Marx's "On 'The Jewish Question'"

Over at Crooked Timber, Corey Robin has a very short post suggesting that "Islam is the 21st Century's Jewish Question," which has attracted a long and perhaps predictably heated comments thread. Some of the more agitated commenters at CT apparently think that such comparisons are inherently dishonest or immoral.  To me, it seems obvious that, however you weigh the similarities and differences in this particular case, the historical experience of anti-semitism is an important reference point for thinking about the way various Others are regarded today.

I don't want to relitigate that comment thread here -- except, again, to say that I don't see anything unreasonable or offensive about the comparison Corey is making. No, the reason I'm writing this is that Corey's mention of it reminded me of what a brilliant and profound, and profoundly misunderstood, essay Marx's "On 'The Jewish Question'" is.

The essay is a response to Bruno Bauer - note the additional quote marks in the title. Bauer is responding to demands for emancipation of Germany's Jews from the various legal restrictions they were subject to. Bauer has two objections. First, he says, there are no citizens in Germany, only different classes of subjects with their own distinct privileges and assigned roles. Jews have one set, Christians have another, but no one is free. Second, even if freedom were possible in Germany, Jews could only become citizens if they were willing to limit their Jewisness to private life -- no special accomodations for religious observance, no maintaining their own institutions. "The Jew must retreat behind the citizen."

Marx replies: All that is true as far as it goes. But that only shows the limitations of the liberal conception of freedom. It is true, as Bauer says, that political emancipation requires the Jews (like everyone else) to make their religion a purely private matter, but all that shows is how far short political emancipation falls of human emancipation.

Human emancipation would recognize that we exist only in relation to myriad other people, and in these relationships we are conscious, moral, rational beings, making choices about our collective lives. Political emancipation, by contrast, isolates our conscious collective life in the political sphere, leaving us disconnected egoists in our private life.

Where the political state has attained its true development, man ... leads a twofold life, a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community, in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers. ... In his most immediate reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here, where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality.

Political emancipation allows people to participate in collective decision-making but only on condition that they give up or deny any concrete, organic identity or connections they have beyond abstract citizenship. While in private life people are free to be really ourselves, but disconnected from the society we continue to depend on, we experience this freedom as being "the plaything of alien powers." 

This connects directly back to the Jewish Question: Judaism is the kind of community or collective identity that people must give up to become citizens in the liberal state. Or rather, pretend to give up:

Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of the community. This conflict reduces itself to the secular division between the political state and civil society. For man as a bourgeois, “life in the state” is “only a semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and the rule.” Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen only sophistically remains a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal. It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference between the merchant and the citizen, between the day-laborer and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between the merchant and the citizen, between the living individual and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious man finds himself with the political man is the same contradiction in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen, and the member of civil society with his political lion’s skin.

While liberal political life is organized on the principle of reasoned debate between disinterested equals, it is not actually the case that inequality and particular interests disappear. One important thing to note in this passage: Here, as elsewhere, Jewishness is only one of various examples of a particular identity. Which should make clear: This is an essay about the limits of political freedom in the liberal state, not an essay about Jews. It's an essay about "The Jewish Question," not about the Jewish Question.

So: Under the bourgeois state (of which Marx already recognizes the northern US as offering the purest example) religion goes from being the most public question, to the most private. "Religion ... is no longer the essence of community, but ... the expression of man's separation from his community ... It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness." It is, in short, now just a matter of taste. 

In the private sphere we are all just automatic pleasure-and-pain machines; our capacity for moral and rational action is limited to the political sphere. Just look at the distinction the French Revolution made between the "rights of the citizen" and the "rights of man":

The rights of man, ... as distinct from the rights of the citizen, are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society, the rights of egoistic man, separated from other men and from the community. ... It is the question of the liberty of man as an isolated monad. ... The rights of man appear as "natural" rights because conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. ... Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and on the other, to a citizen, a juridical person.

Economics, perhaps even more than other social sciences, has taken this distinction and made it doctrine. A core methodological assumption of economics is that private choices are purely arbitrary, they are given natural facts. We can't discuss them, debate them, subject them to reason: De gustibus non est disputandum. In private life, we are animals or not even, we are mechanical objects. Where economics poses a choice, it is invariably: What should the State do?

There is a more direct connection with economics, too. While individuals in civil society are conceived of as monads, they do still relate to each other, through the medium of property. Marx:

The practical application of man's right to liberty is man's right to private property ..., the right to enjoy one's property ... without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty ... makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it.

Social life, to take another tack, is a series of hugely complicated coordination problems. When these problems are solved through norms or tradition, or through rational debate, we experience their resolution as freedom. We see ourselves doing what is right, because it is right. When they are solved by markets or other forms of coercion, we experience unfreedom. One person decides and the rest of us comply.

At the start of the essay, Marx poses the question: "Does the standpoint of political emancipation give the right to demand from the Jew the abolition of Judaism?" Here towards the end, it's clear that Marx's answer is, No. A democratic politics that allows us to act as rational beings only by denying our particular identities is no true democracy. And a private life that allows us our individuality only as arbitrary personal tastes, and in which have no organic ties or moral duties to anyone else, offers no true freedom. Marx does hope and expect that Judaism, like all religions, will eventually disappear. But that's only possible once the separation of political life and civil society has been transcended. We will be able to dispense with religion only once we are able to act as moral agents in our daily lives. Or as he says:

Only when the real, individual man reabsorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his own powers and, consequently, no longer separates power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.

The Golden Age Is In Us

Walking through Central Park a week or so ago, a perfect summer afternoon. Here are the trees, the birds, people playing frisbee, reading, walking dogs, picnicking, the rollerbladers performing by the bandshell, a woman working on an oil painting of Turtle Pond, a pickup soccer game. And look: nothing is for sale, no one is giving orders. But this isn't passive, private leisure: All around is activity, often intense, focused; all around people are cooperating, being together, in a thousand different ways.

Like here, just past Sheep Meadow, where two middle-aged men are performing intricate classical and baroque pieces arranged as saxophone duets. They're playing just for themselves, they don't even have a tip basket. But they're good, they're tight; they must have been playing together for years. I'm walking somewhere but not in a hurry. I stop and join the two or three other people leaning against the fence and listening.

Is there any music recording, any music performance, that compares to the music that emerges, unexpectedly in the middle of something else? Is there ever a better performance than the one that's not for any audience?

In The Ring of Time, E. B. White describes watching a young circus rider practicing some "elementary postures and tricks" in a back lot of the Ringling Brothers' winter home in Florida:

The ten minute ride the girl took achieved -- as far as I was concerned, who wasn't looking for it, and unbeknownst to her, who wasn't even striving for it -- the thing that is sought by performers everywhere, on whatever stage, whether struggling in the tidal currents of Shakespeare or bucking the difficult motion of a horse. ...

Long before the circus comes to town, its most notable performances have already been given. Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources -- from the internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.

This saxophone duo was the combustion of stars. The ten or fifteen minutes I spent listening to them I felt so purely happy, I almost cried.

We don't need to build socialism, or not from scratch. It's here all around us. We just have to scrape away the other crap.

Why do recessions matter?

There’s a tendency, and not only among economists, to describe the costs of downturns like the Great Recession in terms of foregone output. (It’s Okun gaps versus Harberger triangles.) And as far as it goes, it’s true. Less coffee and clothes and cars are being produced than would be, if the Lords of Finance hadn’t crashed the economy. But if, as this kind of talk implicitly assumes, the effect of economic life on wellbeing were just through the quantity of goods and services available – if the recession were a problem mainly for car consumers rather than car producers, coffee drinkers rather than coffee growers – it’s hard to see why anyone would care. So the US GDP fell in 2009 – all the way back to its level in 2006. Were we miserable then? This, by the way, was the point of Robert Lucas' notorious 2003 AEA presidential address, where he claimed that the problem of macroeconomics was solved. He didn’t mean there were no more recessions, just that they didn’t matter since their magnitude was small compared with long-term growth – which, as far as measured output goes, is true, and of the Great Recession too. If he was wrong, his liberal critics are wrong as well.

The tendency to reduce economic questions to the aggregate output of goods and services (plus perhaps the quantity of labor input, as a cost) isn’t limited to recessions. You can find the same thing in the also right-as-far-as-it-goes Stern Review on global warming. Tote up the costs in foregone output of climate change, tote up the costs of doing something about it, and compare to see if burning up the planet is a good idea, or not. The problem is, even the upper range of the costs -- 14 percent of world GDP -- is equivalent to just a few years' economic growth. So, again, who cares? I wonder if anyone has tried to do a similar analysis for World War II. They’d no doubt find that policymakers in the 30s should have been indifferent between averting the war, and increasing long-term growth by two or three tenths of a percent.

It’s tempting – to progressives too – to talk as though there’s a single score to measure economic outcomes. But no, this approach won’t do. Recessions are not important (just; really, hardly at all) because of output foregone. Unemployment is not just a reduction in your lifetime income. Indeed, for rich countries especially, long-term growth in output and income is not even a well-defined quantity. The main cost of unemployment is not the goods the unemployed workers aren’t producing. Indeed, as Keynes (and others) pointed out long ago, for many of the unemployed the disutility of labor is negative – there’s a net gain paying people to work, even if they produce nothing.

The real cost of unemployment is the unemployment itself. In part, this is about the loss of income – not the small reduction in aggregate lifetime income, but the large reduction in current income for those whose lose their jobs. The proportion of people without secure access to food, housing and other necessities is a much better measure of the economic costs of recession than the fall in GDP. But even this is the smaller part of the cost of unemployment. The most important thing about work, under capitalism, isn’t that it produces goods and provides an income, but that it is the carrier of self-worth, status and social power. For most of us, our work is our main bond with society at large; surveys agree with practical experience that losing a job is among the more important events in peoples’ lives. ("Individuals in the British Household Panel Survey commonly report employment-related events as major life events but none report that one of the most important things that happened to them in the past year is that they stopped shopping at Sainsburys and started going to Tescos.") Persistent unemployment breaks social bonds, with profound effects that don’t show up in the aggregates.

We all know people who’ve been out of work for a while. Even if they are in no danger of hunger or homelessness, it’s corrosive. The get depressed; they stop socializing; they describe themselves as failures. I’ve just been reading a bit about unemployment in the 1930s. Here’s what happened in Marienthal, an Austrian village where the majority of the population became unemployed after town’s major employer, a textile factory, shut down in 1930:

Isolation was deepened by a decline in newspaper subscriptions. Subscriptions to the Social Democratic paper, which contained intellectual discussions as well as news, dropped by 60 percent. This was not entirely a matter of money, because the paper had a cheaper subscription rate for unemployed workers… Politics, like other leisure activities, should have benefited from the increased availability of time. But this advantage was heavily outweighed by an increase in apathy that reduced all forms of recreational activity. Library usage also declined; both the number of borrowers and the number of books checked out by each borrower fell. … One striking aspect of this lethargy was the fate of a park that had become a focal point of village life. In more prosperous times, villagers sat on its benches and walked on its paths on Sundays, and the grass and shrubs were neatly tended. In the depression, despite the increase in leisure time, the park fell rapidly into disuse and disrepair.

Or again, the testimony of an unemployed worker in 1930s London: “You feel like you’re no good, if you know what I mean. … It isn’t the hard work of tramping about so much, although that is bad enough. It’s the hopelessness of every step you take when you go in search of a job you know isn’t there.”

We’re already seeing some of this today. If unemployment stays near 10 percent for years, as, absent a change in policy, it likely will, we’ll see much more. We'll see a wide swathe of people cut off from the world, apathetic and discouraged, with no recognized place in society. We'll see increasing stress on families and neighborhoods as they have to take up the role of an overstretched safety net. And quite possibly, if it goes on long enough, we'll see a turn away from democracy. These are profound social changes that have only a tenuous connection with how long it takes GDP to return to trend.

We should remember, at least, what the classic political thinkers knew, what Hannah Arendt knew, when she wrote that "a competition between America and Russia with regard to production and standards of living ... may be very interesting in many respects... There is only one question this outcome, whatever it may be, will never be able to decide, and that is which form of government is better." Once past a threshold of sufficiency (which we have long passed) aggregate output and income have nothing to do with the good life. What matters is freedom and dignity, our chances to develop our inner capacities and our relationships with those around us. And that’s what mass unemployment erodes.