Marx and Milliband on the Jewish Question

....Jewish Question

....In the first essay, Marx criticizes Bruno Bauer for confusing political and human emancipation, and notes that ‘the limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction, that the state can be a free state without man being a free man’. 15 Even so, political emancipation is a great advance; it is not the last form of human emancipation, but it is the last form of human emancipation within the framework of the existing social order. 16 Human emancipation, on the other hand, can only be realized by transcending bourgeois society, ‘which has severed all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolved the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another’. 17 The more specific meaning of that emancipation is defined in the Jewish Question, in Marx’s strictures against ‘Judaism’, here deemed synonymous with trade, money and the commercial spirit which has come to affect all human relations. On this view, the political emancipation of the Jews, which Marx defends, 18 does not produce their social emancipation; this

is only possible in a new society, in which practical need has been humanised and the commercial spirit abolished. 19

"Marx and the State 1965"

In

Class War Conservatism and Other Essays Ralph Miliband