Marx on the Jewish question written in 1842 and published in 1843, criticizes
his fellow Hegelian, Bauer, who propose if only the Jewish will leave their
Jewish Conscience they could achieve political parity, Marx respond, the
Religion was more than the state, he give example in US, which there is not an
official religion, like Prussia, still more religious (which still truth today).
For Bauer has stated that the renouncing of religion would be
especially difficult for Jews, because Judaism consider by him as a primitive
stage in the development of Christianity., Marx argues that the Jewish religion
does not need to be attached to the significance it has in Bauer's analysis,
because it is only a spiritual reflection of Jewish economic life.
For Marx defined the Jewish Question as pre-capitalism, Marx
stereotype of the Jew as a financially apt huckster
and posits a special connection between Judaism as a religion and the
economy of contemporary bourgeois society. Thus, the Jewish religion does not
need to disappear in society, as Bauer argues, because it is actually a natural
part of it. Marx figuratively equated practical
Judaism with huckstering and money,
Marx concludes, that the Christians have
become Jews; and, ultimately, it is mankind that needs to emancipate itself
from practical Judaism, is not doubt about
Marx Antisemitism (this tradiont is carry in all the Socialist, labour and
communist party in Europe), but profound intellectual schisms, will reappear
later on between Post-Modernism specially Derrida and Marxist, New Left and
neo-Marxism.
But as political project in the left took root with Lenin (While
Bakunin openly was Antisemitism, his Antisemitism was lashing against Marx
machinations of the Expulsion of the Libertarian Left from the first international),
while the left way of though as Lenin dealing with the Jewish Question, from
the outset of Lenin's activities, the Jewish *Bund, whose representatives took
part in Russian Social Democratic congresses, was a factor to be dealt with in
his tactics as head of the Bolshevik faction, as the Bund increasingly threw
its weight to the Mensheviks and sometimes swung the balance against Lenin.
Lenin attacked with vigour than others, the anti-Jewish policy of
the Czarist regime. On his initiative the Bolshevist faction in the 4th state
Duma (1912–1917) proposed a law to annul all restrictive measures against Jews,
including education, state service, the Pale of Settlement in part, and others.
Lenin viewed the assimilation of the Jews and their complete
disappearance into the surrounding culture and society as an inevitable and
even desirable result of human advancement. He believed that Jewish
separateness, even in the modern and secularist image of the Bund and Socialist
Zionism, was a remnant of the precapitalist era and had begun to disappear
quickly in Western capitalist countries such as Germany, France, and England.
Lenin viewed the separate cultural and social existence of the Jews of
Russia as a corollary of the anti-Jewish discrimination and persecution and as
a symptom of the backwardness of Russia, in which medieval divisions had not
yet crumbled. He therefore denounced not only all manifestations of
antisemitism, but also all forms of Jewish nationalism and separatism as reactionary phenomena that deflect the
Jewish workers away from revolutionary solidarity with their non-Jewish
comrades and from the struggle for the future revolution to overthrow all class
barriers and finally solve the Jewish problem.
Lenin expounded his views on the Jewish question and on the national
question in general in: The Position of
the Bund in the Party (1903: Collected Works, (19614), 92–103), Theses on the National Question (1913;
ibid., 19 (19634), 243–51), Cultural-National
Autonomy (1913; ibid., 503–7), Critical
Remarks on the National Question (1913; ibid., 20 (19644), 17–51). During
the Civil War he refused to confiscate the Gorkis' pamphlet: On the Jews, despite warnings that it
would become an anti-Bolshevist tool in the hands of the
counterrevolutionaries.
After the Revolution, when Lenin took power in Russia (end of 1917),
he endorsed the establishment of special departments for Jewish affairs in both
the ruling Communist Party (the Yevsektsiya)
and the Commissariat of Nationalities, headed by Joseph Stalin.
Lenin or Stalin at first did not object to the recognition of
Yiddish as the national language of the Jews, since the masses of Jews –
especially in the former Pale of
Settlement – were a large ethnic bloc, with its own culture and language
that should be addressed through means – especially linguistic – understood by
it.
Together with his acquiescence in the de facto recognition of a Jewish nationality in Soviet Russia,
Lenin campaigned vigorously, both orally and in writing, against antisemitism
and incitement to pogroms by the anti-Soviet right-wing forces (the White Army,
the Ukrainian nationalists, peasant anarchists, etc.) and initiated, soon after
the Revolution, the decree outlawing pogroms and their instigators (July 1918).
Thus not only did Lenin abide by one of his ideological principles,
he also faced and fought the most demagogic challenge of the
counterrevolutionary forces that rose agains this regime
Lenin took note of the higher percent of Jews in the revolutionary
movement than their proportion in the population, and he initiated the
promotion of Jews to higher positions in the State and party apparatus.
Lenin did not oppose the persecution of Zionists and suppression of
the Hebrew language and the Jewish religion by the Soviet authorities, although
in his time many arrested Zionists and rabbis were eventually allowed to leave
Russia and go to Palestine. The assassination attempt on behalf of the Social
Revolutionaries (1918), carried out against him by a Jewish woman, Fanya Kaplan, did not change his
approach to the Jews at all.
Lenin attempted to oppose the Russian great power chauvinism of the Soviet regime, which intervened, to
the excessive cruelty in the lives of other nationalities in the country (such
as the Georgians) and thus violated his principles on the national question.
In the 1930, in Nazi Germany as described by John Weiss in Ideology of
Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany and Richard J. Evans the
Third Reich in Power, where, the National Socialism view of communism as their twins,
where for the communist their adoration of party discipline, and for National
Socialist discipline base on race, for the communist class, but for both, for
the National Socialist, the only race and ethnic group was Germany, and for the
communist the utopia a new technocratic class defined by the elite, the
communist legitimize as only the righteous of working class, only their
suffering was righteous.
After, the failure of the communist utopia in the Soviet Union and
Russia was reduce itself to a Kleptocracy society, with an economy based on a
single commodity oil, or China, where communist party transform itself to state
capitalism, while, the criticism of inequality of the capitalist society is
valid, but their analysis were wrong and the solution failed, the only, story
line left was to attack individualism especially since their ideals was based
on a collectivism, and a homogenous society, this utopia, the individual does
not exist, there is not room for outsider, as Marx, Lenin of Hitler defined the
Jewish outsiders.
The hate of the Authoritarian
left (today are Socialist Democrats in Europe, the Left Parties ) toward the
Jews or individual—took a new life in 1990s against postmodernism, while
Derrida in 1963, in the miracle year wrote 3 books, which become base of
postmodernism especially, the concept of Deconstruction and Difference. In of
Grammatology, describing in the text mention Rabbi Elizer (the son of Simon ben
Jochai- Rabbi Elizer a mystic in his own right), where Jewish though of the interpretation
of the law as multi-layer of interpretations—the left consider as relativism,
where Marxist theory based on absolute certainty, while Marxist though created
a rhetoric defined itself is a science, where, their assumptions or predictions
are not less pseudo-science, not only economics of Marxism, but as also
Economics, but justify their policies as a science, what at best can be
consider liberal arts.
Derrida deal with identity issues, while early year was not known,
but in his essay about Tallit (Jewish Prayer shawl) and in 2000, a book dealing
the fact he never carry a circumcision for his son, this individual issue for
the left consider as relativism. The left base on social cohesion where the
individual stop to exist, for them any individual cannot coexist, nationalism
is acceptable because is about a cohesion.
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