The Nation, April 19, 2021
Degrees of Emancipation
Was Karl Marx also a social democrat?
By Bruce Robbins
Karl Marx never publicly referred to his Jewish background. That
background was known to all his friends, and Marx gave no sign of
wishing to deny it. But even his daughter Eleanor, who studied Yiddish
after becoming politically involved with the working-class Jews of
London’s East End, refrained from mentioning her father’s conversion to
Christianity.
BOOKS IN REVIEW
KARL MARX: PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTION
By Shlomo Avineri
As its title suggests, Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, by the
distinguished Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri, is not, in
spite of the “Jewish Lives” series for which it was written, primarily
about Marx’s Jewishness, such as it was. The book gives us, along with a
quick and readable account of the life and works, a Marx whom Avineri
takes as more useful for what he sees as our nonrevolutionary times. In
his view, Marx was less inspired by the desperation of the 19th century
working class, which cried out for immediate revolutionary change, than
by the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and justice, whose realization
might be seen as following a less pressured timetable. This fidelity to
liberty and justice, Avineri goes on to argue, came in part from his
family’s mixed experience of those ideals, dangled in front of them as
members of the Rhineland Jewish community during the French Revolution
and then jerked away in its aftermath. For Avineri, that jarring
experience inspired both Marx’s commitment to an egalitarian
universalism and his skepticism as to whether liberalism could deliver
on that commitment.
Avineri, one suspects, is also writing from his own experience, as an
Israeli and a Zionist. He reminds us in the book that he once served as
the Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sustaining
simultaneous commitments to universalism and particularism is never a
walk in the park, but it has been an absolute nightmare for the leaders
of Israel, a state that has tried to claim it is both democratic and
Jewish. Avineri, who has written important books on Marx and Hegel as
well as on Zionism, wants to stick up for the universal values of
democracy. One can only approve. But by siding with Marx’s
universalism—a universalism that Avineri links less to the international
struggle of the working class against capital than to an unrealized
Enlightenment liberalism—he ushers us gently away from the revolutionary
Marx to a more gradualist and social democratic Marx whose central
vision of change is better adapted, in the author’s eyes, to today’s
limited political horizons. The largest question the book raises, then,
is not about Marx but about the times we live in: how drastic a change
we need (thinking forward, for example, to the climate crisis, which is
not going away, or the climate-change-induced pandemic that will
inevitably come after this one) and the prospects that social democracy
offers—or doesn’t—for making it happen.
Born in 1818, Marx grew up in the Rhineland town of Trier, near the
French border. It was an eventful time for the region’s Jews. Just how
eventful can be seen from the narrative of Marx’s family name, which
Avineri has gone deep into the local archives to explore. Marx’s
paternal grandfather was born Mordecai Levi. He was the chief rabbi of
Trier, and it was during his years in office that the town was conquered
by the French revolutionary armies and annexed to France. French law was
extended to the Rhineland.
This extension of French rights and jurisprudence was truly
revolutionary. It meant that, for a brief but consequential moment, the
region’s Jewish population was emancipated and granted equal rights. It
also paved the way for greater assimilation: Mordecai Levi could (or was
encouraged to?) rename himself Marcus Levi, which eventually became Marx
Levi—the name that Marx’s father would briefly take on. It is
“intriguing to speculate,” Avineri writes, that without French
interference, “Marx would have been born Karl Levi.” He then asks,
playfully, whether “a theory called ‘Levism,’ or later
“Levism-Leninism,’” would have had the same wide appeal as “Marxism.”
As Avineri tells the story, French intervention in the fate of the
Rhineland’s Jews was not only a major factor in the lives of Marx’s
grandfather and father; it was also central to his own political coming
of age. When the French were expelled in 1814, four years before Marx
was born, the Rhineland was handed over to Prussia, and the Jewish
community of Trier suddenly had its emancipation and equal rights
revoked. Marx’s father, who appeared in the 1801 census as Heschel Lewy,
had become Henry Marx by the time he started to study law. But when
Prussia’s anti-Jewish legislation was reimposed in 1815, it once again
became illegal for any Jew to hold a position of authority over a
Christian. Thus, Henry Marx (now Heinrich again) could no longer
practice law—unless he converted to Christianity. He petitioned to be
spared conversion, but his petitions were rejected, and so he converted.
Still, Heinrich and his family remained very much a part of the Jewish
community. He served as its legal counsel; his brother took over the
post of chief rabbi; Heinrich’s wife, Henriette, was also the child of a
rabbi and did not convert until after her father died. When Marx was
born, she was still Jewish, and according to Jewish law, this made Marx
Jewish.
This is a lot of history to have left “no clue,” as Avineri puts it, in
Marx’s “enormous body of work, drafts, and correspondence.” It certainly
made its mark on his circle of acquaintances. Among the (fellow) Jews
who surrounded Marx in his days as a student was Eduard Gans, his
teacher in Berlin and a protégé of Hegel. When Gans converted to
Christianity in 1825 in order to be named a professor, Heinrich
Heine—like Marx, a Jewish Rhinelander who, according to Avineri, was
likely radicalized by the community’s bizarre experience of emancipation
tendered and then revoked—paid sarcastic tribute in a poem, “To an
Apostate”: “And you crawled towards the cross / That same cross which
you detested… / Yesterday you were a hero / But today you’re just a
scoundrel.” As Avineri notes wryly, “Heine himself converted later the
same year, and the anger (and disgust) may have been aimed at himself as
well.”
Avineri does not claim Marx as a “Jewish thinker.” He does not endorse
Isaiah Berlin’s suggestion that the proletariat was for Marx an
unconscious substitute for his repressed Jewish identity. He does not
argue that the tradition of Old Testament prophecy spoke through Marx’s
messianism, as others have maintained. When Avineri writes about, say,
The Communist Manifesto or Capital, he goes silent on Marx’s Jewishness,
and he is right in this. To do otherwise would be to overvalue Marx’s
Jewish background and undervalue his analytic genius. But Avineri does
make a compelling case that for Marx, French Enlightenment universalism
drew its long-lasting appeal from the short-lived emancipation of the
Jews of the Rhineland, which also gave Marx a standard against which to
judge the German state “as not really representing the general interests.”
This disappointment with the pretended universality of the state,
Avineri argues, made Marx both an angry critic of Hegel and an inheritor
of the ideals of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Communism would do what,
despite Hegel’s hopes, the state had failed to do. It is not news that,
as Avineri writes, “the origins of Marx’s socialism are in an internal
radical critique of Hegel’s philosophy.” But the controversy continues
over how much of Hegel he rejected and how much he retained; Avineri
sees him retaining a lot. While Marx thought he had replaced Hegel’s
idealism with a materialism centered in the deprivation of the working
class, Avineri maintains instead that, thanks in large part to the
tumultuous political experience of the Rhineland Jews, he was more
decisively swayed by Hegel’s commitment to Enlightenment universalism
than by the knowledge he acquired (largely through Engels) of the
condition of the industrial working class.
“Marx never studied directly the life condition of the modern
proletariat,” Avineri writes, and the contention clearly means a lot to
him, as he repeats it: “Marx never independently studied working-class
conditions on his own,” we read 50 pages later. If Marx was so
interested in analyzing the dynamics of what came to be called
capitalism (the word didn’t exist yet), it was largely, in Avineri’s
view, so as to understand the failure of the 1848 revolutions, which is
to say the weaknesses of an Enlightenment universalism that was rolled
back almost as soon as it was initiated. Marx’s analysis of 1848 also
gave him confidence that another Enlightenment-bearing revolution was
just around the corner—or, at the least, should be. But for Avineri,
Marx’s study of capital and its impact on the making of modern class led
him toward skepticism about revolutionary politics. Insurrections like
the Paris Commune were, in Marx’s view, premature and bound to fail.
Like other biographers, Avineri points out the irony that it was Marx’s
account of the Commune that made him famous as a revolutionary, even
though he had not participated in the Commune and indeed had developed
serious reservations about it. Only a relatively brief period of Marx’s
life, Avineri insists, was in fact devoted to revolutionary activities.
Reorienting us away from Marx’s revolutionary politics and toward a
latent philosophical universalism, Avineri then proceeds to the most
contentious part of his argument: his rehabilitation of Marx as a
philosophically minded social democrat, not merely open to the idea of a
peaceful and gradual transition to socialism but quite critical of any
recourse to violence. “Marx,” he writes, “argues that the Reign of
Terror was itself a testimony of the failure of Jacobin politics…. [A]ny
attempt to use force when conditions are not ripe for internal change
are doomed to the tragedy—and cruelty—of the Jacobin terror.” The point
could also apply to the Russian Revolution. Some Marxist prophecies have
no doubt failed, but this is one that arguably came true. On the other
hand, should we imagine Marx condemning antifa?
While there is much to admire in Avineri’s insistence that Marx can and
should remain relevant to today’s politics, there are aspects of his
commitment to social democracy that would leave readers in the dark
about some of the issues where Marxism remains most vibrantly alive. One
of the foremost is the connection between capitalism, violence, and
racism. In theory, capitalism was not supposed to need violence (as
feudalism did) in order to separate the poor from the products of their
labor. The exception, mentioned at the very end of Capital, Volume I, as
the very beginning of capital’s rule, was so-called primitive
accumulation, or colonial-style expropriation, which Marx insists is
distinct from exploitation.
Yet even if he saw violent expropriation as a precondition for
capitalism’s emergence, Marx did not insist that it would necessarily
disappear with the advent of wage labor. And as many Marxist thinkers
have pointed out, a distinctly capitalist violence has in fact persisted
into the 21st century. Colonialism, racism, police brutality, and mass
incarceration, they argue, have to be considered central features of a
capitalist system that has never been able to—and perhaps never
could—make do with exploitation alone.
As the historian Walter Johnson has shown, the textile mills of
Manchester depended on the cheap cotton grown by unwaged slaves on the
plantations of Mississippi. Likewise, the racialized prison population
of the United States gives ample evidence that violent expropriation,
premised on the denial of full political rights to some portion of the
population, is still very much alive. So too, then, is the Marx who
gives us analytic terms for it. Readers who are not alerted to this side
of Marx’s legacy are being cheated out of a valuable inheritance.
But what to make of Marx’s own engagement with Jewishness—Europe’s, if
not his own? The go-to text here is “On the Jewish Question,” Marx’s
youthful 1844 essay (he was 26), which comes in two parts. The first is
a critique of Bruno Bauer’s writings on Jewish emancipation, and it
offers the groundwork for Marx’s critique of liberalism and the limits
of formal democracy. Bauer, who in later years would write a viciously
anti-Semitic tract and became a supporter of German imperial expansion,
insisted that if Jews wanted equal rights, they would have to convert.
Marx, perhaps inspired by the pain and anger he felt at his father’s
forced conversion, took umbrage at such a demand and argued against the
need for conversion; Jews as they are deserved equal civil and political
rights.
So far, so good. But then the essay becomes, in Avineri’s words,
“controversial, if not notorious.” In the second part, Marx expresses
what Avineri politely calls “some extremely critical views about
Judaism, identifying it with capitalism.” This is an understatement:
Marx equates Jewishness with money-grubbing and adopts a particularly
pernicious stereotype, Judentum, as a metaphor for commercial society in
order to denounce it.
One might object, in Marx’s defense, that at the time this was common
practice, among Jews as well as non-Jews. Heine, a Jew who had a thing
about Jewish noses, described Hamburg as “a city of hagglers” inhabited
by “baptized and unbaptized Jews (I call all Hamburg’s inhabitants
Jews).” One might also note, as Avineri does, that “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.” In other words: OK, Jews may be like this, but so are
Christians. Under present social conditions, everyone is obliged to be
like this.
This is not a rhetorical strategy that one can enthusiastically
recommend, since it comes dangerously close to reinforcing existing
prejudices. Avineri, who does not hide how troubled he is by it,
nevertheless defends Marx. He argues, first, that Marx never talked
about actual Jewish people or Judaism but only spoke in a “code”—Judaism
standing in for the dominance of commerce—that “was known and
universally understood by his contemporaries.” And he returns to his
insistence on the trauma of the Marx family’s conversion, suggesting
that with this recent history in mind, Marx “defensively sought to
dissociate himself from even a whiff of lingering identification with
Judaism, to prove that his anti-Bauer argument was unrelated to his
family’s background.” He also emphasizes the fact that Marx never said
anything as offensive as this again, even when a good opportunity
presented itself—for example, when he got pugnacious with the Jewish
polemicists against Bauer in The Holy Family.
To say the least, it’s not an ironclad defense. If neither here nor
elsewhere did Marx discuss actual Jews, their living conditions, or
their religious practices, isn’t the same thing true of certain
unambiguous anti-Semites? Avineri insists that Marx knew nothing about
the lives and religious practices of actual Jews—but could this be true,
given that his grandfather and uncle both served as the chief rabbi of
Trier? And does it matter either way?
If there is a better defense, it would perhaps entail accepting that
Marx spoke as a revolutionary or at least a radical, not as a social
democrat, and in that mode he got himself in trouble. After disagreeing
with Bauer and supporting political emancipation for the Jews here and
now, Marx then goes on to discuss what human emancipation would have to
entail. Human emancipation cannot happen, he proposes, without getting
rid of religion itself, Christianity as well as Judaism, and that is why
Judaism is also the target of his essay. A liberal form of emancipation,
one that leaves civil society untouched, would allow religion and its
forms of inequality to remain in place—or, Marx adds, even strengthen
them by making them part of the unregulated private sphere. It’s the
same problem at the level of economics: Political emancipation leaves
private property alone.
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