A propos the long excerpt from political theorist Adolph Reed I posted two weeks ago, a PhD student in German philosophy elsewhere wrote with this very apt analysis of Marx's own contribution to the debate in this famous, early essay:
Marx's surprising claim in OtJQ is that, while calls for equal treatment of disenfranchised ethnic and religious minorities may seem to subvert the prevailing social and economic order, they are actually often welcomed by it for reasons having to do with the logic of capitalism. Calls for the emancipation of German Jews in the 1840s merely seem revolutionary, and, to a certain extent, are revolutionary - especially because of the prevailing Christian anti-semitism of the times, an anti-semitism only abetted by the Christian state. Anti-semitism is a real phenomenon, and its abolition urgently needed. What could be more obvious than that? However, these calls for emancipation are, in another respect, regressive. The extension of formal legal equality to disenfranchised groups is perfectly in keeping with the logic of capitalism, which seeks to erode all ethnic, national religious and ideological barriers among people so as to integrate them more effectively into a world market - one in which the only division left is the class division between laborer and capitalist (a division the market itself masks). Concretely, the ability to own property and participate in markets should be as widespread as possible for this to function, and that ability is unthinkable without legally protected rights of various kinds. So the call for emancipation, though partially emancipatory, is, in this instance, something of a capitalist ruse. "Political emancipation", the granting of formal legal equality, and other less tangible forms of equal status to disenfranchised religious and ethnic minorities, would never be sufficient for true, human emancipation - a fact evidenced for Marx by the fact that the most formally egalitarian nation on earth (the USA) remained among the most religious, and therefore, most alienated (here, Marx is relying on Feuerbach's insight that the persistence of religion is evidence of frustrated human aspirations). True human emancipation would come about not through the inclusion of disenfranchised minorities into the prevailing social and economic order but, rather, through its revolutionary overthrow and the replacement of a mode of production driven by the interest of a particular class by one governed by the general will.
The lesson for today: identity politics, though potentially emancipatory, risks unwitting complicity with the dominant capitalist order, since there is a natural, economically driven tendency in this system towards the inclusion of ever more excluded groups, not for the sake of liberation, but, rather, as a means of integrating them into the prevailing economic system.
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