Stray thoughts: Marx and anti-Semitism.
Was Marx anti-Semitic? Writings such as his "On the
Jewish Question" (1843), written when he was 25, indicate he was, drawing on readymade tropes
of the Jew as financier, symbol of, to his young mind, everything wrong with,
or retarding, the bold and transformative new capitalist economy.
The Jew as parasite. That particular trope got a lot of seriously
murderous play in years to come.
As Marx saw it in 1843, capitalists made things, and
reconfigured society for the — scientifically inevitable — transcendence of
capitalism that would be enacted by its proletariat, which would lead, after a
paroxysm or two, to a blissfully classless society, the end of all history.
Let's draw back a bit and remember that Jews and the Jewish
question occupied only a tiny amount of Marx's voluminous corpus. Does the
Jewish question recur in "The Communist Manifesto"? It does not. Do Jews
get even a mention in Marx's famously trenchant "18th Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte"? Not even a footnote. How about in the three volumes of "Das
Kapital"? You'd think in his supposedly seminal grand prospectus of
history Jews might have cropped up now and then. But, so I've heard, they
don't. (I've never read beyond some choice bits in those three volumes and
don't intend to start now.)
To reject Marx for anti-Semitism, therefore, is a cheap and
uninformed way of rejecting him. It is to miss entirely the much more
appropriate ways of rejecting him.
If you reject him for his anti-Semitism, you're not
rejecting him much at all.
What about his metaphysics, his ontology and epistemology?
What about his entelechy and his teleology? What about that?
Heh heh heh.
What about that?
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