Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848

Jews between Volk and Proletariat { 161

position of philosophy to reality largely misses the point in the German con-

text, Marx contends, because it is only in the philosophy it has produced that

Germany has achieved reality; only in its thinkers—above all, Hegel and Marx’s

fellow Young Hegelians—is Germany the contemporary of modern society

(France) and politics (England).

In “Zur Judenfrage” Marx radicalizes the critique he began in the Kreuznach

Kritik of the state as an illusory realm that offers only a fiction of universal equal-

ity and dignity while perpetuating real social injustice. In “Einleitung” he tries

to envision a possibility of true human emancipation via social, not political, rev-

olution, and he introduces the proletariat as the hero of this drama. His inven-

tion of the proletariat fulfills two key functions. First, it serves as the hopelessly

backward German Volk’s saving grace, and second, it is the German theorist’s

practical partner and legitimating foundation: “As philosophy finds its material

weapons in the proletariat, so the proletariat finds its spiritual weapons in phi-

losophy. And once the lightning of thought has squarely struck this ingenuous

[naiven (my addition)] soil of the people the emancipation of the Germans into

human beings will take place.”^62

Marx can envision such a transformation occurring in politically retarded

Germany because he now thinks of politics essentially as a detour on the way

to true human emancipation. Although there exists no class in German society

bold or vigorous enough to appear (however temporarily or falsely) to embody

the universal interests of all of society and thus to carry out a political revolu-

tion (as the bourgeoisie had done in France), this apparent weakness could be a

strength. Marx’s hope is that Germany will be able to leapfrog over the illusory

stage of political emancipation and achieve human emancipation through so-

cial revolution instead. Marx no longer calls for an idealist and political tran-

scendence of abject German reality. He now theorizes human emancipation as a

possibility of dialectical reversal inherent in the radical abjection of the German

proletariat itself. Abjection has become Germany’s last best hope as well as the

material handmaiden—or perhaps the alibi—of the German theorist. Marx in-

vents the proletariat, in theory, as the material partner of German theory. And

it is difficult to imagine the proletariat being anywhere as utterly abject as in

Marx’s positing of it, which borders on theoretical sadism. To his own question

“So where is the positive possibility of German emancipation?” Marx responds:

Answer: In the formation of a class with radical chains, a class of civil society

which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all

estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and

claims no particular right because no particular wrong but wrong generally