[Marxism] Marx and the jews

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(I wrote this to a young comrade in the USA, who previously visited me in
Amsterdam, few small edits to tidy it up  - you might read it or not)

I said I would write to answer your question about anti-semitism, though I
have little time. I will just finish this letter off and then leave it. I
don't want to comment on a lot of personal stuff just now, Ximena, and so
on, I haven't got a girl now, it's bad for my health etc. blah blah but I
have a pack of stuff to solve and too many things on my mind.

Anyway. As regards "Marx-as-anti-semite": this is basically not true. I
think what is true is, that he personally didn't like Jewish culture, and
the fetishisation of Jewish culture, and he sought personally to break out
of it, which was his right, just as it is the right of Jewish people to
cherish Jewish culture if they want, taking the consequences that can have.
But he got on well with many Jews all the same. Many leftwing radicals in
his lifetime were Jews. He evaluated them on their politics and on their
ideas, the fact that they were Jews was in that sense irrelevant. It was
relevant, only insofar as it might help explain how they arrived at their
ideas or actions.

Anti-semitism is anti-Jewish racism converted into a political stance, which
says Jews are bad and inferior because they are Jews, causing policies and
practices which oppress Jews as Jews. But obviously not liking somebody who
happens to be Jewish is not racist.

But Marx's criticism of Jewish ideology was not racist; his concern was with
how the Jews could be emancipated, and the basic stance he had there was
that Jews were human beings like any other, living in class society,
consequently, this was the key to understand their emancipation. He never
suggested that Jews were inferior or superior to anyone else for being Jews,
i.e. this was not a racist politics.

The history of civil society is replete with wars with all sorts of themes,
but at the basis of those wars, Marx argues, are class forces, because it is
socio-economic inequality and the exploitation of social classes by other
social classes that is the basic source of wars, whatever cultural form they
may take.

If therefore a Jew wanted to argue that the war was ultimately about
something else, i.e. religion, identity, humanity, culture etc. and
manufacture a whole political theory about the "special" nature of Jews in
this regard, then Marx disagreed, he sought to uncover the apologisms, and
attacked that point of view.

So Marx basically says to a Jew "the social question is basically not about
the fact that you are a Jew, but about capitalism and your response to it".
And that response was very different for many different Jews, they had no
common response to all that. Likewise, Marx responded differently to
different Jews.

What is true is that:

(1) Marx's wrath was not infrequently directed at Jewish haggling, Jewish
ideologies and Jewish differentiation (i.e. emphasising defensively how Jews
are different, rather than what they have in common with other people, in
dubious justifcations; something which often happens when an ethnic group is
oppressed). You can evaluate this objectively only by looking at the actual
role which Jewish people had in European society at the time. But in that
case, his criticism was mainly directed at behaviours, and sometimes
characters as archetypes.

(2) Marx was not averse to making sarcastic and wrily disparaging remarks
about personalities, but not normally in things he published. Of course,
academics will mull over everything Marx wrote, but a very large part of
what he wrote was not published. So if Marx made nasty comments in something
he wrote for himself, then you can of course say that he made nasty
comments, but in reality he was making nasty comments to himself, expressing
his thoughts to himself, or maybe, to somebody in private correspondence.
Some of those remarks could today be construed as racist ("dirty
Jewishness", "dirty Mexicans", "Albanian goatfuckers" etc.). So anyway Marx
was not immune from a certain amount of ethnocentrism, prejudice and bias.
But, in reality those "sins" are rather petty and nobody's so perfect or
holy. If we were, religion would not exist.

(3) A vastly more important error, as Roman Rosdolsky showed, was e.g.
Engels's propagation of a theory of "historyless peoples", i.e. peoples or
nations which were just doomed to die out and disappear as distinct
identities simply because they had no significant role in the overall
process of world history. That sort of idea can be used to justify very
reactionary policies and even justify genocide.

For example, around 1900 in New Zealand many white people believed that
Maoris would just die out as a distinctive people, they would be assimilated
and so forth, they had no future as an independent people. That idea was
racist and inhuman, and, if a people has been assimilated in an oppressive,
forcible way, then it doesn't really work, and past grievances continue to
cause new conflict until they are finally resolved.

You can see the same thing within the USA; the history of black slavery, and
genocide against the Indians created a pattern of integration of blacks and
Indians into US society which didn't work in many respects, and then the
result of that is a continuing struggle of black and Indian people, and that
struggle will continue until those problems are finally resolved. Oppressed
peoples have very, very long memories, as Engels already noted.

Marx himself had Jewish Rabbinical ancestors on both sides of the family. So
if Marx truly hated Jews as Jews, then he would have hated himself, his own
identity. But he didn't hate himself. He just sought to break with the past,
rid himself from staid, conservative outlooks, find the road to liberation,
and orient to the future, he wanted to be a revolutionary, change the world,
and not endlessly dwell on his identity. If you really dislike something,
then you cannot keep endlessly talking about it, you opt for something else
that you like, and you do something different, otherwise it destroys your he
alth. And Marx took a different path in life. What is Jewish identity ?
Isaac Deutscher wrote about it. But really, if you want to know Jewish
identity then you have to hang out with Jewish people, it's their identity,
not some kind of abstract concept.

As regards myself, I personally don't like, and didn't respond well, to the
way New Zealand, Dutch and Jewish people deal with sexual relations, I
cannot change that, only myself, and really all I can do is opt
constructively for a different tack in that regard. But obviously I would be
dead wrong, if I started to vent racist attitudes. I have my personal
experience, but if this becomes a distorted racist perspective on society
then I'd be dead wrong. Erotic inclinations are one thing, racism is
another. Let's say I committed suicide, well then some people would see that
as proof my ideas were wrong, etc. or my life had a certain result they
would think such-and-such etc. But basically as a human being you have to do
what you have to do to make a life and humanise yourself, and what other
people think is of no concern in this duty, if it distract you from that.

One of Marx's main inspirations in his economic theories was David Ricardo,
who was a Jewish businessman & financier, whom he respected but also
criticised. Insofar as he disgreed with Ricardo, that was obviously not
because Ricardo was a Jew but because Marx thought Ricardo was wrong. For
more on Ricardo, see:
http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~multimed/theorie/klassik/ricardo/bio/Ricard
o.html

So really, Marx's position on Jewishness was quite sophisticated and
nuanced, and he treated different sorts of Jews differently because he had
very different criteria for evaluating different people depending on what
they did and said (scientific, political, moral etc.). You can say, that he
personally disliked the Jewish concern with being Jewish, but you cannot say
that his position was substantively racist. But some things he said were
obviously not helpful, i.e. his personal dislikes might have led him into
political error in specific cases.

However, nowadays if you shrug at the Jewish concern with being Jewish,
Israelis not infrequently start to scream "anti-semitism", and this is
bullshit. Some people are not attracted to people from other ethnicities,
but that is ipso facto not racist. It is racist only, if this stance in
practice means treating people as inferior because of their ethnic identity
or oppressing them, i.e. a non-attraction which takes the form of racial
hatred, negative discrimination and violence. You might bitch to yourself
e.g. about "this stupid Dutch guy" etc. but it is quite another thing to
actively discriminate negatively against that Dutch guy in your relations
with him on the ground he is Dutch.

The traditional Marxist stance is, that Jewish emancipation is bound up with
the culmination of the class struggles in favour of international socialism
and universal human emancipation from all the things that dehumanise and
oppress people, i.e. prevent them from being all that they could be.
Therefore, from the outset Marxists have in their majority been anti-Zionist
and rejected "chosen people" theories and "promised land" theories as
chauvinist and colonialist. Nevertheless, some Marxists were Zionists, and
some Marxists argued for separate Jewish territories. Subsequent to the
Russian revolution, some Jewish territories were actually designated in the
Russian empire.

Of course, it is one thing to say in theory, the root of the problem is
class society and socio-economic inequality, but it is another things to
find a solution practically for specific ethnic groups which have been
oppressed in specific ways, and you have to treat that very sensitively on
the basis of a specific analysis, and adopt a policy which works best and is
most appropriate to the given situation, with due regard for the overall
project of advancing towards a free, just and egalitarian society we call
socialism or communism.

Having said that, what then are we to make of the Zionist project to
establish a separate Jewish state in Israel ?
The idea of that existed already for a very long time, and was theorised in
detail in the 19th century. All of this is heavily mixed up with religious
beliefs. Already prior to Hitler, Zionists were settling in Israel. It is
just the exterminist policies of German imperialism under Hitler, that gave
a real rationale and justification for an idea, that had already existed for
a very long time.

Israel was established with very strong assistance and support from the USA,
in rivalry (in important respects) with British imperialism which controlled
Palestina as a dominion at the time. Americans were horrified with the
bestial barbarism of Nazism morally, and pragmatically saw the migration of
Jews to Israel as a solution. For their part, many Jews had through
experience acquired an attitude of "I will fight to the death for my right
to exist with my identity with a place of my own". So Jewish terrorist
groups fought against British rule in Palestina and so on, subsequenty quite
a few of those terrorists became leading politicians.

Personally, I take the view that the desire and the claim of Jews to a place
of their own was legitimate, and, in the context of world war, there is a
sense in which you have to say, well what the hell else would you do or have
done. Be that as it may, this of course does not simply endorse any old way
in which you go about that. And in fact the realisation of the Zionist
project was based on the oppression of Palestinians living there already,
the forcible expropriation and oppression of those people in numerous ways.
Not only that however - a very sophisticated attempt was made to justify
this oppression and expropriation in terms of Jewish rights, claims and
identity with religious and historical references. But if you study this in
detail in terms of the Jewish psyche, ideology and culture, then you will
see that Marx's critical, even hostile attitude towards Jewish particularism
as a petit-bourgeois deviation had considerable justification and merit.

The general principle which Marx expressed as regards the national question
(in the context of the Irish question) was that no people or nation can
genuinely and fully emancipate itself, if it oppresses another people or
nation. The fact, that it oppresses and dominates another people, rather
than treat them as human beings on equal terms, indicates something is wrong
in their own psyche, warped as it is already by class-exploitation and
competition and all the power relations resulting therefrom. Therefore, it
is an obstacle to their own progress. To become politically class-conscious
and revolutionary, the English worker had to understand correctly the role
of British imperialism in Ireland, and if he didn't understand it, then he
couldn't understand the British state and its politics either.

The corrollary of that is, that in studying nationalities and national
oppression, you always have to distinguish carefully between the nationalism
of an oppressed people and the nationalism of oppressors, between a healthy
patriotism and a nasty, chauvinist and oppressive patriotism. Socialist
ultimately don't want nations or national socialism but international
socialism, and therefore you evaluate every political question ultimately
from the point of view of how this advances towards socialism and how this
fits in the program of human liberation in the world and advances beyond a
life that you would not wish even for your dog.

So then the real paradox that we live with nowadays is that Israel will
never be able to function peacably and effectively as a nation until the
problem of the oppression of the Palestinian people has been resolved.
People can talk all they like with the cleverest of arguments about Jewish
rights, but if Jewish rights are asserted on the basis that Palestinian
rights are denied it will never work. That is, the Jews thought they could
emancipate themselves through a Jewish state as a sort of ""socialism in one
country" and put a wall around themselves. Well they can do that, but just
as soon as they have done it, the problem rears its head again in some other
way. Because you cannot liberate yourself on the basis that you build your
house over the corpses of other people, simple as that. In reality, Israel
is a smalltime capitalist venture which would hardly survive without
American help. If American financiers pulled the plug on it, Israel
collapses totally into chaos and guerilla warfare.

The problem of the policy of the Bush administration is that all it achieves
is that the Zionists mimic it; all they are concerned with is improving
their position of power (political, military) and their bargaining power, so
that whatever "deal" might be made in the future to solve the Palestinian
question will work out favourably for the state of Israel. That's the
political chessgame.

That is why I think the only hope is with that part of the Jewish population
which is post-Zionist, non-Zionist or Anti-Zionist, i.e. which does not make
mountains out of molehills, looks to the future, and which does not
exaggerate differences in politics which do not really exist. You cannot
expect Jews to go away from Israel and you cannot expect them to give up
their concerns with Jewish identity.

But the hope is that with better politics, rather than might-makes-right
ideas, a situation can be reached where (1) Israel becomes a democratic
state where all citizens have equal status regardless of ethnicity, (2) that
a Palestinian state can exist which is genuinely independent, or failing
that, that the territory now called Israel/Palestinia can be a democratic
state for all the people that live there on the basis of social and civil
equality and mutual respect.

But hope alone is not a lot of use. You have to understand that the politics
is "driven" ultimately by material interests and stakes, or at any rate is
delimited by those interests. On the surface, it is all about nationalities,
racism, genocidal policies which are murderous, religion etc. But behind the
murderousness, is the reality of rich and poor: that Palestinian territories
are effectively poor Bantustans and that Israel is propped up by American
imperialism with an overwhelming military might. The US Government has
vastly more power than Israel, but Israeli politicians are vastly more
skilled, their ability to maneouvre is extremely good. The Israeli Defence
Force is one of the best armies in the world from a military point of view.
This creates a very complicated and murderous situation in the region, where
very much depends on what the US Government does.

But ultimately, following Marx's logic, the "moral lesson" for you as an
American is that so long as the Palestinian people are oppressed and the
problems of Israel are not resolved, American people can talk all they like
about freedom, but Americans still have problems in their own psyche, which
prevent that freedom from being realised, because they are complicit in the
oppression of the Palestinian people and even fund it.

That is why it is essential for Americans to take a very clear stand on this
issue, even for mental health reasons, simply because it is directly tied to
a whole range of other emancipation questions in America itself. A lot of
Christian biblebashing and mythmongering just creates more and more
confusion, while in Israel/Palestina people get murdered and are miserably
poor. The best way to reply to the christians is simply to study the reality
of life in Bethlehem where Jesus was supposed to have been born, and just
listen to what people who live there have to say about their experience and
their life there. Then you will see that the reality of the "Holy Land" is
very different from christian myths about it.

As regards modern socialism, the hysteria about anti-semitism is not
something we want to bother with anymore than we need to. Rather we approach
Jewish people on the basis of an interest in what they can do well, what
they are good at, in their culture, because we want to create a new culture
which is based on what people can do well, what they're best at. Every
culture has things it does well and other things it does badly, so, if you
want to improve things, you look at the strengths of a specific culture,
emphasise those, and build on those, you try to minimise the effect of the
weaknesses. Not on the basis of ethnocentric or racist ideas, but on the
basis of proven practical strengths for which their exists a demonstrable
cultural track-record. If a strength is presented as a weakness, or vice
versa, then you criticise the hell out of it on the basis of the best
experiential evidence you have.

Really, the strongest, most powerful argument against the Zionist idea I can
think of is that it simply does not safeguard Jewish identity, despite its
claims that it does. That identity is safeguarded only by the constructive,
practical things, that Jewish people who identify specifically as Jewish,
actually do that help people surive and improve life.

The more the Zionists murder and exploit, the more murders rebound on them,
and the more harm they cause to the future of Jewish identity. And so it's
quite clear to most intelligent people, that either the Zionists will
abandon their ideology or they will destroy themselves. All that happens in
the meantime, is just that Zionists try to buy more time with new ideas,
tactics and justifications, to show how strong they are. But time runs out
for all of us. On that note, I will stop for now.

----------------

Oh you can ask any questions you like. In "polite society" you cannot ask
certain questions, but really what matters is whether the intent of asking
it is sincere, or whether it's just sleaze or you're just trying to exploit
me by grabbing attention. One always has the option of not answering a
question.

Just think of it this way, if Marx in his given situation posed the
question, "how can the Jews achieve their civic and political emancipation
in civil society, so that they are no longer oppressed in that sense ?",
then how could the accusation, that he was "anti-semitic" make any sense at
all ? That is just a vulgar Zionist fraud. If you hate Jews as such, because
they are Jews, it makes no sense at all, to talk about their "emancipation";
in that case, you would be more likely to discriminate against them, put
them in a Bantustan, or exterminate them.

Marx's argument is really very different: (1) civic and political
emancipation for the Jews means abandoning Judaism as the civic and
political foundation for Jewish life - this is similar to the demand for the
separation of church and state, (2) but political emancipation in the sense
of acquiring bourgeois civil rights on the same footing as anybody else can
be gained without dropping Judaist beliefs, and it is not the same as human
emancipation.

If you don't like Marx's answer, you can reject it of course, but you cannot
say that he is anti-semitic. However, if Zionists monger hysteria about
"anti-semitism" on every occasion it is a lying hysteria, which may justify
theft, robbery and murder, and justify this with the ideology of Judaism as
an apologetic religious cover for crimes. In other words, Zionists are
racist, but they try to project his own racism onto others (transference)
saying others are "anti-semitic". If Jews want to emigrate to Israel and
make a better life there, I have no particular objection to that, how could
I have ? But that is not what the political argument in Israel/Palestine is
about at all. The argument is that you cannot liberate yourself as an
oppressed people on the basis that you oppress another people.

You yourself put it very well: "if you say you don't support Zionism, what
Israel is doing, that Israeli policies are simply breeding murder and
terrorism, etc. many will make the claim of anti-semitism." The Zionist
might argue that if you disagree with a Jew, you must be anti-semitic, but
that is obviously total nonsense, a caricature, and gobbledygook.
Effectively, the Zionists claim that Marx's prescription for Jewish
emancipation is that "Jews should stop being Jews", and that this proves,
that Marx is anti-semitic. But Marx is not saying that at all. Marx is
saying

(1) no political and civic emancipation for Jews can be obtained through
clinging to Judaist ideology, as if this defined what a Jew is (and Marx
argues it doesn't), and

(2) no emancipation can be obtained without recognition of what human beings
have in common, rather than what differentiates or distinguishes them.

This just proves that Marx was correct: the obsession with Judaism and
Jewish particularism, the justification of ""promised land" theories and
"chosen people" theories does not lead to the emancipation of the Jews, but
to a murderous political system. The opposite is really true, if you ask me:
Zionism = anti-semitism, because it destroys Jewish culture and credibility
in the world. If Zionists act like Nazis, then they discredit Jewry and
provoke anti-semitism. That Nazi response is a malformed response on the
part of a Jew, which proves the "chosen people" stuff is bullshit. If a
Zionist wants to kill, steal and exploit Palestinians as of right, and then
say if you disgree with that, that you are "anti-semitic", then this is
obviously nonsense and gobbledygook.

Marx's real argument is this (quote): "It is by no means sufficient to ask:
Who should emancipate and who should be emancipated? Criticism has to be
concerned with a third question. It must ask: What kind of emancipation is
involved and what are the underlying conditions? Criticism of political
emancipation itself is primarily the final critique of the Jewish question
and its true resolution into the 'universal question of the age'."

Marx concluded specifically:

"Because [Jews] can be emancipated politically without completely and fully
renouncing Judaism, political emancipation by itself is not human
emancipation [i.e. you could still be oppressed by religious ideas which are
total garbage and which get in the way of sex, love, equality and freedom].
If you Jews want to be politically emancipated without emancipating
yourselves humanly, the incompleteness and contradiction lies not only in
you, but in the essence and category of political emancipation" .

Marx wrote that in 1843, when demands for civic rights by Jews in Europe
were being raised. The historical context was, a transition from the feudal
absolutist state, which treated Jews as second-class citizens, to the
bourgeois state. The Jewish Question was, at that time, no longer merely
economic (the right to access to occupations and specific resources), but
about whether Jews should be granted civic and political rights.

Bruno Bauer argued that Jews could never be emancipated, because of what he
called "Jewish narrowness", in other words, their commitment to the Judaism,
which he saw as incompatible with universal human emancipation. Emancipation
would require that Jews admitted they are human beings like anybody else,
and that Judaist religion was an obstacle to their aspirations for political
emancipation. Marx just retorts Bauer was a nerd. You could have political
rights, without dropping religious and nationalist beliefs, and therefore
Bauer's idea is just shallow and unrealistic. Of course, Jews admit they are
human beings like anybody else in one sense, but there's always that other
sense some Jews have about "chosen people" and "promised land" theories.

Personally, I defend the validity and importance of Marx's inquiry and
results, but I am not a Marxist. I think you can be a communist or
socialist, but Marxism is just a religion. I think a Marxist cannot become
emancipated until he drops Marxism, and begins to think for himself. But not
all people who are inspired by Marx's thought think that way.

------------------
Just to finish the bit about anti-semitism: Marx never concerned himself
very much with the existence or non-existence of God, except to say that for
human beings, the supreme being is humanity, and that is where the critique
of religions and religious behaviour must start. He would say, "work for
humanity". See further:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lafargue/works/marx.html Marx never really
took an elaborate atheist position either, and he was happy to read myths
about the Greek Gods, and so on.

If you make a "critique of religion" in a scientific or philosophical sense,
this presupposes that you are prepared to take it seriously. Otherwise you
would just rubbish it, but that is not a genuine critique, if you make a
critique, you must say why/how you disagree, and where you disagree, why a
belief cannot have the result that people claim it will have.

But Marx really wanted to concentrate on other topics, and saw religion more
as a stultifying distraction from what he wanted to do. Hence, Marx's
concern was not really with Judaist belief, but what the behavioural
consequences of that belief were, its social, cultural and political role
and effects. So really, what Marx implies, is that people are perfectly
entitled to their persona; religious beliefs and places of worship, but
we have to draw a sharp distinction between a personal religious
belief and "working for humanity" in politics, science etc. so
that spiritual matters do not start to intrude in the wrong place,
and do not serve as an apology or cover for all sorts of "sins"
(a sin = a mistake, a fault).

But, it could be argued that "working for humanity" is also a spiritual
belief. And that brings me back to what I said earlier, the socialist norm
is: respect people's personal beliefs, but look at what is actually done in
the name of those beliefs. There is zero point in being "anti-Judaist",
there is a point only in being anti people who do horrible things in the
name of Judaism. Judaism is just part of the spiritual stock of culture
inherited by humanity, and it is very unwise to say stupid and uninformed
things about spiritual matters, in my experience.

Spiritual awareness, like dreams, refers to experiences which are not
themselves objectively verifiable, because they are consciously subjective
or intersubjective or transcendent. Hence, you can only just respect them
for what they are, and let them be. The only thing that you can verify, is
what a person who has a specific spiritual awareness actually does. And you
can verify, that if somebody claims to act in terms of a spiritual belief in
a way contrary to what he conveys that he means by that belief, that there
is some kind of lie involved, and then you have to clear that up. So for
example people can have "violent humanitarian wars" and then you have to
demonstrate why this is wrong.

Jurriaan



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