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question for Marx scholars

(question asked on Misplaced Pages:Reference desk by 212.9.13.102 (02:07, 20 Mar 2004))

would appreciate help to track down a comment Marx made in Capital where he said there comes a point beyond which the further politizisation of money becomes redundant. could really use this for an essay, but need to be able to reference it. can you pin-point it in Capital?

Marx and Anti-Semitism

Anything on Marx and Anti-Semitism should also make reference to the arguments made in Hal Draper: Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype (1977)

As I read it, the article argues against labeling Marx an anti-Semite. I think the key question is, has any serious historian been able to sustain the charge of anti-Semitism? If not, I don't know that it is even worth discussing in the article. If you disagree, AH, and want to include a precis of Draper and McLellan's points, I certainly won't object, Slrubenstein

I had added something earlier, but it was removed. I was going to add this at a later date when I had some time but I have been distracted. To see more on charges of Marx's anti-semitsm read Marx's "The Jewish Quesiton". http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1844-JQ/ TDC 01:52, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I took it out, and explained why -- what you added were quotes out of context, with a misleading interpretation -- not at all what I say above, which is an invitation to include a resme of scholarly review on the matter. Your link simply goes to Marx's essays on the Jewish question -- which I have studied. It is a deconstruction of the Western discourse on "emancipation" and it is not anti-Semitic. Slrubenstein

Well, some might argue otherwise. I would also counter that the quotes were not out of contex considering the tone of the article, plus he had also written about the Jewery in several other pieces. Marx also had some shitty things to say about the Slavs. TDC 02:10, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Marx was a Jew... john 02:10, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Oh my God, I had absolutely no idea that Marx was a jew, with that Irish soundin name en all!! Well then, I suppose there is no way he could be anti-semetic then could he. TDC 02:41, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Well, the burden of proof should be higher to "prove" that a Jew is an anti-semite, shouldn't it? And "Marx" is certainly not an especially jewish name - it is a German name. Wilhelm Marx was a Catholic politician in Weimar Germany, for instance. john 02:43, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hmmm......

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

But after all, he is Jewish and after all, there is no way that a Jew could be anti-semetic ......... Norman Finkelstein , Noam Chomsky, Uni AveryTDC 02:50, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hmmmm....... am I on to a trend here? Are all anti-semeitc Jews also Marxists?

Hmmmm....... interesting ............ very interesting TDC 02:52, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Again, you're taking stuff out of context. Marx was certainly opposed to the Jewish religion because he was opposed to all religion. But beyond this, I think this is a ridiculous argument. As to Finkelstein and Chomsky, I think it's arguable that they are anti-semites, but, again, one should have pretty solid backing to make such a claim. I'm fairly certain we havan't reached that level with Marx. (BTW, my Irish-sounding name does hide the fact that I'm Jewish), john 02:53, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Like when Marx called Ferdinand Lassalle a "Juden Itzig , in a personal letter he wrote to Engles. No anti-semitism here. Marxist have been trying to explain that little diddy for years. After all, if I called someon a Jew Nigger, leftists would be falling over each other to creatively interprite my remarks to let me off the hook. TDC 03:01, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Perhaps he meant it disparagingly in a general sense without intending a specifically anti-Semetic connotation, in a way analogous to how modern gangsta rappers will describe their enemies as "no-good niggers" or some such. Does this mean that black gangsta rappers are themselves all a bunch of anti-black racists because they call people 'nigger' in a bad way? Hardly. It's important not to read too much into things. Kwertii 09:04, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Kwerti, as I have said to others -- just ignore TDC. You can't have an intelligent discussion with him. He has never responded in a serious way to anyone's comments here or on other pages. I tell him he takes quotes out of context, and he says "no I don't" and procedes to provide quotes with no context. He simply doesn't know what context is and doesn't care. He says one can interpret the quote as anti-semitic, AH provided an article explaining why it isn't, and then TDC suggests the article supports his point. He doesn't even know how to read historical analysis. Don't bother feeding trolls. Slrubenstein

What AH did was provide me an article which was nothing more than a blubbering apology for Marx. And while I may not know how to properly read and comprehend revisionist historical analysis, I have no problem reading and comprehending.

How am I taking Marx’s words out of context. The standard argument exonerating Marx’s “The Jewish Question” is that Marx is calling for the end of the Jewish class.

No, that is not the standard argument.

This, as the argument goes, is in line with Marx’s principal of class elimination and emancipation in general. This argument holds about as much water as a fishing net. Had Marx simply stated that Jews must “emancipated” be for the same reason that Christians or Lutherans (or whatever), the charges of anti-Semitism would not be all that serious.

Had Marx made such an argument he simply would have been agreeing with Bauer; but he is critiquing Bauer's assumptions about freedom and emancipation.

But Marx makes the same allegations against Jews that all anti-semites do.

No, he is invoking the allegations anti-Semites make, in order to critique them.

Are we reading the same thing? Seriously? TDC 20:20, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

His continual emphasis on the atypical, hook nosed, money grubbing, huckstering Jew is the type of stereotype that is the bedrock found in all anti-Semitism though. Can anyone here honestly say that Marx is not painting Jews with the same money grubbing, gold fiending brush that Tom Metzger does? If you accept that Marx was correct about the need for Jewish “emancipation”

No, Marx is not arguing for Jewish emancipation. Not is he arguing that Jews should not be emancipated. Either view misses the point of the argument.

then was Marx also correct when describing what the wordy religion and worldly god of the Jews was?

What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money

Marx never wrote anything attacking other races or peoples comparable to his attacks on the Jews, except the Slavs perhaps.

If the world's Marxists would turn around and plunge their heads into the legacy of what they've wrought in trying to create a better world, they would instantly drown in an ocean of blood.TDC 18:56, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I will ask you once again: Was Marx correct when describing what the wordy religion and worldly god of the Jews was?

    What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money

Dont refer me to some washed up brain dead commie zombie from Berkley , just answer the question. TDC 20:20, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

When Marx uses the word "Jew," he is not using it literally and is not refering to actual Jews, living or dead, nor is he referring to Judaism meaning the beliefs and practices of actual Jews. You misunderstand the text. Yes, we are reading the same document -- it is just that you do not know how to read. Slrubenstein

How silly of me! When Marx said Jew he must have meant what ……. dog, apricot, sissors, purple monkey dishwasher?

So Marx must be applying the term Jew to all mid 18th century purple monkey dishwashers and berating them with themes and charges oddly reminiscent in both tone and content to those applied to "Jew" (those actually of judeo-semetic ancestry as opposed to their doppelgangers in the purple monkey dishwasher community) for the past 1500 years.

 Since in civil society the real nature of the Jew has been universally

 realized and secularized, civil society could not convince the Jew of the

 unreality of his religious nature, which is indeed only the ideal aspect of

 practical need. Consequently, not only in the Pentateuch and the Talmud, but

 in present-day society we find the nature of the modern Jew, and not as an

 abstract nature but as one that is in the highest degree empirical, not

 merely as a narrowness of the Jew, but as the Jewish narrowness of society.

And I’ll be God damned if those purple monkey dishwashers don’t read the Pentateuch and the Talmud just like those Jews of judeo-semetic ancestry. With all the similarities between the two groups, it amazes me that Marx could differentiate between the two.

Money is the jealous god of Israel

And I am the one misunderstanding the text?

Are you a professional contortionist, because I have never seen someone try and twist something like that since the last time I went to the circus. I went to the circus. TDC 22:16, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

"And I am the one misunderstanding the text?"

Yes. First of all The Jewish Question was an early work by Marx written before he had developed the theory of historical materialism, if you like it was written before Marx became "a Marxist". Many of the formulations in it are crude, and backward and influenced by the context of the time. However, you have to read the work in the context of Bruno Bauer's work which it is a reply to. Bauer argues against the emancipation of the Jews. Marx is arguing in favour so he is actually polemicising against anti-Semitism.

Moreover, as Hal Draper argues in Marx and the economic Jew stereotype

There is a bulky output of literature alleging that Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question is anti-Semitic because it equates Jewry with the spirit of money-making, the merchant-huckster, preoccupation with self-interest and egoism-that is, with the commercialism of the new bourgeois order. The charge has been furthered in various ways, including forgery: one honest critic renamed the essay A World Without Jews as if this were Marx’s title. Few discussions of the essay explain clearly its political purpose and content in connection with the Jewish emancipation question, or even accurately present the views of its target, Bauer. Mainly, the allegation is supported by reading the attitudes of the second half of the twentieth century back into the language of the 1840s. More than that, it is supported only if the whole course of German and European anti-Jewish sentiment is whitewashed, so as to make Marx’s essay stand out as a black spot. This note will take up only the 1843 essay and its background.

The general method was memorably illustrated in C.B. Kelland’s 1936 novel Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, which some may know as a Gary Cooper film. In an attempt to have a hearing declare Mr. Deeds of unsound mind, two little old ladies are brought in from his home town to testify. It’s well known, one explains, that he is pixillated – balmy in the head. The honest woman’s evidence seems damning. But the case blows up later when she is asked one more question: “Who else in your town is pixillated?” She answers: “Why, everybody!”

As soon as the question is raised, it is not difficult or even controversial to show that virtually the entire population of Germany (and the rest of Europe, too) was pixillated-that is, habitually used and accepted the words Jew and Jewry in the manner of Marx’s essay whether they were favorable to the Jews’ cause or not, whether they were anti-Semitic or not, whether they were Jews or not. In this they were only following the very old, if now discredited, practice of using national and ethnic names as epithets, usually derogatory, for people showing a trait supposedly characteristic of the nation or ethnic group. This practice, which began to be suppressed in self-consciously polite society only a few decades ago, was as common in English as in any other language, and some of it still hangs on. Consider a few: wild Indian (active child), apache (Paris criminal), Hottentot (as in Hottentot morality), street arab, gypsy, bohemian, Cossack, blackamoor, Turk; or, as an adjective: Dutch courage, Mexican general, French leave. Another of this group, for centuries, has been Jew.

(...)

Marx’s essay represents a very attenuated form of the general pattern, for most commonly Jew was a synonym for usurer, whereas by this time mere money-making was eminently respectable. Bauer’s writing assumed that Jew meant usurer – quite in passing, for he was not interested in the economic Jew but in the “Sabbath Jew”. The same economic stereotype of the Jew can be found in Arnold Ruge , who remained a liberal and never became a communist, as well as in Max Stirner , whose book The Ego and Its Own heralded anarchism. These names already cover the spectrum of the Young Hegelian milieu, whose philosophic mentor Feuerbach provided the immediate example for this language about the role of Jewry.

A special case, near if not in the Young Hegelian tendency, was Moses Hess: conscientiously Jewish himself, Hess had been brought up in an orthodox household and later became the progenitor of Zionism. It is well known that the language of Marx’s Part II of On the Jewish Question followed the view of the Jews’ role given in an essay On the Money System just written by none other than Hess, and just read by Marx.

Hess’s thesis was that present-day society was a “huckster world”, a “social animal-world”, in which people become fully developed “egoists”, beasts of prey and bloodsuckers. “The Jews”, wrote the father of Zionism, “who in the natural history of the social animal-world had the world-historic mission of developing the beast of prey out of humanity have now finally completed their mission’s work.” It was in the “Judeo-Christian huckster world” that “the mystery of the blood of Christ, like the mystery of the ancient Jewish blood-worship, finally appears quite unmasked as the mystery of the beast of prey.” There is more verbiage, going back to the “blood-cult” of ancient Judaism as the prototype of modern society, and on to a condemnation of priests as the “hyenas of the social animal-world” who are as bad as the other animal-people by virtue of their “common quality as beasts of prey, as bloodsuckers, as Jews, as financial wolves”.

So if you're going to argue Marx was anti-Semitic you'll have to argue that Moses Hess was anti-Semitic as well. Andylehrer