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generator: pandoc
title: On the Jewish Question Video Transciption
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
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2019-05-25T23:13:25+10:00
Hey comrades.
I want to talk about another piece of text from early Marx today, and
it's called On the Jewish Question.
And it's kind of a criticism of a Young Hegelian called Bruno Bauer. And
it's a little bit anti-semitic, and I think the most anti-semitic stuff
is in section two, or chapter two of it, when Marx basically says "the
spirit of private property is due to Judaism", and I think that second
section was added in so that he could get it published in some -- so he
could look sufficiently racist in order to save face in German society.
But in any case we can read On the Jewish Question besides its
anti-semitism or despite its anti-semitism. And this where Marx talks
about the rigid separation that occurs between the political sphere and
the "home life" or the "empirical sphere" of human life. And so Bruno
Bauer says that we can't "make Jews liberated or citizens in Germany
until we destroy the bourgeois state or destroy the Christian state"
because at the moment only Christians can be liberated under a Christian
state and even Christians are slaves under the Christian state and so on
and so forth.
But Marx says it's possible to expunge the state out of any kind of
religious -- we can separate the church and the state but that's still
allows religion to happen anyway. And people still remain alienated
despite how politically liberated they might be, because the liberation
that you're giving someone under the bourgeois state, or the liberal
democratic state, is only political liberation.
So religion can even more perfect under a liberal democratic state
because it no longer has to have any kind of disgusting muck -- it
doesn't have to make any practical decisions anymore, it can kind of
just move into the realm of theory and move into the realm of pure
empirical life and preach people pretty nothings, because it doesn't
have to compromise anymore, it doesn't have to make any kind of real
practical interventions in people's everyday lives anymore.
So if you think about it, the liberal democratic state is even MORE the
perfection of religion, Marx says. So ultimately Marx says in order to
liberate ourselves we need to reabsorb the abstract citizenship of the
political state back into our empirical lives. We need to get rid of
this rigid separation between the political person and the economic
person.
Or the political person and the private person. Because this is
alienating us. It's alienating us in a dual sense. (1) You're split down
the middle between the liberated self and the self that's in "a war
against all", like the Hobbesian state of nature, that's the content,
the civil part of our lives, which is in civil society. But also in
civil society we're alienated; (2) because in civil society we don't
have a true communal existence anymore, and this is our REAL existence.
So Marx develops a little bit of the beginnings of his historical
materialism here by saying that the true existence of people's lives is
in civil society and political society at the moment, or the political
realm, the realm of the state just merely represents or was
revolutionised out of the revolution that happened in civil society. But
it was revolution that stopped and didn't go any further.
So Marx is still a liberal democrat here and he he's not really a
communist yet because he doesn't point to how we can reabsorb the
communal abstract part of our lives back into our "contentful" empirical
lives anymore.
That's what happens later in his introduction to his Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right.
Alright comrades, I hope you enjoy this video, I'll see you tomorrow.