File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0108, message 116


From: "Paul Bowman" <paul.bowman-AT-totalise.net>
Subject: AUT: RE: Proudhon -  hard core anti-semite
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 10:56:51 +0100


Fabian:
> As for Marx, his "On the Jewish Question" is clearly a gratuitous
> racialisation of economic categories which has more basis in his family
> circumstances than in reality. <snip...>. Marx's weakness in this area is
rooted in
> integrationist secularism which needs to be thoroughly
> criticised,

Two things:
1. it is worth pointing out what Marx was arguing against in his piece
entitled "On The Jewish Question", namely Bruno Bauer's arguments against
those campaigning for abolishing the Prussian State's specific oppressive
laws against the Jewish population. In other words, Marx was actually
defending the campaign for Jewish "civil rights" (to put it in late 20th
century terms) against Bauer's rather contorted use of "critical" reason to
defend a reactionary position. Bauer was the one posing secularism as a
pre-condition to "integration" (a position that, as far as I can make out,
seems to have interesting parallels with the official CP/trades union(ist)
line on Northern Ireland, but I digress...).
2. Unfortunately the online Marx archives do not have proper footnotes (at
least not the one at www.marxists.org if anybody knows an online source with
good footnotes, please let us know) but from what I can recall of my books
at home, the use of "Judentum" as a synonym of usury was in common use at
the time of writing, so the "gratuitous racialisation of economic
categories" appears to be a feature of German society at the time, rather
than Marx. The fact that he played on these double meanings to expose his
theme that total liberation could not come through civil rights or liberal
reform of the state (secular or no) alone but must involve a radical
transformation of the economic order, may seem horrendously ill-judged from
our historical perspective - but I think it probably needs to be
contextualised a bit.

> by it is
> altogether of a different order from proudhon exterminationist
> anti-semitism.

agreed.



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