Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789-1848
amelia
(Amelia)
#1
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-