394 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 395 Concerning the Jewish Question Two Reviews by KARL MARX The Jewish Question. By Bruno Bauer, Braunschweig, 1843. The Capability of present day Jews and Christians to become free. Twenty one leaflets from Switzerland. Edited by George Herwegh. Zurich and Winterthur, 1843, 56 71.
our disagreements, our personalities, our underhand attempts by parliamentary tricks to make the convention do something it didn believe in and would be sorry for.
There was at least one delegatemhe actually got on the committee on International relations who doubted the wisdom of affiliating with the Third International. He was also one of another and much larger group who made a fight against the Report of the Committee on Program and Labor and who actually succeeded in postponing action on that report until a committee on platform had reported, as instructed, a terse, short platform in simple language suited to the worker and the platform had been acted on. This platform was so terse as to quite omit the Communist idea of political action and the necessity for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat to overthrow Capitalist power and accomplish the Socialist transformation of society.
Many of the delegates were none too clear on the distinction between parliamentarianism and revolutionary political action.
The convention spent nearly half a day in debate. Those trying for a terseness so extreme as to cloud the issue, were both vociferous and adroit, but in the end the Convention, by an overwhelming vote, amended the platform with a clear cut, uncompromising statement of Communist principles and tactics. The politicians subsided or went home, and the Report of the Committee on Program and Labor quickly and quietly went through subject to the careful consideration it merited. The report was based on the Left Wing Program and Manifesto, improved both by the Committee and the Convention. Shortly, it will speak for itself to the workers of America. may be wrong in my opinion that the convention did good work. may be wrong in my feeling that that party is the only one in America where the working class of America the rank and file, can get a run for their money. But in this am surely right: All this storm and stress in the Socialist or Communist call it as you like movement are nothing but labor pains. new soul, a new life is coming into this world, the life and soul of the real revolutionary proletarian movement in America a life and soul so strong and lusty that its first cry strikes terror to the heart of our ruling class.
The German Jews are demanding emancipation. What sort of emancipation do they desire. Civic, political emancipation!
Bruno Bauer replies to them as follows: Nobody in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free; how shall we free you? You Jews are egoistic in demanding special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. You should work as Germans for the political emancipation of Germany, as men for the emancipation of mankind, and regard the particular form of oppression and insult to which you are subjected not as. an exception to the rule but rather as a confirmation of the rule.
Or do the Jews demand equal footing with the Christian subjects of the state? If they do, they thereby justify the existence of the Christian state, they acknowledge the rule of general subjugation. Why do they chafe under their own specific yoke if they find the general yoke acceptable? Why should the German be interested in the emancipation of the Jew if the Jew is not interested in the emancipation of the German?
The Christian state knows only privilege. In this state the Jew possesses the privilege of being a Jew. As a Jew he has rights which the Christians do not possess. Why does he desire rights which the Christians enjoy and which he does not have.
In demanding emancipation from the Christian state, the Jew expects the Christian state to give up its religious prejudice. Does he give up his own religious prejudice? Has he therefore the right to demand of another this abdication of religion?
The Christian state from its very nature cannot emancipate the Jew; and, adds Bauer, the Jew from his very nature is incapable of emancipation. As long as the state is Christian and the Jew Jewish, they are both as incapable of bestowing emancipation as they are of receiving it.