Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

3.4.4) The Layers Overlap: Marx’s First Published Essay: You can see all three of these layers in Marx’s first published essay, On the Jewish Question. There is the German-philosophical layer: interrogating the concept of what it means to be free. There is the French-activist layer: how to organize and legislate to attain freedom. And there is the British-economist layer: the real problems lie in the economy, and how the workings of the economy drive people to be cruel to each other in spite of society’s overall prosperity. In On the Jewish Question Marx is pro-freedom. Jews are seeking equal rights. Many (including Marx’s about to be ex-friend Bruno Bauer) claimed that Germany was a Christian country in which Jews had no standing to ask for equal rights until they joined it—that is, became Christian—and then work for separation of state from church. Marx disagreed, stating that Jews’ status as Jews ought not to in any way be a bar to political emancipation.

But, Marx went on to write, political emancipation is not full human emancipation. In order to accomplish that, we need to transform the economy so that it no longer oppresses people.

Marx’s Antisemitism: And then Marx’s argument becomes unfortunate, because the way that the economy oppresses people, Marx says, is that it leads them to behave like he says Jews behave:

Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew–not the [observant] Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew.

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement…

This was not a phrase Marx outgrew. A decade and a half later, in the mid 1850s, we find him writing things like:

Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets…

Yet by far the majority of the big bankers of mid-nineteenth century Europe were Christians. If he were around today, Marx would be one of those people who, when he wants to say something negative about bankers, will always say “Goldman Sachs” and never say “Bank of America” or “J.P. Morgan” or “Credit Suisse”. And the correspondence between Marx and Engels in which they express their envy of fellow German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle is just… weird. Simon Sebag Montefiore summarizes:

Both… were wildly jealous of Lasslle, who was in many ways what they wished to be: a political star, bon vivant… showman… lover… supported financially by his mistress, Countess von Hatzfeld…. Lassalle recognized Marx’s talent… helping him… get his work published…. Marx and Engles… repaid the favor with an endless stream of racist epithets… “stupid Yid”… “Jewboy”… “n——r”…. Lassalle… affair with a young woman engaged to a Wallachian prince whom he foolishly challenged to a duel. Lassalle was killed. Marx and Engels were astonished by the rise and fall of this flamboyant meteor…. Engels’s reflections on Lassalle’s intellectual and sexual power are particularly striking: “she didn’t want his beautiful mind but his Jewish cock”.

Marx was soon going to change his language away from On the Jewish Question’s claim that the big problem was that in market society all human beings acted like Jews: true human freedom would be thought of as the freedom of humanity from domination by the bourgeoisie, domination by the business class, rather than freedom from what Marx called “Jewishness”, and from an economic system that pushed people to act in what Marx called a “Jewish” way.