of the French Revolution. In this part Marx argues for equal rights for the Jews in the existing bourgeois society and harshly criticizes Bauer for excluding the Jews from society unless they convert: this, to Marx, is a proof that Bauer wasn’t yet free from his Christian theological anti-Jewish prejudices and still viewed Judaism as an inferior religion. Marx’s support for Jewish emancipation and equal rights is clear, and it is in this part that he describes the difference in the status of the Jews in different countries—in the German lands, in France, and in the United States. Referring to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, he asserts that only in the United States, with its separation of state and religion, did the state fully emancipate itself from religion: at the same time, individuals are still deeply religious since, he argues, the alienation inherent in bourgeois society has not been overcome.

  While Part 1 is a straightforward support for Jewish emancipation, Marx’s essay became controversial, if not notorious, because of Part 2: this is where he expresses some extremely critical views about Judaism, identifying it with capitalism. It was this part that led some critics of Marxism during the Cold War to label Marx an anti-Semite or a “self-hating Jew,” while making socialists, and especially Jewish socialists, extremely uncomfortable (a full Hebrew translation of “Zur Judenfrage” appeared only in 1965). The gap between the two parts of the essay may easily lead to a cognitive dissonance, on one hand, and misinterpretation on the other. This calls for a critical and nuanced reading of the totality of the two parts of the essay taken together.

  Marx’s argument in Part 1 of the essay is clear: the issue is one of political rights and is not a religious or theological question. He agrees with Bauer that current society is far from being fully free, but argues that the point is not the theological differences between Christianity and Judaism, but the rights of people who because of Christian triumphalism have been discriminated against and persecuted. Moreover, Bauer does not, according to Marx, distinguish between political emancipation, which entails among other things the separation of state and religion, and human emancipation, which will eventually liberate all humankind from the very need for religion, which to Marx (as he stated in the essay on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right) is “both the expression of real suffering and the protest against real suffering.” To argue, as Bauer does, that Christians can be truly freed from religion by moving one step up, while Jews have to move two steps (embracing Christianity first), is a regression to theological scholasticism.

  Most of Part 2 of “Zur Judenfrage” has a totally different tone. Here Marx launches an extreme and sometimes vituperative attack on Judaism. Had he published only Part 1 of his essay, he would be remembered as a champion of Jewish emancipation and equal rights; Part 2 has largely pushed the liberal political argument of Part 1 into the shadow and gained for Marx the reputation of a hater of Jews.

  Part 2 opens with Marx reiterating his main argument against Bauer—that the issue is one of political rights, not of theology:

  Let us consider the real, worldly Jew [den wirklichen, weltlichen Juden], not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jews.

  Such a sensible suggestion would appear to call either for an analysis of the role Jews play in contemporary society or of the way their real conditions of life are reflected in their religious beliefs and practices. But none of this follows. What follows is a rhetorically powerful onslaught on Judaism, totally devoid of any real social analysis of what Marx has just called “the everyday Jew,” or of Jewish religious precepts. The lines are memorable for their staccato cadences:

  What is the secular [weltlicher] cult of the Jews? Huckstering [Sacher]. What is his secular God? Money … What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism. The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] …

  Money is the jealous God of Israel, in the face of which no other God may exist. Money degrades all the Gods of man and turns them into commodities …

  The God of the Jews has become secularized and has become the God of the real world. The bill of exchange is the real God of the Jew. His God is only an illusory bill of exchange …

  The chimerical nationality [Nationalität] of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

  The more one reads this vehement indictment, couched in almost biblical language, the more it becomes clear that Marx is writing about something beyond actual, living Jews. Despite his insistence that one should discuss “the everyday Jew,” there is no reference to actually living Jewish people or their living conditions. Similarly, there is no mentioning of their religious practices—the reason, apparently, because Marx was totally ignorant of both, never having either experienced them directly or independently studied them. The only reference to any Jewish religious precept is the snide remark that Judaism has made “even the lavatory an object of divine law.” This alludes to an obscure Jewish practice of thanking the Almighty after any ablution for supplying the human body with orifices, since otherwise human beings would perish. This is a thanksgiving prayer even most religious Jews may not be aware of; how did Marx come to know of it? A fair guess is he probably picked it up in the schoolyard of his Protestant humanistic Gymnasium.

  Yet it is obvious that Marx is aiming at much more than “everyday Jews” when he goes on to write:

  In North America the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of commerce and the bankrupt businessman deals in the gospel just as the gospel preacher, who has become rich, goes for business deals.

  Whatever one thinks of this passage, it is obvious that this is not about Jews or Judaism: after all, there were very few Jews in the United States at the time. It is, as he himself admits, about the fact that “Money has become a world power [Weltmacht].” Marx further maintains that it is the Christian world which is the actual realization of what he has just identified with Judaism:

  Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society reaches its perfection. … Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has now been dissolved into Judaism.

  From the outset, the Christian was the theorizing Jew, the Jew is therefore the practical Christian, and the practical Christian has become a Jew again. Christianity has only in semblance overcome real Judaism. …

  Christianity is the sublime thought of Judaism. Judaism is the vulgar practical application of Christianity; but this application could only become general after Christianity as an accomplished religion had achieved theoretically the alienation of man from himself and from nature. Only then could Judaism achieve universal domination. …

  If Marx’s words on Judaism are harsh, his indictment of Christianity as the source of universal human alienation because of the rule of money is even harsher.

  Is Marx writing in code? Probably. When he ends Part 2 of his essay with the resounding and—in retrospective, ominous—words that “the social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism,” his message is much wider: it is about the emancipation of modern society from the power of money, from capitalism (though he carefully avoids the term). This is not to exculpate Marx or excuse him from the utterly unacceptable language he is using regarding Jews and Judaism: but he says similar things about Christianity in the modern world.

  Given modern European history, Marx’s language about Judaism is inexcusable. Yet the historical context in which he was writing should not be overlooked.

  The first point is that if Marx
was writing in code, the code was known and understood by his contemporaries. In German parlance of the time, Judentum also stood for commerce, trade, huckstering in general, just as the English verb “to jew” (now excised from the Oxford English Dictionary) used to mean “to cheat.” So when Marx says that American society is the apotheosis of the power of “Judaism” or that society should be emancipated from the thrall of “Judaism,” there is a subtext here: contemporary readers would recognize that he was not writing just about Jews. Fear of censorship might also have convinced Marx to use the colloquial Judentum rather than “capitalism.”

  Second, and ironically, Marx’s identification of Judaism with capitalism has a paradoxical literary origin. It appears for the first time in Germany in an article by Marx’s socialist colleague Moses Hess called “On Money” [Über das Geldwesen], which was published a year later but, as has been clearly established, Marx had read in manuscript form before writing his own essay. Unlike Marx, who as his own essay shows was quite ignorant of all matters Jewish, Hess, who never converted to Christianity, went to a religious Jewish school, knew Hebrew, and was conversant in Jewish religious practices. In his article Hess identifies Judaism historically with money and a money-based culture; he even speculates—through a highly spurious etymological analysis of the Hebrew words for blood (dam) and money (damim)—that Judaism was initially connected to human sacrifices, which were later converted into cash penalties. Blissfully, Marx did not adopt this nonsense, but basically follows Hess’s identification of Judaism with money. Yet there is a deeper irony here: many years later, in 1862, in Rom und Jerusalem: Die lettzte Nationalitäten Frage [Rome and Jerusalem: The Last Nationality Question], Hess called for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine and became one of the forerunners of modern Zionism. Hess’s intellectual journey is another example of the convoluted and tortuous route of many Jewish nineteenth-century intellectuals in the age of both emancipation and rising nationalism.