September 16, 2011
I. Recap of last year, and some notes on the reading
Last year at this time, reading Kant’s Perpetual Peace initiated a yearlong discussion around the tension between international law and sovereignty. Kant’s political theory of constitutional forms entailing overlapping rights and duties was our departure point, in some ways, to a series of subsequent conversations on politics and humanity, but also law and imperialism. Such discussions often returned to the relationship between legality and legitimacy. Does international law necessarily express the expedient interests of world powers, or does it retain a measure of autonomy, an opening for thinking about alternative global futures?
Along the way, we engaged with a number of topics, including: historicizations and periodizations that highlight various features of sovereign legitimacy; the emergence of the concept of humanity in international law; the relational proximity of the international and religion in modernist thought; and the instability of human rights discourse. Meanwhile, several speakers also challenged us – by attending to vernacular understandings of sovereignty in postcolonial Africa, the emancipatory narratives of CLR James, and Gandhi’s ethico-political theory – to broaden our conception of the political and where we locate it.
Today’s reading by Marx “On the Jewish Question” raises questions, again, of how to think about political futures, and on what terms. In order to think this through, I thought we might briefly incorporate a reading that was part of last year’s seminar, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.
Both Marx and Arendt recognize that the substance of modern politics is based on membership in a political community, the state, but that the conceptual basis of this community is rife with contradictions. Both Marx and Arendt also recognize that, at different historical moments and under different political circumstances, Jews in a modern state came to epitomize the insoluble contradiction between the universal and particular. Marx connects this problematic to “the contradiction which exists between the effective political power of the Jew and his political rights” (On the Jewish Question, 51), a contradiction mediated by the marketplace of civil society. Arendt, meanwhile, reports from a courtroom, where changing technologies of war have raised a variety of questions about the relationship between law and justice, crime and intent, evidence and guilt, state and jurisdiction.
As we think about the openings for different political futures raised by both Marx and Arendt, we might also continue to think about the role of political economic processes in mediating between power and right, as well as exacerbating the incongruity between law, justice and jurisdiction.
—Mark Drury
II. Two concepts from Marx
I would like to open our discussion by highlighting two of Marx’s concepts from “On The Jewish Question”: human emancipation and species-being.
First, human emancipation. Marx asks, not just who should emancipate or who should be emancipated, but also: what kind of emancipation is involved? This leads him to a distinction between political emancipation, whose horizon is limited by the terms of an existing social order, and what he calls human emancipation, which requires a complete transformation of social relations at the level of both the state and civil society. His question of ‘what type of emancipation is involved’ is at the root of the kinds of questions we would like to pose in this seminar under the rubric of ‘global political futures.’
Last year, this seminar spent much time discussing the concept of sovereignty, and the importance of this concept for thinking about inequality in the international order, particularly as it pertains to the category of third world sovereignty. Scholars such as Antony Anghie point out that despite a state system in which there is widespread formal sovereignty, only certain states are able to exercise sovereignty in fact. International institutions, structured through a history of colonialism and imperialism, produce relations of dominance between what are ostensibly equal states.
Going back to Kant in Perpetual Peace, there is the idea that if we want to think at the level of global political futures—which is to say on an unbounded conceptual horizon—then even at that level, for Kant, state sovereignty is something worth preserving.
Of course, Marx isn’t talking about an inter-state order in “The Jewish Question.” But I think its important for us to bring his ideas into that context. So, the kind of question we might ask is: is the concept of state sovereignty working only at the level of political emancipation? If we want to think of something like self-determination of peoples, as a form of emancipation, is sovereignty an adequate category for that? Or is there some broader horizon of human emancipation that we need to be working at? Third world sovereignty is, in this sense, ‘the Jewish Question’ at the level of the interstate order.
It should be noted that Marx is not saying poltical emancipation is a misguided political project. As he says, it “certainly represents a great progress.” But, as he also says, its only “the final form of human emancipation within the framework of the prevailing social order.” (35) To speak of global political futures is to think beyond, or outside of, the framework of the prevailing order.
The other term from Marx that I would like to foreground here is his idea of species-being, a term closely tied to human emancipation. Species-being is the form of sociality for Marx, comparable to the social contract in Enlightenment political thought, or to Kant’s notion of a social compact between nations as the form of sociality at the global level. Marx understands species-being as the form in which man is conscious of himself as mankind. Human emancipation involves an overcoming of man’s alienation from himself as species-being, whether this alienation takes the form of God, State, or (as at the end of his essay) Money.
Marx tries very hard in this essay to show how these different forms of alienation are connected in society. Natural man, as an egotistical, material-self individual of civil society, is made possible by the distillation of political life into the form of the political state, which itself emerged out of a kind of proto-civil society. Some of the most strongly worded passages of the text point to Marx’s struggle to connecting these themes together: “The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only by acquiring the power of money, but also because money has become, through him and also apart from hum, a world power, while the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations” (49); “The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the trader, and above all of the financier” (51). What I think he is forcing us to confront here is the idea that emancipation must happen at the level of both the state and civil society (the market is contained within here) simultaneously.
I will end by posing a few questions on law and justice that this reading raises for us. What is the significance of Marx’s conception of the relationship between state and civil society for our understanding of justice and social justice? What do we make of distributive justice, a process by which inequities in civil society are remedied by appeals to the state? Can this text help to reconcile our understanding of the dominance of financial capital in neoliberalism with debates on state sovereignty?
—Neil Agarwal
III. Group Discussion
Does the shift away from species being in Marx’s later work change the terrain of the question of human emancipation? (It seems that Gary thinks it does not)
– Still there is an important question of how Marx’s later categories (which he comes to use in place of species-being) of say, “social power”, or “capital” as congeal human labor, allow us to think through questions raised in this text about emancipation.
– Perhaps the later categories don’t so much replace or “supersede” question of dis-alienation raised in this text in relation to the species-being, but allow us to refine the question of human alienation and emancipation by looking at the institutions through which this political problematic develops (money, the world market, the state, the international system, etc).
One of the important critiques that Marx raises in text is focused on the deeply problematic structure of the state:
– Marx is here engaging with the very liberal conception of human rights and one that really continues to structure our conception of rights, emancipation and justice even today.
– Marx claims precisely that the liberal rights framework cannot come close to providing let alone guarantee real human emancipation.
What’s interesting about this text is that it is a discussion of the state and the citizen (seemingly) “on their own terms.” It is precisely not the type of political economic reduction of the question of politics to, say, class rule. This text is not the story of class rule: but particularly about political emancipation and about its contradictory relation to the state.
What then is indispensable about political emancipation? Marx observes that so-called “political emancipation” is the highest form (and limit) of human emancipation under the existing capitalist/liberal state relations.
There is actually an existing “abstract” species-being in the framing of law. Yes, it is an alienated form, and one which is a false type of universality, but Marx is not saying that all of this simply falsehood and that we should merely throw away these debased categories. –>And here is the interesting prescription of “re-absorption” into the universal. There is a sense in which he is saying that we need to work through these categories in order to achieve real human emancipation
So then, holding on to the debased categories: what would a real humanism be? What is dis- alienation here? From what? Form law and the state?
– In a sense, Marx’s is an immanent critique of liberalism: that in its debased version liberalism does not actualize universality that it espouses in form. — Marx as a critiqcla but immanent reader of human rights (from within its own logic, a human logic, of universality).
– It is interesting that the political economy approach is usually opposed to these kinds of immanent critiques of human rights and liberalism. What we see here is a very different Marx: a materialist one to be sure, but one which takes the categories of rights, law, civil society, the state, universality and emancipation very seriously.
Debate about whether Marx conceives of this emancipation as a form of “sacrifice” on the part of the individual? Discussion of the meaning of sacrifice.
Discussed quote: “Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual supersession of law.”
What does marx mean by the “continual supersession of law”? (question of translation here: Aufhebung, or rather ‘suspension’ as in my translation, or ‘abrogation’)
The question of law and justice: where do we place justice in this text?
Quote: “In the state, on the other hand, where man is regarded as a species-being, he is the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty, is deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality.”
This quote seems to get at the heart of some of the issues and tensions we are raising that universality is something brought into formal existence through the state, however this is analyzed by Marx as an unreal or abstract universality. Through law and the state we participate as imaginary member in illusory sovereignty. The metaphor of re-absorption is about a fulfillment of this abstract universality in a concrete emancipation:
Quote: “Only when the real, individual man re-absorbs in himself the abstract citizen, and as an individual human being has become a species-being in his everyday life, in his particular work, and in his particular situation, only when man has recognized and organized his “own powers” as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power from himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished.”
– It is interesting to bring up different images associated with justice: how to these raise different questions in relation to law? (On the one hand the image as that of justice as “balance,” on the other justice as the pursuit of human “emancipation”).
Is it possible to pose questions of “social justice” through concept of civil society? The important examples are raised of community organizing, and social justice as a discourse within the concrete struggles that happen within communities. Since this was written, more and more struggles have begun to take the form of community/national groups.
– One things that gives the analytic clarity to this essay is its focus on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
– Questions of identity/religion are reduced to its empirical essence: civil society is looked at in its stark terms.
Gary raises the important point that here Marx is not really talking about justice, what he’s talking about emancipation. These are two very different kinds of discourses which imply different ways of thinking about the political and the social. For Marx it seems that this opposition between social ad political is precisely what is to be overcome. Perhaps one of the tasks for us is trying to conceive of the socio-political in a way that no longer holds them as intrinsically separate realms.
Interesting question about Law: What is it that “Law” gives us that no idea of emancipation can do without? One of the things Marx’s immanent critique of the kind of formal universality embodied in the state and civil society does is that it shows us that these institutions are “actually instituting something that we really like”: universality, justice, freedom, albeit in a formally abstract and alienated manner.
The difficult task is to think through the relation between actual institutions — e.g. the UN & the instruments of international human rights legality — and the project of human emancipation, the aim of re-absorbing what is actually there (in its formal articulation): making concrete a kind of equality, a kind of recognition of what human beings really are or would like to be.
– Thinking about these universalities, emancipation, justice that are articulated under liberalism: that we shouldn’t not concede them to the liberal juridical and political institutions wherein there are a foil for what it is that we are actually fighting for. This text concretely show how important an immanent critique of universality and emancipation as they exist in liberal rights diccourse and civil society for re-appropriating these terms to a radical politics of human emancipation.
Wendy Brown: not about making claims on the state but about attempt to become power (does the UN allow us to conceive this). (“Freedom” as a term that helps us to rethink)
Although the state is a form of alienation, what is embodied in the state is absolutely essential — the question is how to render this from the abstract (formal) to the concrete (actual).
What would this dis-alienated sociopolitical reality look like? Its not clear where states or laws would figure in such a dis-alienated reality… Its not clear whether these ought to be considered as “intermediary” states; whether emancipation is emancipation from the law or an emancipated form of law (in law)? (certainly our current limited sense of “political sovereignty” cant be the answer).
Are we/ought we be talking about a global political future in which international law figures? as a kind of form of international sociality that we are seeking, or are we talking about imagining forms of global political future and democracy that are “post-legal” (this post-legal concepy should probably be approached with a modicum of suspicion).
Text as inviting us to rethink and rebuild concepts such as emancipation, justice, law, etc.
—special thanks to Zoltan Gluck for these notes!
