‘Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution’ Review: On the Marxist Question
By Jonathan Rose
The Wall Street Journal
August 6, 2019
How was the ideology of Karl Marx shaped by his Jewish background? Over the past several years, Yale University Press has published a series of short biographies of eminent Jews, from Moses to Barbra Streisand. This project now has provided the much-honored Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri with an opportunity to tackle this question, which inevitably leads to a still thornier follow-up: Was Karl Marx Jewish at all?
The answers are neither easy nor obvious. Marx was born to a Jewish mother, but his father had converted pro forma to Christianity, in order to continue his legal career at a time when Prussia barred Jews from that profession. Young Karl was later baptized, but we don’t know whether he was understanding or ashamed or contemptuous of his father’s apostasy, because he left no record of his reaction. Marx never publicly discussed his own Jewish identity and, though both his grandfathers and an uncle were rabbis, Mr. Avineri reports that he apparently knew little about Judaism as it was actually lived. Late in life, Marx enjoyed conversations with the pioneering Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz, but what they said is a mystery. The paper trail of his thoughts on Judaism in general is thin, contradictory and sometimes troubling.
His 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” is notorious. Marx consistently supported full legal equality for Jews, but here he broadcast a classic anti-Semitic smear: that Jewry constituted a vast global capitalist conspiracy. The true religion of the Jew was sacher(huckstering). “Money is the jealous God of Israel, in the face of which no other God may exist,” Marx wrote. “In North America”—where in reality there were at that time very few Jews—“the practical domination of Judaism over the Christian world has achieved its unambiguous and normal expression that the preaching of the gospel itself and the Christian ministry have become articles of commerce.” Or as someone else more recently put it: “It’s all about the Benjamins baby.”
Mr. Avineri finds this Marx difficult to deal with, since he is anxious to rehabilitate his subject. The author wants to avoid the label “self-hating Jew”—and granted, Marx didn’t have a self-esteem problem. But Mr. Avineri’s argument that “On the Jewish Question” was written in “code” is contrived. A more plausible explanation is that, for the sake of ideological solidarity, Marx was striving to ingratiate himself with anti-Semites on the political left (and there were plenty). He only succeeded in feeding the beast: There are echoes of “On the Jewish Question” in a work by another German socialist, Adolf Hitler’s last will and testament.
Despite this blind spot, Mr. Avineri’s treatment of Marx is a perceptive and fair-minded corrective to superficial treatments of the man. Reading it, you come to understand why Marx once said “I am not a Marxist.” Both his followers (notably Friedrich Engels) and his detractors oversimplified his ideas, reducing them to a hard ideology. The real Marx was willing to revise his social diagnoses in the light of changing historical circumstances.
Although he and Engels proclaimed in “The Communist Manifesto” that “the worker has no country,” the subsequent surge of nationalist movements in Europe forced him to reconsider. Far from offering a one-tactic-fits-all theory of violent revolution, he granted that liberal democratic societies like Britain and the United States might peacefully evolve toward socialism. (He wasn’t sure which path Russia would take.) He did not believe that socialism could be imposed overnight: Somehow the Bolsheviks didn’t carefully read that part of the manifesto, with disastrous results.
Marx had no patience with hotheaded insurrectionists who rushed to the barricades every Thursday. But his dislike of political terror was not as unequivocal as Mr. Avineri makes out: At times he suggested that ruthless but temporary measures against counterrevolutionaries might be necessary. What he never endorsed or even imagined were the permanent secret police empires that became ubiquitous in Communist regimes.
While Mr. Avineri concedes that “Marx never studied directly the life condition of the modern proletariat,” the author portrays him as a flexible analyst of capitalism, not a clockwork economic determinist. Marxists often touted Marxism as a science, comparable to Darwinism, and though Marx contributed to that misconception, he in fact thought Darwin had dubiously projected capitalist ethics onto the natural world. When Marx said religion is “the opium of the people,” he didn’t mean that it narcotized the proletariat. Though an atheist, he saw religion as an authentic response to social injustice, “at the same time the expression of real suffering and also the protest against real suffering.”
Mr. Avineri’s biography would make ideal reading for students who today gush about socialism but have no clear sense of what it is (or was). To be sure, parts will appall them: Though Marx recognized that British and French imperialists were grossly exploitative, he nevertheless welcomed them as progressive forces that would modernize the non-Western world. (On campus, “orientalist” is now a far more damning epithet than “bourgeois.”)
Readers today may also be stunned to read what Marx said about Palestine. In 1976 Mr. Avineri represented Israel at a stormy Unesco meeting, where Arab and Soviet bloc delegates charged Israeli archaeologists with seeking to “Judaize” Jerusalem by overemphasizing its Jewish roots. In response Mr. Avineri cited an 1854 article by Marx, in which he noted that Jerusalem even then had a slight Jewish majority that was sorely oppressed by its Muslim overlords. When a delegate from the U.S.S.R. shouted that this article was a forgery, Mr. Avineri produced the official Soviet publication he was quoting.
And here lies the central strength of this short biography: It tells us what Marx actually wrote. This is revisionist history in the finest sense of the term.
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