Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

160 } Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany

between thinking and suffering humanity as the force that will eventually effect

political revolution indeed anticipates the alliance between critic and proletariat

in “Einleitung,” there are crucial differences. As we will see shortly, there is a

neat division of labor in “Einleitung” between the thinking critic and the suf-

fering proletariat, and the envisioned outcome of this alliance is social—not

political—revolution. No clear distinction between the roles of thinkers and suf-

ferers obtains in Marx’s May 1843 letter: thinking human beings are oppressed,

and suffering human beings think. And even as Marx anticipates the proletariat

when he associates this new suffering humanity with the rise of industry and

trade and the forms of human exploitation they entail, what defines the new suf-

fering humanity is not that it suffers but that it thinks: it is political consciousness

that distinguishes this “new type of humanity”—that is, political animals—from

its passive, brainless German counterpart. It is thought— political or human

consciousness—that renders ineffectual passive suffering active.

This, surely, is one reason why Marx expends no energy depicting the suf-

fering of this new group, in contrast to his considerable investment in depicting

the animality of subpolitical Germans. Their suffering is not productive per se

but is rather a force that serves as a yardstick for and galvanizes active conscious

thought. Marx can allude to the suffering of this emerging humanity on German

soil, but to elaborate on or depict the nature of its suffering as extreme would

erode its status as an active, productive political agent in contradistinction to

the essentially passive subpolitical animal order. Even as he enlists a new kind

of suffering humanity in the cause of creating a political revolution in Germany,

Marx continues to privilege thought and consciousness as the active agent in

this political (human) transformation.

By the end of the period reflected in the one double issue of Deutsch-franzö-

sische Jahrbücher, Marx’s investment in abjection had shifted from bemoaning

the stupidity of toady German philistines to his first theorization of the pro-

letariat. Although thought remains an—arguably the primary—active force in

Marx’s new conception of the proletariat, the proletariat’s abject suffering be-

comes a productive force in its own right. One of the chief innovations of “Zur

Judenfrage” is that Marx abandons faith in politics per se and in the political

protagonist, the Volk. The endpoint of this trajectory in the abject, but poten-

tially active and redemptive, proletariat helps bring into focus the conceptual

strain of “Zur Judenfrage,” the fractured late 1843 text that mediates between

these two theoretical positions.

The first half of Marx’s “Einleitung,” written in late 1843 and early 1844

— immediately after, and possibly concurrently with portions of, “Zur Judenfrage”—

deals with different aspects of the reality and nonreality of Germany. The op-