quotes from Karl Marx

Only in the free states of North America—or at least in some of them—does the Jewish question lose its theological significance and become a truly secular question. Only where the political state exists in its complete development can the relation of the Jew, and generally speaking the religious man, to the political state, that is, the relation of religion to state, appear in its characteristic and pure form. Criticism of this relation ceases to be theological once the state abandons a theological posture toward religion, once it relates itself to religion as a state, that is, politically. Criticism then becomes criticism of the political state. Where the question here ceases to be theological, Bauer’s criticism ceases to be critical. “In the United States there is neither a state religion, nor a religion declared to be that of the majority, nor a pre‐eminence of one faith over another. The state is foreign to all faiths.” (Gustave de Beaumont, Marie ou l’esclavage aux Etats‐Unis . . . [Brussels, 1835], p. 214.) There are even some states in North America where “the constitution imposes no religious beliefs or sectarian practice as the condition of political rights” (loc. cit. p. 225). Yet “no one in the United States believes that a man without religion can be an honest man” (loc. cit. p. 224). And North America is pre‐eminently the land of religiosity as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton assure us unanimously. The North American states, however, serve only as an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find even in a country with full political emancipation that religion not only exists but is fresh and vital, we have proof that the existence of religion is not incompatible with the full development of the state. But since the existence of religion implies a defect, the source of this defect must be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer take religion to be the basis but only the manifestation of secular narrowness. Hence we explain religious restriction of free citizens on the basis of their secular restriction. We do not claim that they must trancend their religious resriction in order to trancend their secular limitations. We do claim that they will trancend their religious restriction once they have trancended their secular limitations. We do not convert secular questions into theological ones. We convert theological questions into secular questions. History has long enough been resolved into superstition, but now we can resolve superstition into history. The question of the relation of political emancipation to religion becomes for us a question of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation. We criticize the religious weaknesses of the political state by criticizing the political state in its secular construction apart from the religious defects. In human terms we resolve the contradiction between the state and a particular religion such as Judaism into the contradiction between the state and particular secluar elements, the contradiciton bewteen the state and religion generally into the contradiction between the state and its presuppositions.

The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, or the religious man generally is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In a form and manner corresponding to its nature, the state as such emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion, that is, by recognizing no religion and recognizing itself simply as the state. Political emancipation from religion is not complete and consistent emancipation from religion because political emancipation is not the complete and consistent form of human emancipation.

The limits of political emancipation are seen at once in the fact that the state can free itself from a limitation without man actually being free from it, in the fact that a state can be a free state without men becoming free men. Bauer himself tacitly admits this in setting the following condition of political emancipation: “Every religious privilege, including the monopoly of a privileged church, would have to be abolished. If a few or many or even the overwhelming majority still felt obliged to fulfill their religious duties, such a practice should be left to them as a purely private matter.” The state can thus emancipate itself from religion even though the overwhelming majority is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease being religious by being religious in private.

But the attitude of the state, particularly the free state, toward religion is still only the attitude of the men who make up the state. Hence it follows that man frees himself from a limitation politically, through the state, by overcoming the limitation in an abstract, limited, and partial manner, in contradiction with himself. Further, when man frees himself politically, he does so indirectly, through an intermediary, even if the intermediary is necessary. Finally, even when man proclaims himself an atheist through the medium of the state—that is, when he declares the state to be atheistic—he is still captive to religion since he only recognizes his atheism indirectly through an intermediary. Religion is merely the indirect recognition of man through a mediator. The state is the mediator between man and the freedom of man. As Christ is the mediator on whom man unburdens all his own divinity and all his religious ties, so is the state the mediator to which man transfers all his unholiness and all his human freedom.

The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects and all the advantages of any political elevation. If the state as state, for example, abolishes private property, man proclaims private property is overcome politically once he abolishes the property qualification for active and passive voting as has been done in many North American states. Hamilion interprets this fact quite correctly in political terms: “The great majority of the people have gained a victory over property owners and financial wealth.”^[*] Is not private property ideally abolished when the have‐nots come to legislate for the haves? The property qualification is the last political form for recognizing private property.

Yet the political annulment of private property not only does not abolish it but even presupposes it. The state abolishes distinctions of birth, rank, education, and occupation in its fashion when it declares them to be non‐political distinctions, when it proclaims that every member of the community equally participates in popular sovereignty without regard to these distinctions, and when it deals with all elements of the actual life of the nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless the state permits private property, education, and occupation to act and manifest their particular nature as private property, education, and occupation in their own ways. Far from overcoming these factual distinctions, the state exists only by presupposing them; it is aware of itself as a political state and makes its universality effective only in opposition to these elements.

[*Thomas Hamilton, Men and Manners in America (2 vols; Edinburgh: Willam Blackwood, 1833). Marx quotes from the German translation, Die Menschen und die Sitten in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika (Mannheim: Hoff, 1834), Vol Ⅰ, p. 146.]

According to Baeur man must sacrifice the “privilege of faith” to be able to acquire the universal rights of man. Let us consider for a moment these so‐called rights and indeed in their most authentic form, the form they have among their discoverers, the North Americans and the French. In part these rights are political rights that can be exercised only in community with others. Participation in the community, indeed the political community or state, constitutes their substance. They belong in the category of political freedom, of civil rights, which by no means presupposes the consistent and positive trancendence of religion and thus of Judaism, as we have seen. There is left for consideration the other part, the rights of man as distinct from the rights of the citizen.

Among these is freedom of conscience, the right to practice one’s chosen religion. The privilege of faith is expressly recognized either as a right of man or as a consequence of a right of man, freedom.

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1791, Art. 10: “No one is to be disturbed on account of his beliefs, even religious beliefs.” In Title Ⅰ of the Constitution of 1791 there is guaranteed as a human right: “The liberty of every man to practice the religious worship to which he is attached.”

The Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., 1793, includes among human richts, Art. 7: “Freedom of worship.” Moreover, it even maintains in regard to the right to express views and opinions, to assemble, and to worship: “The need to proclaim these rights assumes either the presence or recent memory of despotism.” Compare the Constitution of 1795, Title ⅩⅠⅤ, Art. 354.

Constitution of Pennsylvania, Art. 9, § 3: “All men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own consciences; no man can of right be compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or to maintain any ministry against his consent; no human authority can, in any case whatever, interfere with the rights of conscience and control the prerogatives of the soul.”

Constitution of New Hampshire, Arts. 5 and 6: “Among the natural rights, some are in their very nature unalienable, because no equivalent can be conceived for them. Of this kind are the rights of conscience.” (Beaumont, loc. cit., pp. 213, 214.)

The incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is so little implied in the concept of the rights of man that the right to be religious according to one’s liking and to practice a particular religion is explicitly included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a universal human right.

The rights of man as such are distinguished from the rights of the citizen. Who is this man distinguished from the citizen? None other than the member of civil society. Why is the member of the civil society called “man,” man without qualification, and why are his rights called the rights of man? How can we explain this? By the relation of the political state to civil society and by the nature of political emancipation.

Let us note first of all that the so‐called rights of man as distinguished from the rights of the citizen are only the rights of the member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, man separated from other men and from the community. The most radical constitution, the Constitution of 1793, may be quoted:

Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

Art. 2. “These rights (the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty, security, property.”

What is this liberty?

Art 6. “Liberty is the power belonging to each man to do anything which does not impair the rights of others,” or according to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791: “Liberty is the power to do anything which does not harm others.”

Liberty is thus the right to do and perform anything that does not harm others. The limits within which each can act without harming others is determined by law just as the boundary between two fields is marked by a stake. This is the liberty of man viewed as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself. Why, according to Bauer, is the Jew not capable of acquiring human rights? “As long as he remains a Jew the limited nature which makes him a Jew must triumph over the human nature which should link him as a man with others and must separate him from non‐Jews.” But liberty as a right of man is not based on the association of man with man but rather on the separation of man from man. It is the right of this separation, the right of the limited individual limited to himself.

The practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property.

What is property as one of the rights of man?

Art. 16 (Constitution of 1793):

“The right of property is that belonging to every citizen to enjoy and dispose of his goods, his revenues, the fruits of his labor and of his industry as he wills.”

The right of property is thus the right to enjoy and dispose of one’s possessions as one wills, without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self‐interest. This individual freedom and its application as well constitutes the basis of civil society. It lets every man find in other men not the realization but rather the limitation of his own freedom. It proclaims above all the right of man “to enjoy and dispose of his goods, his revenues, the fruits of his labor and of his industry as he wills.”

There still remain the other rights of man, equality and security.

“Equality”—here used in its non‐political sense—is only the equal right to liberty as described above, viz., that every man is equally viewed as a self‐sufficient monad. The Constitution of 1705 defines the concept of equality with this significance:

Art. 3 (Constitution of 1795): “Equality consists in the fact that the law is the same for all, whether it protects or whether it punishes.”

And security?

Art. 8 (Constitution of 1793): “Security consists in the protection accorded by society to each of its members for the preservation of his person, his rights and his property.”

Security is the supreme social concept of civil society, the concept of the police, the concept that the whole society exists only to guarantee to each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights, and his property. In this sense Hegel calls civil society “the state as necessity and rationality.”

Civil society does not raise itself above its egoism through the concept of security. Rather, security is the guarantee of the egoism.

Thus none of the so‐called rights of men goes beyond the egoistic man, the man withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private choice, and separated from the community as a member of civil society. Far from viewing man here in his species‐being, his species‐life itself—society—rather appears to be an external framework for the individual, limiting his original independence. The only bond between men is natural necessity, need and private interest, the maintenance of their property and egoistic persons.

It is somewhat curious that a nation just beginning to free itself, tearing down all the barriers between different sections of the people and founding a political community, should solemnly proclaim (Declaration of 1791) the justification of the egoistic man, man separated from his fellow men and from the community, and should even repeat this proclamation at a moment when only the most heroic sacrifice can save the nation and hence is urgently required, when the sacrifice of all the interests of civil society is highly imperaive and egoism must be punished as crime (Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1793). This becomes even more curious when we observe that the political liberators reduce citizenship, the political community, to a mere means for preserving these so‐called rights of man and that the citizen thus is proclaimed to be the servant of the egoistic man, the sphere in which the man acts as a member of the community is degraded below that in which he acts as a fractional being, and finally man as bourgeios rather than man as citizen is considered to be proper and authentic man.

“The goal of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man.” (Declaration of the Rights of Man, etc., of 1791, Art. 2.) “Government is instituted to guarantee man’s enjoyment of his natural and imprescriptible rights.” (Declaration, etc., of 1793, Art. 1.) Thus even at the time of its youthful enthusiasm fired by the urgency of circumstances political life is proclaimed to be a mere means whose end is life in civil society. To be sure, revolutionary practice flagrantly contradicts its theory. While security, for example, is proclaimed to be one of the rights of man, the violation of the privacy of correspondance is publicly established as the order of the day. While the “unlimited freedom of the press” (Constitution of 1973, Art. 122) as a consequence of the rights of man and individual freedom is guaranteed, freedom of the press is completely abolished because “freedom of the press should not be permitted to compromise public liberty.” (“Robespierre jeune,” Parliamentary History of the French Revolution, by Buchez and Roux, Vol. 28, p. 159.) This means that the human right of liberty ceases to be a right when it comes into conflict with political life while theoretically political life is only the guarantee of the rights of man, the rights of individual man, and should be abandoned once it contradicts its end, these rights of man. But the practice is only the exception, the theory is the rule. Even if we choose to regard revolutionary practice as the correct expression of this relationship, the problem still remains unsettled as to why the relationship is inverted in the consciousness of the political liberators so that the end appears as means and the means as the end. This optical illusion of their consciousness would always be the same problem, though a psychological, a theoretical problem.

This man, the member of civil society, is now the basis and presupposition of the political state. He is recognized as such by the state in the rights of man.

But the freedom of egoistic man and the recognition of this freedom is rather the recognition of the unbridled movement of the sprirtual and material elements forming the content of his life.

Thus man was not freed from religion; he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property. He received freedom of property. He was not freed from the egoism of trade but received freedom to trade.

The constitution of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals—whose relation is law just as the relation of estates and guilds was privilege—is accomplished in one and the same act. As a member of civil society man is the non‐political man but necessarily appears to be natural man. The rights of man appear to be natural rights because self‐conscious activity is concentrated on the political act. The egoistic man is the passive and given result of the dissolved society, an object of immediate certainty and thus a natural object. The political revolution dissolves civil life into its constituent elements without revolutionizing these elements themselves and subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society—the realm of needs, labor, private interests, and private right—as the basis of its existence, as a presupposition needing no ground, and thus as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member of civil society is regarded as authentic man, man as distinct from citizen, since he is man in his sensuous, individual, and most intimate existence while political man is only the abstract and artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Actual man is recognized only in the form of an egoistic individual, authentic man, only in the form of abstract citizen.

But in spite of all his apparent iconoclasm one already finds in Qu’est-ce que la propriété? the contradiction that Proudhon is criticising society, on the one hand, from the standpoint and with the eyes of a French small-holding peasant (later petit bourgeois) and, on the other, that he measures it with the standards he inherited from the socialists.

The deficiency of the book is indicated by its very title. The question is so badly formulated that it cannot be answered correctly. Ancient “property relations” were superseded by feudal property relations and these by “bourgeois” property relations. Thus history itself had expressed its criticism upon past property relations. What Proudhon was actually dealing with was modern bourgeois property as it exists today. The question of what this is could have only been answered by a critical analysis of “political economy,” embracing the totality of these property relations, considering not their legal aspect as relations of volition but their real form, that is, as relations of production. But as Proudhon entangled the whole of these economic relations in the general legal concept of “property,” “la propriété,” he could not get beyond the answer which, in a similar work published before 1789, Brissot had already given in the same words: “La propriété c’est le vol.”

The upshot is at best that the bourgeois legal conceptions of “theft” apply equally well to the “honest” gains of the bourgeois himself. On the other hand, since “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property, Proudhon entangled himself in all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property.