Re: [Marxism] Re: What to make of Marx's anti-semitism? (his essay, 'O n the Je

["andypollack@xxxxxxxx" <andypollack@xxxxxxxx>]

Some great responses so far to the original query, just a comment on the form 
of Marx's essay, i.e. how to account for his apparently casual use of harsh and 
categorical generalizations about entire peoples.  The journal Critique a while 
back put out a special issue which was a reprint of Rosdolsky's scathing attack 
on Marx and Engels for their approach toward various Eastern and Southern 
European peoples who they believed were bound to disappear. On that question, 
as also, for instance, in analyzing England's role in India, Marx was stressing 
the objective forces determining the fates of nations, and how the 
consciousness of those nations were often at best distorted, passive 
reflections of those fates.  Read only on the surface, such writings could 
appear to be dismissive of the individuals of those nations and attributing 
traits to them, whereas instead he was describing the nation as a whole, in the 
same sense as throughout Capital he describes the capitalist or the worker as 
an abstract type standing in for the entire class.

Marx may have been wrong on which nations would survive capitalism's spread. 
But what strikes most observers is not the accuracy of his predictions, but the 
harshness of the rhetoric. After decades of struggle in the 20th Century 
against racist characterizations of individual members of nations, Marx's 
rhetoric could appear (wrongly) to be attributing character traits to 
individuals rather than literary devices depicting the historic roles of 
nations.

Which is not to say that Marx was not a man of his times, for better and for 
worse...

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