Human Emancipation: Abolish the Economy, Don't Enhance the State

     Karl Marx, in On the Jewish Question, claims that “human emancipation will only be complete when the real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen” (Marx 46). According to Marx, liberal democracies create a dual identity in humans consisting of the citizen, a political construct of equal and altruistic beings under the law, and the individual, the real egoistic beings in the economic sphere, where altruism crumbles and people treat one another as a means to an end.

    While liberal democracies have political emancipation, i.e. people have the same rights and citizenship status despite their differences, Marx believes that this version of emancipation critically omits oppression in the economic sphere. Marx wants to abolish this capitalist spirit (which he compares to Judaism), however, Marx’s way of bringing this about (in order to bring about human emancipation), the seizure of the means of production, has shown massive failures throughout history. If public ownership and command economics has failed, how can human emancipation come about?

If Judaism really is the issue in the way of human emancipation, then the only society that can abolish it is one that rids itself of buying and selling entirely, not simply transferring it to the proletariat government. Marx’s ideas can only work in Gift Economies. By moving out of the binary of buying and selling, social capital and kindness, the citizen can absorb the ego of the individual (E.g. Pacific Northwest American Indians – Haida, Tilingit).

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