The Jewish Question, but in reverse.

One of Marx’s most persistent points, from On the Jewish Question forward, is that despite the formal freedoms that we enjoy in a liberal state—the right to freedom of speech, for example, or freedom of religion—we are socially and in fact unfree. (As Bruno Leipold reports in his Citizen Marx, a lot of Marx’s evidence for this claim, particularly about religion, came from travelers’ reports to America, which Marx read assiduously.) That is what it means to live in a liberal society, says Marx: formally free, actually unfree. But lately I’ve been wondering whether we are not living in the reverse. Despite the efforts of right-wingers to bend the state in a repressive, less free direction, society seems more and […]