Selected Essays - The Original Classic Edition. Marx Karl

negation of private property, it is merely elevat-ing to a general principle of society what it already involuntarily embodies in itself as the negative product of society.

       With respect to the nascent world the proletariat finds itself in the same position as the German king occupies with respect to the departed world, when he calls the people his people, just as he calls a horse his horse. In declaring the people to be his private property, the king acknowledges that private property is king.

       Just as philosophy finds in the proletariat its material weapons, so the proletariat finds in philosophy its intellectual weapons, and as soon as the lightning of thought has penetrated [39]into the flaccid popular soil, the elevation of Germans into men will be accomplished.

       Let us summarize the result at which we have arrived. The only liberation of Germany that is practical or possible is a liberation from the standpoint of the theory that declares man to be the supreme being of mankind. In Germany emancipation from the Mid-dle Ages can only be effected by means of emancipation from the results of a partial freedom from the Middle Ages. In Germany no brand of serfdom can be extirpated without extirpating every kind of serfdom. Fundamental Germany cannot be revolutionized without a revolution in its basis. The emancipation of Germans is the emancipation of mankind. The head of this emancipation is

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       philosophy; its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be realized without the abolition of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot abolish itself without realizing philosophy.

       When all the inner conditions are fulfilled, the German day of resurrection will be announced by the crowing of the Gallic Cock.

       FOOTNOTES:

       [1] Speech in defence of hearths and homes. [2] Shameful part.

       [3] listigen, a play on the name of the protectionist economist F. List. [4] In English in the original.

       [5] In conformity with principles.

       [40]

       ON THE JEWISH QUESTIONToC

       1. Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage (The Jewish Question), Brunswick 1843.

       2. Bruno Bauer, Die Fahigkeit der heutigen Juden und Christen, frei zu werden (The Capacity of Modern Jews and Christians to become free), Zurich 1843.

       1. Bruno Bauer, Die Judenfrage, Brunswick 1843.

       The German Jews crave for emancipation. What emancipation do they crave? Civic, political emancipation.

       Bruno Bauer answers them: Nobody in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are unfree. How shall we liberate you?

       You Jews are egoists, if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans you ought to labour for the political emancipation of Germany, as men for human emancipation, and you ought to feel the special nature of your oppression and your disgrace not as an exception from the rule, but rather as its confirmation.

       Or do Jews demand to be put on an equal [41]footing with Christian subjects? Then they recognize the Christian State as justified, then they recognize the regime of general subjugation. Why are they displeased at their special yoke, when the general yoke pleases them? Why should Germans interest themselves in the emancipation of the Jews, if Jews do not interest themselves in the emancipation of Germans?

       The Christian State knows only privileges. In that State the Jew possesses the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew, he has rights which a

       Christian has not. Why does he crave the rights which he has not, and which Christians enjoy?

       If the Jew wants to be emancipated from the Christian State, then he should demand that the Christian State abandon its religious

       prejudice. Will the Jew abandon his religious prejudice? Has he therefore the right to demand of another this abdication of religion? By its very nature the Christian State cannot emancipate the Jews; but, adds Bauer, by his very nature the Jew cannot be emancipated. So long as the State is Christian and the Jew is Jewish, both are equally incapable of granting and receiving emancipation.

       [42]The Christian State can only behave towards the Jew in the manner of a Christian State, that is in a privileged manner, by grant-

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       ing the separation of the Jew from the other subjects, but causing him to feel the pressure of the other separated spheres, and all the more onerously inasmuch as the Jew is in religious antagonism to the dominant religion. But the Jew also can only conduct himself towards the State in a Jewish fashion, that is as a stranger, by opposing his chimerical nationality to the real nationality, his illusory

       law to the real law, by imagining that his separation from humanity is justified, by abstaining on principle from all participation in the historical movement, by waiting on a future which has nothing in common with the general future of mankind, by regarding himself as a member of the Jewish people and the Jewish people as the chosen people.

       Upon what grounds therefore do you Jews crave emancipation? On account of your religion? It is the mortal enemy of the State

       religion. As citizens? There are no citizens in Germany. As men? You are as little men as He on whom you called.

       After giving a criticism of the previous [43]positions and solutions of the question, Bauer has freshly posited the question of Jewish emancipation. How, he asks, are they constituted, the Jew to be emancipated, and the Christian State which is to emancipate? He replies by a criticism of the Jewish religion, he analyses the religious antagonism between Judaism and Christianity, he explains the nature of the Christian State, and all this with boldness, acuteness, spirit, and thoroughness, in a style as precise as it is forcible and energetic.

       How then does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result? The formulation of a question is its solution. The criticism of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question.

       The summary is therefore as follows:

       We must emancipate ourselves before we are able to emancipate others.

       The most rigid form of the antagonism between the Jew and the Christian is the religious antagonism. How is this antagonism resolved? By making it impossible. How is a religious antagonism made impossible? By abolishing religion.

       As soon as Jew and Christian recognize [44]their respective religions as different stages in the development of the human mind, as different snake skins which history has cast off, and men as the snakes encased therein, they stand no longer in a religious relationship, but in a critical, a scientific, a human one. Science then constitutes their unity. Antagonisms in science, however, are resolved by science itself.

       The German Jew is particularly affected by the lack of political emancipation in general and the pronounced Christianity of the

       State. In Bauer's sense, however, the Jewish question has a general significance independent of the specific German conditions.

       It is the question of the relation of religion to the State, of the contradiction between religious entanglement and political emancipation. Emancipation from religion is posited as a condition, both for the Jews, who desire to be politically emancipated, and for the State, which shall emancipate and itself be emancipated.

       "Good, you say, and the Jew says so too, the Jew also is not to be emancipated as Jew, not because he is a Jew, not because he has such an excellent, general, human principle of [45]morality; the Jew will rather retire behind the citizen and be a citizen, although he is a Jew and wants to remain one: that is, he is and remains a Jew, in spite of the fact that he is a citizen and lives in general human relationships: his Jewish and limited nature always and eventually triumphs over his human and political obligations. The prejudice remains in spite of the fact that it has been outstripped by general principles. If, however, it remains, it rather outstrips everything else." "Only sophistically and to outward seeming would the Jew be able to remain a Jew in civic life; if he desired to remain a Jew, the mere semblance would therefore be the essential thing and would triumph, that is, his life in the State would be only a semblance or a passing exception to the rule and the nature of things" ("The Capacity of modern Jews and Christians to become free," p. 57).

       Let us see, on the other hand, how Bauer describes