Marx’s Real Objection to Human Rights

Dispelling one prolific modern political myth

If anyone were to want to object to Karl Marx — imagine that — they’d be forgiven to try to start with “On the Jewish Question”. The title itself obviously suggests antisemitism, and there’s no shortage of people who say the text does as well, as it describes European Jews as greedy moneylenders.

Damning enough.

But Marx is addressing European Jews by the social role they were forced into by Christian domination through the Middle Ages, and he is using their involuntary economic position, useful to but not accepted or legally protected within, Christian society, as a case study for how human rights were exercised by the bourgeois nation-states of his (and very much still our) day.

photo by Pierre Herman on Unsplash

In order to understand what Marx even means by “human rights” in “On the Jewish Question” and why he means to critique them, we may have to tweak the name a bit; he isn’t just referring to human rights in general: he refers to “abstract human rights”, which for clarity’s sake may be called “bourgeois human rights”.

The sets of rights he is referring are specifically the anti-monarchical declarations of the rights of the American and French revolutionaries made toward the end of the 18th century. These were both of course meant to be liberatory documents, declaring freedom from the tyrannies of monarchy and guaranteeing a certain list of rights previously suppressed and never to be suppressed again. But they were both also arguably bourgeois revolutions, in which the bourgeoisie overthrew the old feudal orders they felt they were given undersized representation in. It was the funds and the allyships of the bourgeoisie in both which enabled revolution, and it was the bourgeoisie who claimed the highest profiles and offices once revolution succeeded, styling themselves as the emancipators of all their nations’ people even when — especially in the case of the US — they severely restricted the freedom of most of their populations.

Marx does not allow the bourgeoisie this self-styling without harsh criticism. He says in “On the Jewish Question”, in reference to the religious emancipation of German Jews but just as applicably here: “It was by no means sufficient to ask: who should…