Selected Essays - The Original Classic Edition. Marx Karl

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СКАЧАТЬ this standpoint to be antiquated, or at least very problematical. In France partial emancipation is the basis of universal emancipation. In Germany universal emancipation is the conditio sine qua non of every partial emancipation. In France it is the reality, in Germany it is the impossibility of gradual emancipation which must bring forth entire freedom. In France every popular class is tinged with political idealism, and does not feel primarily as a particular class, but as the representative of social needs generally. The role of emancipator, therefore, flits from one class to another of the French people in a dramatic movement, until it eventually reaches the class which will no longer realize social freedom upon the basis of certain conditions lying outside of mankind and yet created by human society, but will rather organize all the conditions of human existence upon the basis of social freedom. In Germany, on the other hand, where practical life is as unintellectual as intellectual life

       is unpractical, no class of bourgeois society either feels the need or possesses the capacity for emancipation, unless [37]driven thereto by its immediate position, by material necessity, by its chains themselves.

       Wherein, therefore, lies the positive possibility of German emancipation?

       Answer: In the formation of a class in radical chains, a class which finds itself in bourgeois society, but which is not of it, an order which shall break up all orders, a sphere which possesses a universal character by virtue of its universal suffering, which lays claim to no special right, because no particular wrong but wrong in general is committed upon it, which can no longer invoke a historical

       title, but only a human title, which stands not in a one-sided antagonism to the consequences, but in a many-sided antagonism to the assumptions of the German community, a sphere finally which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating all the other spheres of society, which represents in a word the complete loss of mankind, and can therefore only redeem itself through the complete redemption of mankind. The dissolution of society reduced to a special order is the proletariat.

       The proletariat arises in Germany only with the beginning of the industrial movement; for it is not poverty resulting from natural [38]circumstances but poverty artificially created, not the masses who are held down by the weight of the social system, but the multitude released by the acute break-up of society--especially of the middle class--which gives rise to the proletariat. When the proletariat proclaims the dissolution of the existing order of things it is merely announcing the secret of its own existence, for it is in itself the virtual dissolution of this order of things. When the proletariat desires the 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

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