[Xmca-l] Re: Marx and Der Judenfrage

[Wolff-Michael Roth]

Perhaps a bit  picky, but it is "die Judenfrage," for Frage (question) is a
feminine noun. Michael

On Sat, Jun 8, 2019 at 3:04 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am ploughing through an enormous tome by Yuri Slezkine, called "The
> House of Government". Slezkine sets out to give us a kind of historical
> ethnography of Soviet times in the form of an autobiography of "the
> Swamp"--an area of Moscow across the river from the Kremlin. To his credit,
> he soon realizes that when you do this, you cannot have a "bricks and
> mortar" model of context (what Ruqaiya Hasan called 'material situational
> settings'); you need to understand context as the relevant settings for
> text. So then he decides that the context is really Marxism (already a very
> debatable proposition) and that the context of Marxism is really--religion.
>
> In Russia, it's an idea whose time--or at least whose sell-by date--has
> come: all of Soviet history is now being re-evaluated by Russians in highly
> religious terms. But how to repackage this idea in America? It turns out
> that Slezkine's model of Marxism is based on Marx's work on the "Jewish
> Question", probably the most vociferously decontextualized thing poor Marx
> ever wrote (it is invariably cited in discussions which 'prove' that Marx
> was anti-semitic). It also turns out that Slezkine's model of Judaism has
> an uncanny resemblance to the work of Amy Chua on "model minorities" like
> Chinese-Americans and Mormons; Slezkine thinks that Jews are
> a "Mercurial" people, who thrive on going to places in the economy where
> angels and "Apollonian" gentiles dare not tread.
>
> Slezkine is not an idiot; he's just a very repetitious, redundant, and
> wordy writer (caveat emptor until the paperback comes out!). But my reading
> of "Marx and Der Judenfrage" is very different. First of all, I took it for
> granted that Marx is writing as a Jew himself--as someone who would, like
> Mendelsohn, have been recognized as part of the "self-emancipated" Jewry
> (the Jews who had sought franchise by renouncing religion). Secondly, I
> thought that Marx is really making the same argument that Andy made. It is
> one of the cardinal and most overlooked  points of the Quranic revelation:
> in religion, and matters of philosophy quite generally, compulsion (and
> French style state atheism) is quite beside the point. But maybe I am an
> idiot. (If so, the least I can do is to try to avoid repetition,
> redundancy, and ...)
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> New Article:
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
> understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>
>
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