"Cultural Marxism"

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Was Karl Marx an anti-Semite?

It is true that Karl Marx uses anti-Jewish stereotypes in his essay published in 1844. However, it is also true that Marx paraphrases these stereotypes from Bruno Bauer's pamphlet 'The Jewish Question' (1843) and turns them against Bauer. Marx's statements therefore belong in a philosophical-historical context. Admittedly, this is not easy to understand.

Dispute between Bauer and Marx - Number One: What is Emancipation?

Bruno Bauer understood the question of the emancipation of the Jews in Christian Prussia as a religious question. Jews would first have to shed their belief in chosenness in order to be recognized as equal citizens. Marx, on the other hand, understood the question of emancipation not in religious but in social-practical terms. Although bourgeois society had replaced the religious society of estates, it had not ended the oppression of the Jews, but merely perfected it. As an example, Marx cites the ban on Sunday work in France. This was no longer a Christian privilege after the July Revolution in 1830, but general law. Bourgeois society enforcing the right of Sunday by suppressing the same right of Sabbath against Judaism is the barrier to emancipation that Marx criticizes. "Would not the Jewish Sabbath have the same right?" (Marx/Engels, The Holy Family, quoted in Brunkhorst, p. 115) Political emancipation must therefore be followed by human emancipation. Marx means by this an abstract utopian ought-state.

Dispute between Bauer and Marx - Number Two: What determines social conflicts?

Marx was not concerned with Judaism in his essay 'Zur Judenfrage'. The central issue was the application of his newly developed critical method of social analysis. Judaism was only an illustrative example for this. Marx criticized Bruno Bauer for wanting to explain social conflicts on the basis of idealistic philosophical opposites. For Bauer, the core of Judaism was its religion. Marx, on the other hand, wanted to explain social conflicts on the basis of social-practical opposites. Marx wanted to trace all social developments back to human practice, including religion: "Man makes religion, religion does not make man" (MEW 1, p. 372). True to this method, Marx tries to prove the Jewish religion as the result of the practical activity of the Jews. Judaism, he argues, is first and foremost a trading people - also because of the anti-Jewish occupational bans. In doing so, he paraphrases without circumstance the stereotypes of Bruno Bauer, according to which Jews stand for money and haggling - and thus reproduces the anti-Jewish stereotypes anew.

Marx did not have an anti-Semitic world view

In his answer to Bruno Bauer, Marx thus reproduced anti-Jewish stereotypes, but he did not represent an anti-Semitic worldview. Neither in the young nor in the old Marx do Jews appear as authors, masterminds, culprits, or conspirators of the economic conditions he criticized. Other features of anti-Semitism are also absent: Personification, conspiracy theory, the division of the world into good and evil, the construction of opposing communities. Where the capitalist mode of production has come to rule, all religions are capitalist as well. It is not Judaism that produces the profit interest of bourgeois society. "Through him [the Jew] and without him" became "money the world power" (Marx, Zur Judenfrage, p. 373). Not the "religious caricature" produces the "world of self-interest", the "world of self-interest" produces the "religious caricature". (Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 375) Only liberation from the rule of private property would fully emancipate man. One can agree or disagree with this - but it is in no way anti-Semitic.

This also allows Marx's often misunderstood sentence to be understood correctly. "The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Jewry." (Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 377) Marx wants to liberate both Jews and society as a whole from both the domination of economics and the false notion of Jewishness. Jewishness or anti-Jewish stereotypes played no role in his later writings for his materialist analysis of society. In it, it was no longer the sphere of money and interest that was responsible for exploitation, but the nature of production and the distribution of the productive forces.

Marx was for the emancipation of the Jews and all religious people

In the writings where Marx actually reflected on the social status of the Jews, he advocated their unconditional emancipation. He even regarded it as a criterion for evaluating social progress: "States ... which have not yet been able to emancipate the Jews politically are ... to be shown to be underdeveloped states." (Marx/Engels, The Holy Family, MEW 1, p. 117) Marx also counters Bruno Bauer "The political emancipation of the Jew, of the Christian, in general of religious man, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, in general from religion. In its form, in the manner peculiar to its essence, as a state, the state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion, i.e., by the state as a state professing no religion, by the state rather professing itself as a state." (Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 353) This makes clear: Marx's writing is not about hatred of Jews, but rather about the emancipation of Jews in a secularized state. It must be understood as the emancipation of all religions.