Karl Marx, The Market, And The Hidden Jew

When I was in college, a frequently assigned text in literature and philosophy classes was Karl Marx's On The Jewish Question, about the relationship between political and religious freedom. I don't know if anybody ever got to the end of it--I certainly didn't then--and I have the feeling it wasn't many, because I don't recall anyone being especially shocked by the punchline:

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. ...In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

Kind of a bombshell, ain't? Doesn't read so well after all these years. I bring it up not in an effort to throw more dirt on the grave of Marxism (it's buried well enough), but because it seems to me to have some interesting resonance for the one part of Marx that is still relevant, the critique of the values of the market. Marx's basic point that the market imbues our lives with a scale of values that we do not choose and that in its pervasiveness hides the possibility of other values is one that has a great degree of force. Its attraction has been equally clear to the left and the right, and in that sense is pretty non-partisan.

What's striking about the end of On The Jewish Question, however, is how deeply encoded Marx's anti-semitism is in the critique of the market. The critique of the market involves an attack on the Jew--and a particular kind of attack, coming from the child of converted Jews. In Marx's vehemence I read a degree of shame. The sneakiness of the Jew, the Jew as liar, is a common trope of anti-semitism. The converted Jew is the Jew squared: the Jew is purported to be hidden, and the converted Jew is ... a hidden Jew. The more he tries to run, the more of a Jew he becomes (this is captured in the challenge of Freud's construction in The Resistance to Psychoanalysis, in which he pointedly describes himself as " a Jew who is not afraid to admit that he is a Jew.")

The sense of the inescapability of Jewishness to the converted Jew hangs over the critique of the market. It has sometimes struck me that some of the people who claim most fervently to reject the values of the market in theory cling to them most strongly in practice (not difficult, because in fact the market is extremely good at co-opting, recycling, and retailing anti-marketism: half the advertising industry is based on this). The critique of the market holds inside it the same doubt that seems to have afflicted Marx. Very often the claims of rejecting the values of the market leave the suspicion that inside those doing the loud rejecting is still a hidden Market Man, beholden to the same standards of popular appeal and commercial success, just (like the hidden Jew) pushed further inside.

"If I Could Save The Union Without Freeing Any Slave..."

About a month ago we passed the 150th anniversary of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, and having missed commenting on it for the last 150 years, I don't think coming in another month late makes too much difference. I recently read part (not all) of the debates, and they help answer the question that has always puzzled me about Lincoln. Everybody knows that Lincoln told Horace Greeley that if he could save the Union without freeing a slave, he'd have done so. Now, this has to be perplexing to any modern person, because it leaves open the basic question of what the hell was the justification for Civil War if it wasn't freeing the slaves?

I feel like most of what I've read about Lincoln manages to avoid giving a direct answer to this question, which is incredibly disappointing, because it has to be the most interesting question about Lincoln. The debates help a lot in getting to this, because they make clear the context for what Lincoln told Greeley. Lincoln says about slavery:

I think that [Stephen Douglas], and those acting with him, have placed that institution on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery. And while it is placed upon this new basis, I say, and I have said that I believe we shall not have peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or, on the other hand, that its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

To Lincoln's thinking, preserving the Union without freeing the slaves wasn't one of the options. That option had been sealed off, and he believed that it had been sealed off not by him, but by the South and the apologists for the South. For those opposed to slavery, there were no more concessions left to give. Just maintaining the status quo and letting the slave states maintain the abhorrent institution was clearly not enough. The South had been offered that and much more. As Lincoln saw it, the only demand left was that slavery should not only be permitted, but expanded into the free states. For Lincoln, the political realities of slavery (he outlines these in a fascinating way in a letter to his friend Joshua Speed guaranteed the political ascendency in the South of the most intransigently pro-slavery faction. And that meant the inevitability of war.

It was not a question of just letting the South go, because the South did not want merely to go and be left on its own. It had been offered the chance to be left alone and much more, and that was never good enough. The last demand that was on the table was one that Lincoln would not countenance: not just that slavery be tolerated, but that it should be expanded and perpetuated. So the question of just letting things lie as they were was a false one. It was an option that the South and its supporters had themselves taken off the table, and to concede any more, even if it was possible, would do nothing but delay the coming catastrophe. Thus the famous sentence: "If we cannot live together as brothers, how will we live together as enemies?" Or, in other words, if we are already close to war now, why does anyone think that we will not be at war after we split into two countries?

Plato, Ancient Escape Artist

A lot of people seem to think that philosophy is about finding the good, the true and the beautiful, and these people are often the same ones who are pretty convinced that they know what those things are already. This is what I could never stand about the presentation of Plato: the Socratic dialogue is supposed to be a means of self-help, a way of getting to an answer if you just nod "yes" at the right moments.

Plato is a whole lot more interesting than that. I read the Gorgias a little while ago, and what struck me most was its vertiginous pessimism. The Gorgias is the story of a public debate, involving Socrates, two "philosophers," and the politician Callicles. The fact that the debate is in public, essentially on a stage, is key. Nobody in it is going to be persuaded of anything. Socrates gets the philosophers, Gorgias and his student Polus, to agree with him in proper Socratic fashion. But then Callicles messes it all up, basically saying, sure, Polus (Gorgias's student) will agree with Socrates that tyranny's bad--because there's no way he's going to stand up in front of a room and give them an answer they don't want to hear. And then Callicles accuses Socrates himself of rehearsing arguments that will be palatable to the listeners, and repeatedly calls him on playing to the audience.

That is in fact what Socrates is doing, as when he challenges Callicles to say one good thing he's done, and Callicles says, "You're being contentious." I'm pretty sure that the way we're supposed to take this is that Callicles means, "Look, I said my piece honestly. And now because you know I have political ambitions, you're backing me into a corner and forcing me to give you nonsense about the public interest at heart, because that's what people expect." The initial positions have gotten totally reversed. Socrates is the one who started out saying he doesn't care whom he persuades or how many people are with him. But now he's tweaking Callicles; he's saying, "Well, if you want to persuade people to let you govern, you're gonna have to start talking about what's just and good."

Nobody, including Socrates, is really speaking freely and what is supposed to be a dialogue about virtue turns into a discussion of whether the actors are actually saying what they think or just flattering the audience. The dialogue is not about tyranny or virtue, but about persuasion. The best line occurs when when Socrates asks Callicles if he should be the city's physician or its flatterer. And Callicles say, "You should be the flatterer." The intro to the online edition calls Callicles's answer "ingenuous," which is 100 percent off base. That just totally ignores all the next lines, which make clear that Callicles is being the opposite of ingenuous: he's openly insulting Socrates. Callicles' insult really gets to the core of the issue. His concept of debate is instrumental: it's a tool to get the power that you want. And on Callicles' view, someone like Socrates, who has no "power" in the conventional sense, is limited to saying the things that his audience won't object to.

Ultimately Socrates wins the point, though it's a close call, and there's no pretence that he's actually persuaded his interlocuters. He wins on Callicles' terms, by demonstrating that he holds the trump card:

If I died because I have no powers of flattery or rhetoric, I am very sure that you would not find me repining at death. For no man who is not an utter fool and coward is afraid of death itself, but he is afraid of doing wrong. For to go to the world below having one's soul full of injustice is the last and worst of all evils.

Socrates' advantage over Callicles is that he has gone beyond the fear of death and so made himself untouchable. Or so he claims. Whether in fact Socrates, or especially Plato (who had more interest in political power) believes this is an open question. Socrates drank the hemlock. Plato several times lost the goodwill of his political patrons, and each time he chose the much less philosophical path of cut-and-run.