The Labour Party and anti-Semitism

There is no upsurge of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. There is a moral panic being instigated by the media due, to a handful of cases, almost all of which took place before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in the summer of 2015. In fact, the Corbyn leadership has demonstrated it is not afraid to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism against Labour figures, including allies like Ken Livingstone. But this is not all there is to say.

The perfect storm over anti-Semitism and Labour has been building for a long time. Every wing of the British media establishment has taken part – from the BBC and the Guardian to the Telegraph and the Spectator. The Naz Shah case, and Ken Livingstone’s intervention, is just the latest to be picked up. The British press has manufactured this scandal in a bid to create a crisis and, in turn, undermine Corbyn. But this hysteria also represents the high emotional stakes in Israel among the commentariat.

The Anglosphere is culturally and politically invested in Israel in a way which other world powers are not. Make no doubt about it, this is the result of settler colonialism. Israel fits into the imperial ambitions of Western powers. The American intellectual class fell in love with Israel after the 1967 war, which came as a welcome sign that the world was not in total disarray. So the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a coincidental part of our political discourse – it is necessarily a part of the way the conflict is understood in the West.

For these reasons, we might say Ken Livingstone ran into the Shah scandal like a bull into a china shop. We still may not have heard the last vase smash as it hits the floor. Plenty of leftists have pointed out the Haavara agreement, the Nazi plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar and elsewhere. However, the facts of Nazi Germany are not really relevant or helpful here. The real controversy is over Livingstone’s use of the term ‘Zionism’ to describe Nazi policy. Laying out the historical record cannot dispel the outrage (much of it phony). The damage is done.

Sadly, honest voices like Jamie Stern-Weiner are lost in the storm. Vilification campaigns are successful because it is virtually impossible to resist mudslinging. If you explain yourself, deny the claims or even apologise, you’re screwed. It’s too late. It’s never enough. There is no way of adequately deflecting, let alone dodging, the mud. You’re always guilty in the eyes of some people. Even before this, Livingstone was rated as an anti-Semite by certain people thanks to the media.

Even if we presume innocence, it’s worth examining why Livingstone’s use of the term ‘Zionism’ was problematic. First off, Zionism is a broad church, much like feminism or conservatism, so it’s hardly a clearly defined target to begin with. For example, Noam Chomsky was a Zionist youth organiser and Alan Dershowitz was apart of the same Hebrew summer camp. But Chomsky’s childhood Zionism would not recognised by the devotees of the state of Israel. There is a big difference between the left-wing, anti-statist currents of the 1930s and present day right-wing Israeli nationalism.

That’s not to say that Zionism did not always suffer from major, and potentially unreconcilable contradictions. Left-wing nationalism, for example, as rarely, if ever given way to non-nationalism. This is what the left-wing problem with Zionism is at its root all about. Politically, the ideology has failed to be secular, becoming increasingly violent and ethnocratic. The British left’s version is compounded by the UK’s history as an imperial power, whose policies created the regional divisions, in the Middle East, at the root of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

This is why term “Zionism” is so loaded, and why, in a British context it is especially toxic. It connotes support for a status quo that goes to the heart of a history of ruinous foreign policy, and, in its contemporary form, the chauvinism of settlers towards an indigenous people. This is why the Blairite goon John Mann was so furious with Ken Livingstone. The presuppositions are evident: Israeli policy is so morally immaculate, it can only be opposed by closet Nazis.

Of course, the obvious point cannot be made too often: not all Zionists are Jews, neither are all Jews Zionists. Yet this game is played by the Israeli right, and its reactionary Diaspora boosters. Never mind the fact that Christian Zionism, for example, is a huge movement with deep roots, while anti-Zionism has a long history among, err, Jews. Note the American Christian right tend to be fanatical supporters of Israeli colonialism, but they do so as they yearn for the Rapture and end for Jewish people worldwide. But this anti-Semitism is rarely called out, if ever.

As much as it is absurd to conflate Zionism with Jewishness, the Z-word can be dangerous for progressives to use carelessly. In many ways, it would be much better for leftists to talk about Israeli or Jewish nationalism today. Precision of language is vital here. Clear distinctions have to be maintained. Not only because the misuse of the term ‘Zionist’ can easily be painted as anti-Semitic, but because it can be received as such by actual racists. This means the Left should deepen its vocabulary about the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Too often do we hear talk of the ‘Israel lobby’, or even the ‘Jewish lobby’, and this is not unproblematic. The only reason why lobbyists are welcomed in Washington and London is because there is an underlying interest in the first place. In other words, US policy favours Israel due to its own interests in the Middle East, not because of Israeli interference in American political life. The Left should not presuppose Western innocence in all of this, as if the US is being led astray by foreign interests. This is not inherently anti-Semitic, but it is seriously flawed.

As Didi Herman argues, the Left should probably stop using the word ‘Zionism’ and try to grasp the problems at hand in clear terms. By using ‘Zionism’, the Left opens itself up to right-wing offensives and infiltration by genuine anti-Semites. At the same time, there is little engagement with Jewish nationalism as a historic movement and the reasons for its appeal. It was once that the Left was avowedly pro-Zionist and many supported Israel up to the 1967 war, whereas today leftists are eager to pronounce themselves anti-Zionists. But posturing does not always translate into good politics.

Speaking of posturing, the self-described ‘anti-totalitarian Left’ is heavily involved in the smear machine. Many of these soi-disant leftists and liberals supported the invasion of Iraq on supposed progressive grounds.

They see Israel as a Western liberal democracy encircled by Arab dictatorships and Islamic fascist regimes. Therefore, all criticism of Israel is painted as anti-Jewish. The reality is much less convenient for this herd of independent minds.

Localising anti-Jewish prejudice on the Left is a form of externalisation. Much like child sexual abuse, we’re meant to believe it’s always someone else who is guilty of it. The terrible truth is sexual violence is far more common and banal. And the same can be said of Judeophobia. It’s not the preserve of student activists, intellectuals and conspiracists. The global financial crisis set the conditions in place for a resurgence of racism. Anti-Semitism is the handmade of Islamophobia. To assume that it would not reemerge now is to not take anti-immigrant politics seriously.

As for the Labour Party in particular, there is little to no anti-Semitism among its ranks. The last leader, Ed Miliband is of Belgian Jewish heritage – his father, a refugee from Nazism served in WW2 – yet the British press was comfortable mocking him for his inability to enjoy a bacon sandwich. His father Ralph Miliband was a refugee from the Nazi onslaught, and the right-wing press insinuated the man was ‘disloyal’ to Britain. There was no discussion of anti-Jewish undercurrents in the midst of this.

Jew-bashing is an old game for the Right. The times haven’t changed so much. As Sam Kriss argues, the contemporary Right is now philo-Semitic – it is fascinated by Israel and by Jews – but this supposed love is really its opposite. Jews who criticise Israel are deemed insufficiently Jewish. This is why Norwegian fascist Anders Breivik drew a line between ‘loyal’ and ‘disloyal’ Jews (Zionists in the one hand, left-liberals in the other). A Jewish state is one kind of solution for the anti-Semite, as Jews are taken, in this view, as essentially deracinated.

The Right is trying to destroy Jeremy Corbyn by any means necessary. The coalition includes the Blairites, the Conservatives and the media. Guido Fawkes started this scandal by digging up Naz Shah’s Facebook posts from August 2014, and the media quickly took it up. This was before she was selected to run against George Galloway in Bradford West. It was also long before Jeremy Corbyn triumphed over the attempts to renew the New Labour project. So it should be obvious why there is a moral panic now of all times.

Actually the media has been pushing this line for a long-term. The BBC’s John Ware, who writes for Standpoint magazine, produced a documentary attacking Corbyn as supporting anti-Semites and terrorists. The good news is Corbyn has overcome every attack on his character. This scandal may be harder to trounce thanks to Livingstone’s comments. It’s possible the local elections could be hit by this, but it’s also true Labour is facing the prospect of long-term decline anyway. Corbyn may not be able to save the party. But the Blairites lack anyone capable of filling the void.

At the same time, it’s less likely to sway Londoners away from Sadiq Khan and to the shameful, racist campaign mounted by Zac Goldsmith. The Khan campaign has kept to its ‘soft left’ script and made simple, uncontroversial pledges. It’s possible we’ll see the Corbyn vote turnout for the mayoral vote, while Labour takes serious losses in the local elections. Neither would necessarily be turned by the events of the past week. Not that this would ever be acknowledged by the BBC.

This article was originally written for Souciant Magazine.

Zionism: An Unhelpful Term

A big part of the controversy around Ken Livingstone's remarks is the use of the term ‘Zionism’ in relation to Hitler. The historical record can be looked up, though it may be better to question the use of language here. After all, words matter.

The Zionist movement was a broad church and included everyone from Noam Chomsky to Jackie Mason. However, Professor Chomsky is not a right-wing Jewish nationalist. Yet he was a Zionist youth leader and Alan Dershowitz was apart of the same Hebrew summer camp. But Chomsky’s childhood Zionism would not be recognised by the devotees of the state of Israel. He remembers the foundation of the so-called Jewish state as a “day of mourning”.

Of course, the obvious point cannot be made too often. Not all Zionists are Jews, neither are all Jews Zionists. For instance, Christian Zionism is a huge movement with deep roots and remains strong in the American Bible Belt, while anti-Zionism has a long history among Jews. Note the Christian Right tend to be fanatical supporters of Israeli aggression, but they also yearn for the Rapture and the end of Jewry worldwide.

Zionism is not synonymous with Jewishness, but it’s a highly imprecise term. In many ways, it would be more accurate to talk about Israeli or Jewish nationalism today. Precision of language is vital here. Clear distinctions have to be maintained. Not only because the misuse of the term ‘Zionist’ can be painted as anti-Semitic, but it can be received as such. This means deepening the vocabulary of the Left on Israel-Palestine.

Too often do we hear talk of the Israel lobby, or even the Jewish lobby, and this is not unproblematic. The only reason why lobbyists are welcomed in Washington and London is because there is an underlying interest in the first place. In other words, US policy favours Israel due to its own interests in the Middle East, not because of Israeli interference in American political life. The Left should not presuppose Western innocence in all of this, as if the US is being led astray by foreign interests. It is not necessarily anti-Semitic, but it certainly can be to talk in this way.

As Didi Herman argues, the Left should probably stop using the word ‘Zionism’ and try to grasp the problem in clear terms. By using ‘Zionism’, the Left opens itself up to right-wing offensives and infiltration by genuine anti-Semites. At the same time, there is little engagement with Jewish nationalism as a historic movement and the reasons for its appeal. It was once that the Left was avowedly Zionist, whereas today leftists are eager to pronounce themselves anti-Zionists. Here is a passage of advice from Herman:

The identification of a generic Zionism with nothing but racist practice in Israel entrenches an understanding of zionism not just as a dirty word, but as a pariah form of thinking unrelated to any other (except apartheid thinking). However, as Balibar (2009), Asharwi (2003), and many others have noted, Jewish nationalisms need to be taken seriously. The left’s wholesale intellectual rejection of an assumed monolithic Zionism does not assist such an endeavour. 

I suppose this post is, in part, a plea to the left to stop saying ‘Zionist’. Use ‘Israeli nationalists’ or ‘Israeli fundamentalists’ or better yet ‘Netanyahu’s regime’ or, as a last resort, at least refer to ‘Israel-zionism’ and not ‘Zionism’ per se, as in ‘media outlets that support Netanyahu’s regime’ or ‘the University of Birmingham is a bit of an Israeli nationalist outpost’. These alternatives won’t provide an easy shorthand in the way ‘Zionism’ does, for example, ‘Israeli nationalism = apartheid’ just doesn’t have the same ring to it, but I suppose that is my point — easy options often sacrifice understanding for rhetorical force. The Zionist shorthand is upsetting to many because it is a very old way of talking about ‘Jewish conspiracy’ (used by antisemites long before Israeli statehood), and no doubt more importantly, it harms the cause of Palestinian solidarity because it allows people with all sorts of agendas to attack the solidarity campaign, and with occasional justification. Of course Israel itself likes to messianically represent itself as the embodiment of a monolithic Zionism, but there is no need for the left to reproduce this erasure of all the other forms of zionism.

It’s not surprising that the self-described ‘anti-totalitarian Left’ is leading the witch hunt. Many of these soi-disant leftists and liberals supported the invasion of Iraq on progressive grounds. Israel is seen as a Western liberal democracy encircled by Arab dictatorships and Islamic fascist regimes. Therefore all criticism of Israel is painted as anti-Jewish. The reality is much less convenient for this herd of independent minds.

Localising anti-Jewish prejudice in the Left is a form of externalisation. Much like child sexual abuse, we’re meant to believe it’s always someone else who is guilty of it. The terrible truth is sexual violence is far more common and banal. And the same can be said of Judeophobia. It’s not the preserve of student activists, intellectuals and conspiracists. The global financial crisis set the conditions in place for a resurgence.

As for the Labour Party, there is little to no anti-Semitism among its ranks. The last leader Ed Miliband is of Belgian Jewish heritage - his father, a refugee from Nazism served in WW2 - yet the British press was comfortable mocking him for his inability to enjoy a bacon sandwich. His father Ralph Miliband was a refugee from Nazism served in WW2, and the right-wing press insinuated the man was ‘disloyal’ to Britain. There was no discussion of anti-Jewish undercurrents in the midst of this.

However, Jew-bashing is an old game for the Right. The times haven’t changed so much. As Sam Kriss argues, the contemporary Right is now avowedly philo-Semitic - it is fascinated by Israel and by Jews - but this supposed love is really its opposite. Jews who criticise Israel are deemed insufficiently Jewish. The Norwegian fascist Breivik drew a line between ‘patriotic’ and ‘disloyal’ Jews in his rambling manifesto. Naturally, a Jewish state appeals to anti-Semites who want to rid their countries of a certain minority.

At this point, we could do far worse than to turn to the words of Judith Butler on Jewish politics and the Western fascination with Israel:

In holding out for a distinction to be made between Israel and Jews, I am calling for a space for dissent for Jews, and non-Jews, who have criticisms of Israel to articulate; but I am also opposing anti-semitic reductions of Jewishness to Israeli interests. The ‘Jew’ is no more defined by Israel than by anti-semitism. The ‘Jew’ exceeds both determinations, and is to be found, substantively, as a historically and culturally changing identity that takes no single form and has no single telos. Once the distinction is made, discussion of both Zionism and anti-semitism can begin, since it will be as important to understand the legacy of Zionism and to debate its future as to oppose anti-semitism wherever we find it.

I rest my case, fellow travellers.

Is Labour anti-Semitic?

No, the Labour Party is not an association of anti-Semites. Yet the media storm over anti-Semitism and the Labour Party has been building for a long time. The Naz Shah case, and Ken Livingstone’s intervention, is just the latest to be picked up by the media. In fact, the British press has manufactured this scandal in a bid to create a crisis. This hysteria represents the emotional stakes in Israel. It is precisely because of the state of British political discourse that this was possible.

The Anglosphere is culturally and politically invested in Israel in a way which other world powers are not. Make no doubt about it, this is the result of settler colonialism. Israel fits into the imperial ambitions of Western powers. The American intellectual class fell in love with Israel after the 1967 war, which came as a welcome sign that the world was not in total disarray. So the conflation of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a coincidental part of our political discourse - it is necessarily a part of the way the conflict is understood in the West.

For these reasons, we might say Ken Livingstone ran into the Shah scandal like a bull into a china shop. We still may not have heard the last vase smash as it hits the floor. Plenty of leftists have pointed out the Haavara agreement, the Nazi plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar and elsewhere. However, the facts of Nazi Germany are not really relevant or helpful here. The real controversy is over Livingstone’s use of the term ‘Zionism’ (an idiotic choice of words) to describe Nazi policy. Laying out the historical record cannot dispel the outrage (much of it phony). The damage is done.

Vilification campaigns are successful because it is virtually impossible to resist mudslinging. If you explain yourself, deny the claims or even apologise, you’re screwed. It’s too late. It’s never enough. There is no way of adequately deflecting, let alone dodging, the mud. You’re always guilty in the eyes of some people. Even before this, Livingstone was rated as an anti-Semite by certain people thanks to the media. But what is the point of all this?

Right now, Jeremy Corbyn is leading the Labour Party and this represents a major challenge to the status quo in Britain. So far, Corbyn has beaten all the odds against him (he has to, there are no half-measures), but the Blairites are desperate to inflict a defeat on the Left. They feel the party has been snatched from them. They want it back. The Blairites already tried to destroy him by branding him an apologist for terrorism, now they're gunning to smear him as sympathetic to xenophobes.

Myra Breckenridge on Circumcision.

In Myra Breckenridge (1968) Gore Vidal writes in the first person as ‘Woman Triumphant’. I've already written about the possibility of crossover between the author and the protagonist in this example. Some parts of the book naturally stood out to me. As I've written about the issue of genital cutting in the past, the twenty-second chapter certainly stood out to me. The brief chapter is entirely a comment on circumcision after the narrator attends an orgy.

Just as I expected, seventy-two per cent of the male students are circumcised. At Clem's party I had been reminded of the promiscuous way in which American doctors circumcise males in childhood, a practice I highly disapprove of, agreeing with that publisher who is forever advertising in the New York Times Book Review a work which proves that circumcision is necessary for only a very few men. For the rest, it constitutes, in the advertiser's phrase, “a rape of the penis.” Until the Forties, only the upper or educated classes were circumcised in America. The real people were spared this humiliation. But during the affluent postwar years the operation became standard procedure, making money for doctors as well as allowing the American mother to mutilate her son in order that he might never forget her early power over him. Today only the poor Boston Irish, the Midwestern Poles and the Appalachian Southerners can be counted upon to be complete.

Myron never forgave Gertrude for her circumcision of him. In fact, he once denounced her in my presence for it. She defended herself by saying that the doctor had recommended it on hygienic grounds - which of course does not hold water since most foreskins are easily manipulated and kept clean. What is truly sinister is the fact that with the foreskin's removal, up to fifty per cent of sensation in the glans penis is reduced... a condition no doubt as pleasing to the puritan American mother as it is to her co-conspirator, the puritan Jewish doctor who delights in being able to mutilate the goyim in the same vivid way that his religion (and mother!) mutilated him.

I once had the subject out with Dr. Montag, who granted me every single point and yet, finally, turned dentist and confessed, “Whenever I hear the word ‘smegma’, I become physically ill.” I am sure Moses is roasting in hell, along with Jesus, Saint Paul, and Gertrude Percy Breckenridge.[1]

We might read Myra as a partial satire of Vidal himself – the consummate gentleman-bitch. If we do so we’re faced with certain questions and in particular: what should we take away from this about the author? Some would describe Vidal as ‘anti-Semitic’ here. The section holds within it vulgar imagery, but that can be said of the entire novel. It’s a ‘masterpiece in bad taste’ after all. Breckenridge damns Moses to the same ranks as Jesus and St. Paul, as well as the “puritan American mother”. The grounds of the attacks are pro-hedonist. Vidal was an exponent of promiscuity, not of commitment and monogamy. He disapproved of marriage equality on this same basis.

We find this is the case, as he goes on to write “I prefer the penis intact... in order that it be raped not by impersonal survey but by me!”[2] This is tongue-in-cheek comedy. It’s a self-caricature. Going by the extent Vidal parodies his own fears of overpopulation in the book this is not an implausible reading. He was promiscuous, experimented with drugs in the Sixties, enjoyed cinema, and claimed the advertisement was the only American art form. These things (and more) are all present in the book and taken to their own extremities.

This isn’t the only extract in the book worthy of notation. At one point, Myra remarks on Dr Montag, one of the Jewish characters of the novel, in the context of their disagreement over sexuality and womanhood.

Being Jewish as well as neo-Freudian, he is not able to divest himself entirely of the Law of Moses. For the Jew, the family is everything; if it had not been, that religion which they so cherish (but happily do not practice) would have long since ended and with it their baleful sense of identity. As a result, the Jew finds literally demoralizing the normal human sexual drive toward promiscuity. Also, the Old Testament injunction not to look upon the father's nakedness is the core to a puritanism which finds unbearble the thought that the make in himself might possess an intrinsic attractiveness, either aesthetically or sensually. In fact, they hate the male body and ritually tear the penis in order to remind the man so damaged that his sex is unlovely. It is, all in all, a religion even more dreadful than Christianity.[3]

So what should we make of the crude stereotyping and vulgar language around Jews? If we exclude the possibility that Gore Vidal was anti-Semitic (and I do, as I have already written) then we can only understand these passages in a handful of ways. If Myra is a partial parody of Vidal then it seems that this writing is at the extreme end of exaggeration of what Vidal actually thinks. Alternatively, Myra isn’t based on Vidal and in which case it can’t be said that these views represent those of the novelist. To paraphrase Houellebecq, when asked if his protagonists are really him, “Perhaps the mistake is to think of me at all.” 

As tempting as the latter option would be, I think I’ve already clarified why I think it is too convenient an option. That isn’t to say that I accept the accusations of anti-Semitism levelled against Vidal in the Eighties. In a way we shouldn’t be too surprised by Gore Vidal’s views on religion. He was a man of the Enlightenment and he didn’t feel the need to hold his tongue. It’s not as if Vidal was known for resorting to gentle euphemisms. In his response to charges of prejudice, Gore Vidal was blunt “I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster to befall the human race.”[4] He had plenty of time to romanticise polytheism and pre-Christian religions and Eastern philosophies.

So Vidal took the side of Athens over Jerusalem. Does this convict him of any offence? Only of leaving religionists offended. His politics were a snob cocktail of libertarian strains, where populism and leftism crossover. He admired the tradition of William Jennings Bryan, while he took charge against its descendants in the Creationist Right. The aggressive secularism in Vidal’s politics has to be understood in its American context. He lived through the revival of political Christianity in the Fifties and the rise of the ‘Moral Majority’ in the Eighties. Ever the provocateur, Vidal would take a swipe at anyone to prove his points.

---

[1] Vidal, G; Myra Breckenridge & Myron (Abacus | 1968, 1972) pg.103-104

[2] Ibid.

[3] Vidal, G; Myra Breckenridge (Abacus | 1968, 1972) pg.78-79

[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jwc_M0KN2vU

Europe's problem with Muslims.

Now Marine Le Pen has stated that there should be no 'special treatment' for Muslims (and by extension Jews) with school meals. Either they eat pork, or they starve. This isn't to be understood as in isolation. As some of you may have read the Danish have banned halal and kosher slaughter on the grounds of animal rights. Of course, this is just another event in a long procession of bans in Europe. The French government banned the veil in public places, the Swiss government banned minarets, then there was the Cologne ruling against circumcision in 2012, and the 2013 ban on halal and kosher slaughter in Poland. This is at the same time as we've seen calls for the Qur'an to be banned from Dutch politician Geert Wilders. He has found common cause with other self-described 'counter-jihadists' such as Le Pen. We've had a recurring debate about whether Islam is compatible with 'Western' culture. Britain routinely has a debate over whether or not to ban the veil, with similar debates on halal meat and circumcision taking place with less frequency.

We should ask ourselves some stark questions about all of this. No Muslim country has invaded or occupied a 'Western' or European state in recent decades. To the contrary, the UK and the US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and occupied leaving more than a million people dead. The vast majority killed have been civilians and no doubt most of them have been Muslims. The French were totally on board with the NATO intervention in Libya which left thousands dead, just as they also wanted to bomb Syria as US allies Turkey and Israel had already done. This is at the same time that the governments of the US and Western Europe continue to support dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim world. So the idea that there is a 'clash of civilisations' is somewhat absurd, mainly because it's rightists who want such a war. As for European Muslims, here's an excerpt from Yehouda Shenhav:

I would like to go back for a minute to what was known in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century as the "Jewish problem," and to the debates of Jewish emancipation. The debates were originally stirred by a Prussian government effort to extend an identical status to all Jews under its rule; in 1841, it released a draft law concerned with the need for maintaining "the wondrous essence" of the Jews without "intervening with the Christian state." Bruno Bauer wrote that, in a state where Christianity was the official religion, Jews could not be truly emancipated. Religious freedom necessitates the privatization of religion and eschewing it away from the public sphere, but Judaism, being a religion of (public) law rather than of faith, cannot be reduced into a "private religion."

Just as Judaism is a public religion Islam can be understood in these terms as well and liberal societies cannot easily integrate such religious groups into atomised chambers of individual rights and freedoms. The pre-Enlightenment communitarian values of Judaeo-Islamic culture reach beyond the limits of individualism, as such an identity and tradition cannot easily be relegated to a private space. This is where multiculturalism entered as a liberal option of opening up a space for newly settled cultures within the liberal framework. But this has been a beleaguered idea since it first appeared. This is how we are to understand the calls to ban the veil, minarets, and so on. It's no coincidence that the anti-Muslim racism of today can easily overlap with anti-Semitism. This is what bans on circumcision and halal slaughter demonstrate so well. The European fascist parties now have a new means of reinstating old anti-Jewish measures as a programme for defending 'our culture' from imaginary Muslim hordes.

Over the last decade we've witnessed the legitimation of anti-Muslim hatred across Europe in various forms. The actions Breivik undertook can only be understood with this background. The Far-Right used to claim Communism was the Jewish plot to destroy European nationhood, now they claim the Left (and the Jews, no doubt!) are working to flood Europe with Muslims and impose Islamic law in order to destroy 'Western' civilisation. This was the essence of Breivik's ideology: multiculturalism, feminism, and 'political-correctness', are a "cultural Marxist" affront to European nations and their traditional culture. I've covered the growth of this theory among neo-fascists before. It should concern all of us, especially as anti-Muslim hatred is increasingly normalised by the very same liberal intelligentsia who are meant to be the custodians of liberal democratic values.

Lenin on anti-Semitism.

Vladimir Illyich had his moments. It was in March of 1919 that the White Armies were waging a general offensive on the Siberian front. There Kolchak's forces engaged in mass-floggings, summary executions, anti-Jewish pogroms, the destruction of thousands of villages and farms. The reactionary forces led by Kolchak and Denikin had been incubated by the Tsarist regime and had been stirred to act by the fall of Bloody Nicholas. On the side of counter-revolution the powers of Europe, alongside the US, Japan, and China, intervened to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle. The possibility of defeat was a very real one at this time. Lenin took the time to stake out a political position on the anti-Jewish pogroms being carried out by the White movement and its allies:

Anti-Semitism means spreading enmity towards the Jews. When the accursed Tsarist monarchy was living its last days it tried to incite ignorant workers and peasants against the Jews. The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. In other countries, too, we often see the capitalists fomenting hatred against the Jews in order to blind the workers, to divert their attention from the real enemy of the working people, capital. Hatred towards the Jews persists only in those countries where slavery to the landowners and capitalists has created abysmal ignorance among the workers and peasants. Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. This is a survival of ancient feudal times, when the priests burned heretics at the stake, when the peasants lived in slavery, and when the people were crushed and inarticulate. This ancient, feudal ignorance is passing away; the eyes of the people are being opened.

It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations. The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. Those who do not work are kept in power by the power and strength of capital. Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob and disunite the workers.

Shame on accursed Tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.

Long live the fraternal trust and fighting alliance of the workers of all nations in the struggle to overthrow capital.

This was one of eight speeches by Lenin recorded on gramophone. Significantly, it would later be the speech left out by the Communist Party when they came to re-record these speeches to re-circulate them in 1961. And this was Khrushchev's thaw. It's clear there had been a regression. It would get worse: Brezhnev would later reinstate the Jewish quota in Russian schools. The measure had originally been used by the Tsarist regime as part of a whole swathe of laws instituted to restrict and persecute Russian Jews. This was the same regime we can thank for the word 'pogrom' and the first drafts of The Elders of the Protocols of Zion, which was produced by the secret police and later distributed by the Black Hundreds. The anti-Jewish legislation of the Russian Empire would be obliterated in the revolutionary fervour of 1917. From then on the anti-Semites had a new canard, the Jews had stolen the motherland.

Right from the beginning there was a tension between the secular policies of the Bolsheviks and the official commitment to self-determination. The Jews were not problematic as an oppressed people with a unique culture, what the Bolsheviks found problematic was the Jewish faith and political Zionism offered the potential of an independent current. At first it was secular Yiddish culture which received the patronage of the state, while education remained secular, and Hebrew remained suppressed as it was under the Tsar. Even still the leap to equal rights was a dramatic one for a society that had been in the frenzy of pogroms not long before. Stalin would later set out to establish an autonomous Jewish region in the easternmost corner of Russia. It was meant to be a compromise with Jewish nationalism. Yet Stalin would later back the establishment of Israel in 1948 and arm the Israelis in the war of that same year.

It wasn't over yet. Stalin had hoped that Israel would be a Soviet ally in the Middle East. When Golda Meir and the Israeli delegation came to Moscow in 1948 there was a spontaneous gathering of thousands of Jews. At that point Stalin was frightened of where this could lead and initiated an anti-Semitic campaign of his own against "rootless cosmopolitans". It went as far as purges of doctors and assassinations of actors, not even famous Yiddish poets were safe. Through it all Stalin enjoyed popular support from Kibbutzniks within Israel. Even still the Soviet Union would move to a much more critical position on Israel in the coming decades and align itself with Arab dictatorships instead. The new restrictions on Jews extending to preventing them from emigrating to Israel. It was the birth of the refuseniks, a favourite cause of neoconservatives. And yet today's neo-fascists still see Jewish-Bolshevism under their beds at night.

Progress under Capitalism.

 

1.1 Materialisation of 'History as Progress'

 

The writings of Karl Marx can be understood in a historic-philosophical context that is specifically post-Enlightenment in a number of ways. One of the ways is that Marx seems to still adhere to a kind of historical progressivism. The idea of progress was around long before the Enlightenment, but it gained greater momentum during that time. As a concept progress became bound up with the emancipation of mankind from subservience and superstition. It was a matter of the expansion of scientific knowledge for many. Condorcet and Kant proclaimed progress as a trajectory of increasing reflexive self-awareness, on a cultural and not just individual level. Kant went further to reference to a 'hidden plan of nature' to bring about 'the sole state in which all of humanity's natural capacities can be developed'.[1] Progress has been taken as an uninterruptible evolution in its historic guise; the idea took hold strongly as human interventions began finally to displace the fatalistic acceptance of providence. This adherence to history as progress has manifested itself in terms of political change, technological advancement and even moral questions.

It may be said that the materialist conception of history was a transformation of Hegel’s historicism as a necessary step in Marx’s development of an analysis of capitalism. In Hegel's work we find its most emphatic version, since the real is rational and the rational is real all philosophy sets itself the task of revealing the gradual triumph of reason in all departments of cultured and social life.[2] In the subversion of Hegel's diagnosis of the seamless unfolding of universal reason Marx invoked a materialist conception of history. In this schema, we might say, progress is taken as an emergent emancipation through the realisation of hitherto-suppressed human potentiality and the control of our natural environment.

The integral role of revolution and schism is an objective liberality to the historical process. This could be understood as progress in teleological terms: as a more or less vital journey onwards (from feudalism to capitalism) and upwards (socialism on from capitalism) to a universally redemptive end (communism). Whether or not this historicism should be taken as teleological is a matter which we will explore later. Before we go any further we must first clarify the full quote referred to in the title and its context in Marx's project:

 

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.^[3]

 

This is an excerpt from a section of the Communist Manifesto focused on bourgeois and proletarians. The same section itself opens with the words “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” before elaborating that the modern bourgeois society had sprouted from the ruins of feudal society. That same burgeoning new order had failed to purge itself of the class struggle. In the place of the obliterated means to and forms of oppression the bourgeois epoch has only imposed its own. Yet the ambiguity in Marx’s analysis of capitalism is that he found revolutionary prospects in the universalization of the capitalist system, for he saw the obliteration of the old feudal order and the successive bourgeois liberal society as an advance upon what had existed before it.^[4]  He denoted the bourgeoisie as having played ‘a most revolutionary part’ in history in its capacities for rapid development, its rise hastened by the colonisation of America and exploitation of the East Indian and Chinese markets.^[5]  Marx attributes accomplishments to the bourgeoisie “far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.”^[6]  In this framework the bourgeoisie cannot exist without revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, in doing so the relations of society as a whole are transformed.

This revolution of the productive forces in its ability to bulldoze away all the old social conditions only to wipe away the new forms before they can become ossified. By these same processes the bourgeoisie circumvents barbarism and draws all countries into civilisation in its pursuit of greater expansion.^[7] This same process of expansion and growth requires as a necessary part of itself the extraction and accumulation of surplus value from the constant toiling of the proletariat. Karl Marx was well aware of the immense cost of this progression, he spent much of his life in critical engagement with the structures of exploitation as well as in political movements looking to overturn those same structures. In Eagleton's words Marx was neither a naïve progressivist nor a total pessimist about the world-historical situation in this sense.[8] It's more like Marx saw historical progress as inseparably from its often horrific costs. The circumvention of immediate obstacles to greater advances had brought not just improvements but limitations to those steps forward.

 

1.2 Species-Being and Directionality

 

For Marx and Engels, capitalism was not only the most dynamic economic model after all of its predecessors it was also just another transient form of exploitation – it was not itself the culmination of all history as progress. The four progressive epochs, in Cohen’s terms, may be designated as 1) pre-class society in which there is no surplus, 2) pre-capitalist class society where there is a growing surplus, which is still less than the reasonably high surplus generated by 3) capitalist society; and finally the enormous material surplus of 4) post-class society.[9] Each stage in this sequence gradually, if not suddenly and violently, supersedes its predecessor only to give way to another stage. In the world-historical situation this process is dialectical in that every advance achieved comes with its own limitations. In his magnum opus Marx takes an aside to comment on his own use of dialectics:

 

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[10]

 

From this we might be justified in concluding that Marx had abandoned his earlier stances as a Young Hegelian. Yet it may be said that Marx was really engaged in the materialisation of Hegel’s framework, to move it from the realm of ideas to the material. Marx goes on to add after this paragraph that it is the “mystifying side” of Hegel’s dialectic which he has long criticised and, less directly, it is that mystification which he seeks to get away from. Marx describes himself as the “pupil of that mighty thinker” before affirming the dialectic as ‘working’ in a manner not mystifying in its Hegelian form.[11] Famously Marx remarks “With [Hegel] it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”[12] He notes that the dialectic became the height of fashion in Germany insofar as its mysticism was effectively conservative as Hegel glorified the ‘existing state of things’. Towards the end of the 1873 preface Marx stresses that the dialectic in its rational form stands as an ‘abomination to bourgeoisdom’.[13] This is so as the dialectic, as he employs it, includes not just the comprehension and recognition of the current epoch but acknowledges its transience and its ‘inevitable breaking-up’. In short, the dialectic reveals the fluidity of society’s development and in doing so may function to destabilise its claims to an unchanging solidity.

If we are to take Lenin’s word and see Marxism as a body of thought in its consummative unity of English economics, French politics and German philosophy, then we may view this materialisation as a transformation of these key areas.[14] We may trace the emergence of this in Marx's early work. In the Holy Family as part of comments on idealist conceptions of history Marx stresses “Just as according to old teleologists plants exist to be eaten by animals and animals by men, history exists in order to serve as the act of consumption of theoretical eating – proving. Man exists so that history may exist and history exists so that the proof of truths may exist.”[15] Noting that Hegel positions his own history, its speculative and esoteric elements, within an empiric and exoteric history, Marx goes on to write that the “history of mankind becomes the history of the abstract spirit of mankind, a spirit beyond all man!”[16] In this way we find Marx looking at the Hegelian framework as limited in its preoccupation with the ideational. It was this that would later lead Marx to embrace materialism over idealism. That isn't to say the Hegelian strain in Marx ends at the dialectic.

As Alasdair MacIntyre observes, the importance of the concept of freedom runs from Hegel into Marx in that it is conceived in each as the overcoming of the limitations and constraints of one social order by hastening the arrival of a less limited order.[17] Hegel had written of freedom that “this very idea itself is the actuality of men – not something which they have, as men, but which they are.”[18] Marx saw human freedom as so essential that even the opponents of freedom realise it and furthermore “No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others.”[19] Where Hegel interprets those limitations and constraints as primarily the limitations and constraints of a conceptual scheme Marx does not. It is this that distinguishes the materialists from the idealists. The social order is constituted not in ideational but in material form, its prevailing mode of production specifically. Its possibilities and limitations are constituted in the prevailing form of production in that social order.

As MacIntyre notes the forms of labour will vary in accordance with the available technologies, how labour is divided (if at all) and the consequent split of society into masters and labourers in turn producing classes.[20] The conflict between classes is inherent to the mode and relations of production, its contradictions and sudden twists a necessary consequence of the development of the productive forces. MacIntyre notes that the conceptual schemes with which people grasp their own society have a duality of roles: revealing the nature of that activity while at the same time concealing its true character.[21] The critique of concepts and the struggle to transform society are necessarily connected, albeit with variation on that relation over time. In the materialist conception of history Marx replaces the self-development of the Absolute Idea with the socio-economic history of class. In this way Marx transforms the Hegelian conception of individuality, finding its hindrances and advances (which Hegel attributes to conceptual schemes) only comprehensible as part of an analysis of class society.

Consciousness would not be understood in terms of a formative impetus on life, famously for Marx it is life that determines consciousness.[22] In this way the emphasis ought to be on the material conditions and economic formations which constitute the historical epoch. Naturally then Marx worked to demystify political economy. All the while Marx stressed that the mode of production known as capitalism has its own historicity, it is just as transient as the previous forms of society. Marx went as far as to deem the whole of, what we could call, history as 'pre-history', for it is only a record of one exploitative system after another: slavery, feudalism, capitalism.[23] Accordingly the only truly 'historic' act in Marx's mind would be to break with this succession of variations on exploitation. To break with this long record of miserable toil would mean bringing into fruition an epoch wherein the possibilities of self-realisation are as unencumbered as possible. Notably sparse on this matter Marx did have this to say about the end of pre-history and what communism would look like:

 

Within communist society, the only society in which the original and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase, this development is determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces.[24]

 

Wilde argues that Marx shares with Aristotle the view that the elements of human essence are sociality and rationality – the exercise of these capacities are what make us human.[25] Primarily Aristotle was concerned with the self-development of citizens, the refinement of virtue through practice, requiring the opportunity to contemplate truth to achieve eudaimonia. Marx saw more in human essence than just the capacity for reason, the distinction of humanity from other animals is in the capacity for productive creativity and mastery over nature. Species-being referring to the human capacity to transform the environment around them. The world can be shaped through the practical engagements of humankind, partly leading to greater and greater self-knowledge. In class society, human beings are left alienated from what we produce and thus cannot understand its species-being.[26] Furthermore, Wilde argues that, the directionality of historical development for Marx lies with the self-realisation of human essence – it is its telos – and only after the overthrow of capitalism can human beings find their social creativity realised in communism.[27]

 

2.3 The Limits of Emancipation

 

The historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that “the world transformed by capitalism which [Marx] described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognisably the world of the early twenty-first century.”[28] It was this prescience demonstrated the Manifesto – for the rising tide of neoliberal globalisation especially – which may lead us to conclude that the analysis of capitalism drafted by Marx and Engels can’t be dismissed easily even more 150 years since it was first written. At the time of writing, Marx and Engels attributed much greater industrial accomplishments to the capitalist system than were actually achieved. By 1850 the world produced no more than 71,000 tons of steel, with almost 70% being produced in Britain, and it had built less than 24,000 miles of railroads with two-thirds of these in Britain and the United States.[29] It was inaccurate of the possibilities of the world, if not most of Europe, in the nineteenth century and the globalisation of capitalism has only been achieved after a long and contorted journey. It is vital not to overlook the fact that Marx has definitely not been proven right in all of his predictions and expectations. Most infamously in the prediction that the capitalist system will, inevitably, produce its own ‘gravedigger’, in its creation of the proletariat and transformation of productive relations through a period of primitive accumulation, and driving the class struggle to a revolutionary conclusion.

The implications of the way Marx theorised of capitalism as a historically transient stage are huge. After all the breakdown of pre-capitalist formations of class society to give way to capitalist class society does not bring the process to a close. As each stage advances it brings with it limitations. This means that the transformative capacities of capitalism can be evaluated and not just described in historicist terms. This is where the distinction Marx made between political and human emancipation may have great relevance. Marx came to this distinction in his exchange with Bruno Bauer on the issue of Jewish emancipation. Bauer had taken the position that it was religion that was the barrier to emancipation. The Jews couldn't be emancipated politically, e.g. granted rights, until they ceased to be Jews, given that the state should retain its secularity it cannot concede space to forms of identity to any religion. Instead Marx argues that the political emancipation of European Jewry is possible, compatible and preferable within a liberal framework to the religious-states of Europe at the time. As Jonathan Wolff notes, Marx makes a central contribution to the criticism of liberal societies in his distinction between political and human emancipation.[30] It’s on this distinction that Marx rests his argument writing that “The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and religious man in general implies the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general. The state as state emancipates itself from religion in the manner peculiar to its own nature by emancipating itself from the state religion, i.e. by not recognising, as a state, any religion, by affirming itself simply as a state. Political emancipation is not the completed and consistent form of religious emancipation because political emancipation is not the completed and consistent form of human emancipation.”[31]

Marx argues that the abolition of religion does not undo the ills of religion, nor is it an end-all solution to society's problems. Secularism is not in itself emancipatory, while liberal societies offer political emancipation it is only to separate social groups into atomised individuals with sets of rights and liberties to protect them from others. In turn this serves to undermine the prospects of human emancipation; it puts up the barriers to solidarity. As Wolff notes, the right to private property leads men to limit their own freedom.[32] The continuing existence of religion is more than compatible in this liberal framework. He gestures to the United States as an example of a republic with a separation between church and state that has always had a large population of religiously observant citizens. As Wolff concludes, the major point is that we have to get beyond liberal society and abolish the gap between the state and civil society.[33] Political emancipation in the form of rights is not the end of all forms of oppression and certainly not of exploitation under capitalism. The bestowing of rights is not the means to solving the problem of alienation. For Marx it is only emancipation from the conditions of the market system which will answer that qualm.

Against human emancipation Marx contrasts its liberal precursor political emancipation as the “reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand to a citizen, a moral person.” As we have seen previously, these words may well presuppose an evaluative criterion in Marx's thinking which holds human fulfilment and realisation in the highest of priorities. Liberalism falls short in its devotion to bourgeois freedom and the free-market, bringing with it new forms of unfreedom and servitude. Marx writes “The limitations of political emancipation are immediately evident in the fact that a state can liberate itself from a limitation without man himself being truly free of it and the state can be a free state without man himself being a free man.”[34] He advocates the emancipation of the Jews in political terms of rights, as that would be a significant step forward, while at the same time he has no illusions about the limitations which will come from this advance. This is all in line with the dialectic process by which freedom unfolds over time laid out in Hegel’s work.

We might just as well look at the steps made toward political emancipation of African-Americans may have made them citizens rather than slaves, but they are still enduring the alienating conditions of capitalism. The example of the abolition of slavery was one that Marx was familiar with. He and Engels were vocal supporters of Abraham Lincoln. The American Civil War as a struggle between pre-capitalist class society where there is a growing surplus and the forces of a burgeoning capitalist society. The war between the Union and the Confederacy is understood in terms of a struggle by the impulse of emergent capitalism towards industrialisation and away from agrarian formations. The preservation of the Union required the transformation of the forces and relations of production in conjunction with a victory over the secessionists. Marx believed the war would open the way toward the revolutionary path of free, self-owning labour, and eventually hasten the advent of a post-capitalist society. When Lincoln was re-elected Marx and Engels wrote to him “If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”[35] Before going on to add that “the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.”[36]

Elsewhere, Engels elaborated “Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the political development of the United States, has been broken, the country is bound to receive an impetus from which it will acquire a different position in world history.”[37] Just as the American War of Independence initiated a period of middle-class ascendancy, Marx hoped, the Civil War would open a period of working-class ascendancy.[38] The abolition of slavery was framed in this way as a necessary step for the American working-class to attain ‘true freedom’ as well as to support the side of the European working-classes. Slavery was an obstacle to the furtherance of capitalism that had to be shaken off if capitalism were to be overcome. In Marx’s own words “this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”[39] With all of this in light we might be justified in seeing Marx as an adherent to a form of historical progressivism. It should also be clear that this isn’t the end of the story.



Next: Moral Objectivity in History

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[1] Edgar, A; Sedgwick, P; Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1999) pg.311-312

[2] Marx, K; Capital v.1 (1873 Preface | Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1906) pg.25-26

[3] Marx, K; The Manifesto of the Communist Party (The Revolutions of 1848 | Verso, 2010) pg.71

[4] Teschke, B; Marxism (The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, Oxford University Press) pg.163-170

[5] Marx, K; The Manifesto of the Communist Party (The Revolutions of 1848 | Verso, 2010) pg.68-71

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Eagleton, T; Is Marxism a Theodicy? (2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJePGD7D_RQ

[9] Cohen, GA; Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press, 2004 reprint) pg.197-201

[10] Marx, K; Capital v.1 (Preface, 1873 | Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1906) pg.25-26

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Callinicos, A; The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2010 reprint) pg.52

[15] Marx, K; The Holy Family (McLellan, D; Karl Marx: Selected Writings | Oxford University Press, 1977) pg.138-139

[16] Ibid. pg.144

[17] MacIntyre, A; A Short History of Ethics (Routledge, 1967) pg.210-214

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] MacIntyre, A; A Short History of Ethics (Routledge, 1967) pg.210-214

[22] Hobsbawm, E; On History (Abacus, 1997) pg.211

[23] Eagleton, T; Why Marx was Right (Yale University Press, 2011) pg.73

[24] Marx, K; The German Ideology (McLellan, D; Karl Marx: Selected Writings | Oxford University Press, 1977) pg.191

[25] Wilde, L; Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Nottingham Trent University, 1998) pg.32-35

[26] Edgar, A; Sedgwick, P; Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1999) pg.309

[27] Wilde, L; Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Nottingham Trent University, 1998) pg.32-35

[28] Hobsbawm, E; On the Communist Manifesto (How to Change the World | Little Brown, 2011) pg.110-111

[29] Ibid.

[30] Wolff, J; Karl Marx entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1

[31] Marx, K; On the Jewish Question, Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[32] Wolff, J; Karl Marx entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1

[33] Ibid.

[34] Marx, K; On the Jewish Question, Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[35] Marx, K; Engels, F; Letters to America: 1848-1895 (International Publishers, New York; 1963) pg.65-66

[36] Ibid.

[37] Zaretsky, E; Why America Needs A Left (Polity, 2012) pg.56

[38] Marx, K; Engels, F; Letters to America: 1848-1895 (International Publishers, New York; 1963) pg.65-66

[39] Ibid.