US ambassador killed over a film

[FireIceTalon]

Marx was atheist and had contempt for all religion, so what is your point?

Marx makes it abundantly clear - he is not talking about their religion. He says so right at the top of that quote. He is talking about Jews, and how they Jewishly Jew people out of their money, greedy bastards. The world being greedy, and the world being Jewish, are the same thing, because Jewish is synonymous with greed.

He was a rank anti-semite, in addition to a hypocrite and a sponge. So long as we're playing the game of "whose intellectual heroes were worse," Marx is pretty bad.

-Jester

Your observation, comrade Jester, is a gross oversimplification of historical facts pertaining to the context of which Marx was writing in, as well as in response to, and it also doesn't take into consideration the political climate and nature of "political correctness" of the time.

"The Jewish Question" was written by Marx as a response to an author named Bruno Bauer, a German historian. Bauer was arguing at the time that Jews should not be allowed full civil rights or freedoms unless they converted to Christianity or were baptized as one, and that any suffering they endured was of their own cause - typical bourgeois language, much like what Republicans say about poor minorities today in America (though perhaps more in a cultural context than a religious one). If you really think about it, it was Bauer, not Marx, who was the anti-semite. Marx's argument was not against Jews themselves, but rather that Germans needed to be emancipated from capitalism, and not from Jews. His critique was in the context of the behavior of Jews being a result of living under capitalism, and not as a result of actually being Jewish as Bauer was arguing - this was part of Marx's concept of alienation. Also, at the time, there was no such thing as Judaism being viewed in a racial context, it was still very much in a religious one. Even today, it doesn't make much sense to me because one can change their religion at anytime. You might be born Jewish, but you can covert to another religion easily. You CANNOT convert to another race, obviously.

Admittedly, Marx's writing here is very awkward and can easily be taken out of context if it is just looked at upon face value, without any consideration to what he was responding to and writing about, and without considering the political correctness (or lack thereof) that was very common among philosophers and social scientists during this era. It wasn't until the 20th century where political correctness really came into itself, and much of the "political correctness" that the far right hates today is a result of the dreaded (from their perspective) "Cultural Marxism". I very much doubt Marx was an anti-semite, and when he stated "Workers of all countries unite" at the end of the Manifesto, you can bet your bottom dollar that included Jewish workers. Marx's writing style was often very rhetorical, sarcastic, and sometimes even scathing. Sometimes it was funny and true at the same time, like his quote about Napoleon III riding off the coattails of his infamous uncle, when he stated "History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce". Other times, it is ambiguous, clumsy and doesn't come off well like in the case of these quotes from The Jewish Question, which is why an understanding of historical circumstances and context is important when reading any intellectual piece, especially a controversial one.

Lenin also has been commonly accused of anti-semitism (possibly because of the perceived anti-semitism of Marx, and being guilty by association) but this is refuted by a speech he gave in 1919:

"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. ... 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. ... The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. ... Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob, and disunite the workers. ... Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations".

The premises in the above speech rings even more true today, in America. Except now American capitalists and their reactionary apologists use Muslims and Latinos as scapegoats, rather than Jews.

Be as it may, racial and gender equality are absolute and universal prerequisites to being a revolutionary Leftist of any stripe - be they an anarchist, socialist, or communist. Always. The same is true for all other identity politics, including ethnicity, nationality, age, disability, sexual orientation, etc etc.

And lastly, I don't "admire" anyone. I respect his work and for the most part agree with what he wrote, in particular his scientific and historical materialist conception of the development of our history, but nothing more. Marxists in general don't like Great Man Theories.

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Objectivism as a philosophy, suffers like others when slavishly imposed ( much like Marxism). When I have access to a knife, fork and spoon, why should I eat peas with only a knife? There are pearls of insight in studying many many viewpoints. I'm not so narrow minded to become the Fan Boi of one.

One problem: Marxism isn't a philosophy, nor is it an ideology - it is a science, and mode of analysis. Now, if you had said communism, you might sort of have a point, although communism itself isn't really a philosophy either, it's actually an ideology though the context of what you are saying may be applicable to it. Certainly not to Marxism though.