When Daniel Bensaïd died in January 2010, the obituaries written for him inside the Fourth International tried to list what he had done with Marx. There is the biography, Marx l’intempestif; there is La Discordance des temps; there is the illustrated Passion Karl Marx; there is the late, charming Marx mode d’emploi, drawn by Charb, written for young people joining the NPA. And there, in the middle of the list, almost in passing: he also published studies on concrete aspects of Marx’s thought, “like the complete critical edition of On the Jewish question”.
That is a striking place for this essay to end up. The most embarrassing text in the Marxist canon, the one his enemies quote and his followers explain away, was given its full critical apparatus by a leader of the Fourth International, in the last decade of his life, as one job among several. It is worth asking why he bothered, and the answer is the argument of this introduction.
The pieces in this volume were written by a man of twenty-five who had not yet become “Marx”. In the winter of 1843–44, newly married and newly exiled to Paris, Karl Marx helped edit a single double-issue of a journal with a hopeful, unwieldy name, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, meant to marry German philosophy to French politics. Only that one issue ever appeared. It carried these two pieces: an introduction to a longer, unpublished Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right, and a review-essay on the writings of Bruno Bauer under the title On the Jewish Question. Between them they mark the exact place where a brilliant young Hegelian stopped criticising heaven and turned to criticise the earth.
A word on the text. The major writings of Marx and Engels are long out of copyright, but the modern collected edition is a living publisher’s property, and we will not dress it up as something it is not. We have gone instead to the first English rendering of these essays, made by H. J. Stenning for the 1926 volume Selected Essays, now in the public domain. It is a translation of its period: a little stiff, fond of “man” where a later hand would write “human being”, and it renders Marx’s title-phrase as A Criticism of the Hegelian Philosophy of Right. We reproduce it honestly, as a public-domain text and not as a Progress edition.
Read the Criticism first, because it is the manifesto of everything that follows. In a few dense pages the young Marx sets down, almost as slogans, the ideas he will spend a lifetime working out. The criticism of religion is the basis of all criticism. Man makes religion, not religion man. Religion is the moan of the oppressed creature, the sentiment of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions, and then the line the whole world knows and almost always half-remembers: it is the opium of the people. Marx is not sneering at believers. He is saying that religion is at once a real expression of suffering and a real protest against it, so that to abolish the illusion you must abolish the conditions that need illusions. That the officially atheist USSR would read the opium line as a licence to persecute belief rather than as a diagnosis of why people cling to it is the first of several inversions we shall meet. The essay ends by naming the agent of the coming change: a class in radical chains, which can redeem itself only by redeeming all of society. The proletariat enters Marx’s thought here for the first time, less as an economic fact than as a philosophical necessity.
On the Jewish Question is two things at once, and honesty requires taking them separately.
The first and larger part is one of the most valuable things Marx ever wrote. Bruno Bauer had argued that Jews could not be politically emancipated until they, and everyone else, gave up religion: the state must shed Christianity and the Jew must shed Judaism. Marx turns the question inside out. Look at the United States, he says, a state with no established religion and the most religious society on earth. The state can free itself from religion without freeing its citizens from it. Out of that observation comes the distinction that runs through all his later work, between political emancipation — equality before the law, the rights of the citizen, the secular state — and human emancipation, the real freedom of people in their actual social lives. Political emancipation is a genuine advance and Marx never belittles it, but it is not the end of the road. The much-praised rights of man, he shows, are largely the rights of the isolated, self-interested individual of bourgeois society, not the rights of people bound together.
It was the working life of that distinction, not antiquarian interest, that kept bringing this tradition back to the essay. Bensaïd, asked late in life where the very idea of revolution now stood, went straight to it. The revolutionary aim, he answered, took on a more concrete content during the nineteenth century with the birth of the socialist movements, “as evidenced by the distinction established by Marx, from On the Jewish Question (1844) between ‘emancipation that is only political’ or civic (the political revolution), and ‘human emancipation’ (or social emancipation), to which the French revolutionaries of the time responded with the theme of ‘the Social Republic’ opposed to the Republic itself, which can be a Thermidorian or colonialist republic.” That is the essay doing work in an argument about Venezuela, Bolivia and the Zapatistas, a hundred and sixty years after it was printed. Every later fight over whether formal legal equality is enough, for the freed slave, the enfranchised worker, the citizen who is equal at the ballot box and unequal everywhere else, is a footnote to those pages.
Then there is the second part, and there is no use pretending it is not there. Answering Bauer’s claim that the Jews’ worldliness disqualified them, Marx accepts the era’s crudest stereotype and runs with it: the everyday religion of the Jew, he writes, is huckstering; its worldly god is money; and the emancipation of society from Judaism would be emancipation from huckstering and money. The passage equates Judaism with the money-getting spirit of commercial society and proposes to abolish both together.
This is a real blemish, and it should be named as one. It is not softened by the facts that surround it: that Marx was the grandson of rabbis on both sides; that his father had converted for a lawyer’s licence; that the equation of Jews with money was a commonplace of the German radical milieu, used by writers far cruder than Marx; that his target is plainly capitalism, for which Judaism here is a borrowed and disreputable metaphor. Context explains; it does not excuse. Our own view is the plain one: the analytic core, that money and the market corrode human relations, is Marxist and true, and the language the young Marx dressed it in is a slur he should not have used, which did real harm, and which later antisemites were delighted to quote.
The serious point is what the movement did with that page afterwards, and the answer for most of the twentieth century is: not enough. The reckoning came late and it came from the margins. Enzo Traverso’s doctoral thesis, published in 1990 as Les marxistes et la question juive. Histoire d’un débat, 1843–1943, takes its opening date from this essay and makes the whole subsequent century of Marxist writing on the Jews a commentary on it. His verdict is severe and, we think, right. Among the majority of Marx’s followers an interpretation of Marxism established itself early as a materialist conception of history dominated by the idea of a linear, necessary and natural direction of historical development. The debate on the Jewish question, he argues, exposes this better than any other, because the tendency was to treat the whole matter as something transitory that would be resolved on the inevitable path to socialism, revealing, in his phrase, “the tragic illusions of a teleological vision of history, which so profoundly marked the thinking of the official Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals”. At the origin of the assimilationism and the failure to understand antisemitism, Traverso writes, was an idea of progress in which history was a linear evolution and the development of the productive forces under capitalism inevitably brought the socialist order nearer.
The exception in that record, and the reason this tradition has some right to speak, is a book by a young man who did not survive to see it printed. Abram Léon wrote The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation in occupied Belgium and was murdered at Auschwitz at twenty-six. Ernest Mandel, who edited it, wrote the preface to the first edition under the name E. Germain, and returned to it all his life; the passage his comrades quoted at his own death in 1995 is the one asking why men of such gifts chose a movement that could promise them neither success nor glory nor honours. When Maspero reprinted Léon in 1969, Quatrième Internationale reviewed it in terms that say plainly what was at stake: at a moment when the Palestinian tragedy was flaring again and the symptoms of antisemitic degeneration were reappearing in “socialist” Poland, the reprint had, the reviewer wrote, the value of a political act, putting within reach of a new revolutionary generation a work indispensable to any Marxist approach to the subject. That is the line this edition stands in. It runs from Léon through Mandel and Weinstock to Traverso and Bensaïd, and it is a line that took Marx’s worst page seriously instead of managing it.
Here the essays turn a hard light on the regime that made Marx its founding saint. On the Jewish Question is, in the end, a plea for human emancipation, for a freedom that reaches past the law into social life. The Soviet state offered its Jewish citizens neither the political nor the human kind. Under Stalin the trajectory is a matter of record: the Yiddish culture strangled, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee’s leaders shot in 1952, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign with its barely coded targets, the Doctors’ Plot that death alone cut short, and for decades afterwards a wall against emigration and a state anti-Zionism that shaded continually into the older hatred. A country that canonised an essay on emancipation practised, against the very people named in its title, a modern version of the disability the young Marx set out to abolish.
The reflex outlived the state. The Fourth International’s press was still tracking it in 1990, when the reformed East German party, trying to make amends, had its prime minister declare that the GDR recognised the responsibility of the German people in its entirety for the crimes committed against the Jews. International Viewpoint called the declaration grotesque, and gave the reason: it merely reverses the negative essence the Nazis attributed to the Jews and attributes it to the Germans instead, and it is made by a party which, far from representing the German people in its entirety, no longer even represents its own members. What the PDS leaders had never done, the paper noted, was recognise their own responsibilities. The habit of using a collective essence to avoid a particular reckoning is exactly the habit Marx was attacking when he was at his best, and exactly the one he fell into when he was at his worst.
The canon’s handling of the essay told the same story more quietly. Where it was printed at all in the Soviet collections, the difficult second part was managed: read as pure anti-capitalism, filed among the early works a mature Marx supposedly outgrew, rarely dwelt on. The awkwardness was real. The honest course would have been to confront the passage, not to smooth it, and a state that had made its peace with the substance of the prejudice was in no position to reckon with its founder’s worst page. It took a French Trotskyist in the 2000s, with no state and no institute behind him, to sit down and produce the critical edition.
Strip away both the ossification and the ugly paragraph, and what remains here is astonishingly alive. The distinction between political and human emancipation has lost none of its edge: it tells us why winning the vote, or the law, or a seat at the table is necessary and never sufficient, why a society can be scrupulously equal on paper and savagely unequal in fact, why the market’s freedoms and human freedom are not the same thing. The critique of the merely formal rights of man is not an argument against rights, for which Marxists have shed blood, but an argument that rights held by isolated individuals against one another are a floor and not a ceiling. And the young Marx’s wager that the class most completely stripped of humanity is the one that can win it back for everyone is the moral core of the whole tradition, older and deeper than any five-year plan.
We publish the essays whole, the achievement and the failing together, because a founder worth having is one you can read with your eyes open: crediting the man who taught us to distinguish the free citizen from the free human being, and refusing him the page where he forgot his own lesson.