Karl Marx
On The Jewish Question
***
The Christian state can behave towards the Jew only in the way
characteristic of the Christian state -- that is, by granting
privileges, by permitting the separation of the Jew from the other
subjects, but making him feel the pressure of all the other separate
spheres of society, and feel it all the more intensely because
he is in religious opposition to the dominant religion.
But the Jew, too, can behave towards the state only in a Jewish
way -- that is, by treating it as something alien to him, by counterposing
his imaginary nationality to the real nationality, by counterposing
his illusory law to the real law, by deeming himself justified
in separating himself from mankind, by abstaining on principle
from taking part in the historical movement, by putting his trust
in a future which has nothing in common with the future of mankind
in general, and by seeing himself as a member of the Jewish people,
and the Jewish people as the chosen people.
***
How, then, does Bauer solve the Jewish question? What is the result?
The formulation of a question is its solution. The critique of
the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question. The
summary, therefore, is as follows:
We must emancipated ourselves before we can emancipate others.
The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the
Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition
resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition
made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew
and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no
more than different stages in the development of the human
mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and
that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and
Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific,
and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity.
But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself.
***
Bauer, therefore, demands, on the one hand, that the Jew should
renounce Judaism, and that mankind in general should renounce
religion, in order to achieve civic emancipation. On the
other hand, he quite consistently regards the political
abolition of religion as the abolition of religion as such. The
state which presupposes religion is not yet a true, real state.
***
At this point, the one-sided formulation of the Jewish
question becomes evident.
It was by no means sufficient to investigate: Who is to emancipate?
Who is to be emancipated? Criticism had to investigate a third
point. It had to inquire: What kind of emancipation is
in question? What conditions follow from the very nature of the
emancipation that is demanded? Only the criticism of political
emancipation itself would have been the conclusive criticism
of the Jewish question and its real merging in the "general
question of time".
Because Bauer does not raise the question to this level, he becomes
entangled in contradictions. He puts forward conditions which
are not based on the nature of political emancipation itself.
He raises questions which are not part of his problem, and he
solves problems which leave this question unanswered. When Bauer
says of the opponents of Jewish emancipation: "Their error
was only that they assumed the Christian state to be the only
true one and did not subject it to the same criticism that they
applied to Judaism" (op. cit., p.3), we find that his error
lies in the fact that he subjects to criticism only the
"Christian state", not the "state as such",
that he does not investigate the relation of political emancipation
to human emancipation and, therefore, puts forward conditions
which can be explained only by uncritical confusion of political
emancipation with general human emancipation. If Bauer asks the
Jews: Have you, from your standpoint, the right to want political
emancipation? we ask the converse question: Does the standpoint
of political emancipation give the right to demand from
the Jew the abolition of Judaism and from man the abolition of
religion?
The Jewish question acquires a different form depending on the
state in which the Jew lives. In Germany, where there is no political
state, no state as such, the Jewish question is a purely theological
one. The Jew finds himself in religious opposition to the
state, which recognizes Christianity as its basis. This state
is a theologian ex professo. Criticism here is criticism
of theology, a double-edged criticism -- criticism of Christian
theology and of Jewish theology. Hence, we continue to operate
in the sphere of theology, however much we may operate critically
within it.
In France, a constitutional state, the Jewish question
is a question of constitutionalism, the question of the incompleteness
of political emancipation. Since the semblance of a
state religion is retained here, although in a meaningless and
self-contradictory formula, that of a religion of the majority,
the relation of the Jew to the state retains the semblance
of a religious, theological opposition.
Only in the North American states -- at least, in some of them
-- does the Jewish question lose its theological significance
and become a really secular question. Only where the political
state exists in its completely developed form can the relation
of the Jew, and of the religious man in general, to the political
state, and therefore the relation of religion to the state, show
itself in its specific character, in its purity. The criticism
of this relation ceases to be theological criticism as soon as
the state ceases to adopt a theological attitude toward religion,
as soon as it behaves towards religion as a state -- i.e.,
politically. Criticism, then, becomes criticism of the
political state. At this point, where the question ceases to be
theological, Bauer's criticism ceases to be critical.
***
Nevertheless, North America is pre-eminently the country of religiosity,
as Beaumont, Tocqueville, and the Englishman Hamilton unanimously
assure us. The North American states, however, serve us only as
an example. The question is: What is the relation of complete
political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the
country of complete political emancipation, religion not only
exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof
that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the
perfection of the state. Since, however, the existence of religion
is the existence of defect, the source of this defect can only
be sought in the nature of the state itself. We no longer regard
religion as the cause, but only as the manifestation of
secular narrowness. Therefore, we explain the religious limitations
of the free citizen by their secular limitations. We do not assert
that they must overcome their religious narrowness in order to
get rid of their secular restrictions, we assert that they will
overcome their religious narrowness once they get rid of their
secular restrictions. We do not turn secular questions into theological
ones. History has long enough been merged in superstition, we
now merge superstition in history. The question of the relation
of political emancipation to religion becomes for us the question
of the relation of political emancipation to human emancipation.
We criticize the religious weakness of the political state by
criticizing the political state in its secular form, apart from
its weaknesses as regards religion. The contradiction between
the state and a particular religion, for instance Judaism, is
given by us a human form as the contradiction between the state
and particular secular elements; the contradiction between
the state and religion in general as the contradiction between
the state and its presuppositions in general.
The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in
general, of religious man, is the emancipation of the state
from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In
its own form, in the manner characteristic of its nature, the
state as a state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating
itself from the state religion -- that is to say, by the state
as a state not professing any religion, but, on the contrary,
asserting itself as a state. The political emancipation
from religion is not a religious emancipation that has been carried
through to completion and is free from contradiction, because
political emancipation is not a form of human emancipation
which has been carried through to completion and is free from
contradiction.
The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from
the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without
man being really free from this restriction, that the state can
be a free state [ pun on word Freistaat, which also means
republic ] without man being a free man. Bauer himself
tacitly admits this when he lays down the following condition
for political emancipation:
***
It is possible, therefore, for the state to have emancipated
itself from religion even if the overwhelming majority
is still religious. And the overwhelming majority does not cease
to be religious through being religious in private.
But, the attitude of the state, and of the republic [ free state
] in particular, to religion is, after all, only the attitude
to religion of the men who compose the state. It follows
from this that man frees himself through the medium of
the state, that he frees himself politically from a limitation
when, in contradiction with himself, he raises himself above this
limitation in an abstract, limited, and partial way. It follows
further that, by freeing himself politically, man frees himself
in a roundabout way, through an intermediary, although an essential
intermediary. It follows, finally, that man, even if he proclaims
himself an atheist through the medium of the state -- that is,
if he proclaims the state to be atheist -- still remains in the
grip of religion, precisely because he acknowledges himself only
by a roundabout route, only through an intermediary. Religion
is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way, through
an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and
man's freedom. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man
transfers the burden of all his divinity, all his religious constraint,
so the state is the intermediary to whom man transfers all his
non-divinity and all his human constraint.
The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects
and all the advantages of political elevation in general. The
state as a state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares
by political means that private property is abolished as soon
as the property qualification for the right to elect or be elected
is abolished, as has occurred in many states of North America.
Hamilton quite correctly interprets this fact from a political
point of view as meaning:
***
Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property
owner has become the legislator for the property owner? The property
qualification for the suffrage is the last political form of giving
recognition to private property.
Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not
only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it.
The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions of birth, social
rank, education, occupation, when it declares that birth, social
rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when
it proclaims, without regard to these distinction, that every
member of the nation is an equal participant in national
sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the
nation from the standpoint of the state. Nevertheless, the state
allows private property, education, occupation, to act
in their way -- i.e., as private property, as education,
as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special
nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state
only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels
itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only
in opposition to these elements of its being.
***
The perfect political state is, by its nature, man's species-life,
as opposed to his material life. All the preconditions of this
egoistic life continue to exist in civil society outside the sphere
of the state, but as qualities of civil society. Where the political
state has attained its true development, man -- not only in thought,
in consciousness, but in reality, in life -- leads a twofold life,
a heavenly and an earthly life: life in the political community,
in which he considers himself a communal being, and life in civil
society, in which he acts as a private individual, regards other
men as a means, degrades himself into a means, and becomes the
plaything of alien powers. The relation of the political state
to civil society is just as spiritual as the relations of heaven
to earth. The political state stands in the same opposition to
civil society, and it prevails over the latter in the same way
as religion prevails over the narrowness of the secular world
-- i.e., by likewise having always to acknowledge it, to
restore it, and allow itself to be dominated by it. In his most
immediate reality, in civil society, man is a secular being. Here,
where he regards himself as a real individual, and is so regarded
by others, he is a fictitious phenomenon. 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.
Man, as the adherent of a particular religion, finds himself in
conflict with his citizenship and with other men as members of
the community. This conflict reduces itself to the secular
division between the political state and civil society.
For man as a bourgeois [here, meaning, member of civil society,
private life ], "life in the state" is "only a
semblance or a temporary exception to the essential and the rule".
Of course, the bourgeois, like the Jew, remains only sophistically
in the sphere of political life, just as the citoyen only sophistically
remains a Jew or a bourgeois. But, this sophistry is not personal.
It is the sophistry of the political state itself. The difference
between the merchant and the citizen, between the day-laborer
and the citizen, between the landowner and the citizen, between
the merchant and the citizen, between the living individual
and the citizen. The contradiction in which the religious
man finds himself with the political man is the same contradiction
in which the bourgeois finds himself with the citoyen, and the
member of civil society with his political lion's skin.
This secular conflict, to which the Jewish question ultimately
reduces itself, the relation between the political state and its
preconditions, whether these are material elements, such as private
property, etc., or spiritual elements, such as culture or religion,
the conflict between the general interest and private interest,
the schism between the political state and civil society -- these
secular antitheses Bauer allows to persist, whereas he conducts
a polemic against their religious expression.
***
Political emancipation is, of course, a big step forward. True,
it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but
it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto
existing world order. It goes without saying that we are speaking
here of real, practical emancipation.
Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing
it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion
is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves --
although in a limited way, in a particular form, and in a particular
sphere -- as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion
has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism,
of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence
of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the
expression of man's separation from his community, from himself
and from other men -- as it was originally. It is only the abstract
avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness.
The endless fragmentation of religion in North America, for example,
gives it even externally the form of a purely individual affair.
It has been thrust among the multitude of private interests and
ejected from the community as such. But one should be under no
illusion about the limits of political emancipation. The division
of the human being into a public man and a private
man, the displacement of religion from the state into civil society,
this is not a stage of political emancipation but its completion;
this emancipation, therefore, neither abolished the real religiousness
of man, nor strives to do so.
The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and
citizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed
against citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political
emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, the political
method of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods
when the political state as such is born violently out of civil
society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive
to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far
as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But,
it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition
of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive
taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the
guillotine.
***
The members of the political state are religious owning to the
dualism between individual life and species-life, between the
life of civil society and political life. They are religious because
men treat the political life of the state, an area beyond their
real individuality, as if it were their true life. They are religious
insofar as religion here is the spirit of civil society, expressing
the separation and remoteness of man from man. Political democracy
is Christian since in it man, not merely one man but everyman,
ranks as sovereign, as the highest being, but it is man
in his uncivilized, unsocial form, man in his fortuitous existence,
man just as he is, man as he has been corrupted by the whole organization
of our society, who has lost himself, been alienated, and handed
over to the rule of inhuman conditions and elements -- in short,
man who is not yet a real species-being. That which is
a creation of fantasy, a dream, a postulate of Christianity, i.e.,
the sovereignty of man -- but man as an alien being different
from the real man -- becomes, in democracy, tangible reality,
present existence, and secular principle.
***
We have, thus, shown that political emancipation from religion
leaves religion in existence, although not a privileged religion.
The contradiction in which the adherent of a particular religion
finds himself involved in relation to his citizenship is only
one aspect of the universal secular contradiction between
the political state and civil society. The consummation of the
Christian state is the state which acknowledges itself as a state
and disregards the religion of its members. The emancipation of
the state from religion is not the emancipation of the real man
from religion.
Therefore, we do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: You cannot
be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radically
from Judaism. On the contrary, we tell them: Because you can be
emancipated politically without renouncing Judaism completely
and incontrovertibly, political emancipation itself is not human
emancipation. If you Jews want to be emancipated politically,
without emancipating yourselves humanly, the half-hearted approach
and contradiction is not in you alone, it is inherent in the nature
and category of political emancipation. If you find yourself
within the confines of this category, you share in a general confinement.
Just as the state evangelizes when, although it is a state, it
adopts a Christian attitude towards the Jews, so the Jew acts
politically when, although a Jew, he demands civic rights.
[ * ]
But, if a man, although a Jew, can be emancipated politically
and receive civic rights, can he lay claim to the so-called rights
of man and receive them? Bauer denies it.
***
According to Bauer, man has to sacrifice the "privilege of
faith" to be able to receive the universal rights of man.
Let us examine, for a moment, the so-called rights of man -- to
be precise, the rights of man in their authentic form, in the
form which they have among those who discovered them, the
North Americans and the French. These rights of man are, in part,
political rights, rights which can only be exercised in community
with others. Their content is participation in the community,
and specifically int he political community, in the life of the
state. They come within the category of political freedom, the
category of civic rights, which, as we have seen, in no
way presuppose the incontrovertible and positive abolition of
religion -- nor, therefore, of Judaism. There remains to be examined
the other part of the rights of man -- the rights of man,
insofar as these differ from the rights of the citizen.
Included among them is freedom of conscience, the right to practice
any religion one chooses. The privilege of faith is expressly
recognized either as a right of man or as the consequence of a
right of man, that of liberty.
***
Incompatibility between religion and the rights of man is to such
a degree absent from the concept of the rights of man that, on
the contrary, a man's right to be religious, is expressly
included among the rights of man. The privilege of faith is a
universal right of man.
The droits de l'homme, the rights of man, are, as such, distinct
from the droits du citoyen, the rights of the citizen. Who is
homme as distinct from citoyen? None other than the member of
civil society. Why is the member of civil society called "man",
simply man; why are his rights called the rights of man? How is
this fact to be explained? From the relationship between the political
state and civil society, from the nature of political emancipation.
Above all, we note the fact that the so-called rights of man,
the droits de l'homme as distinct from the droits du citoyen,
are nothing but the rights of a member of civil society -- i.e.,
the rights of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and
from the community. Let us hear what the most radical Constitution,
the Constitution of 1793, has to say: Declaration of the Rights
of Man and of the Citizen. Article 2. "These rights, etc.,
(the natural and imprescriptible rights) are: equality, liberty,
security, property." What constitutes liberty?
Article 6. "Liberty is the power which man has to do everything
that does not harm the rights of others", or, according to
the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1791: "Liberty consists
in being able to do everything which does not harm others."
Liberty, therefore, is the right to do everything that harms no
one else. The limits within which anyone can act without harming
someone else are defined by law, just as the boundary between
two fields is determined by a boundary post. It is a question
of the liberty of man as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself.
***
The practical application of man's right to liberty is man's right
to private property.
What constitutes man's right to private property?
Article 16. (Constitution of 1793): "The right of property
is that which every citizen has of enjoying and of disposing at
his discretion of his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor
and industry."
The right of man to private property is, therefore, the right
to enjoy one's property and to dispose of it at one's discretion
(a son gre), without regard to other men, independently
of society, the right of self-interest. This individual liberty
and its application form the basis of civil society. It makes
every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom,
but the barrier to it. But, above all, it proclaims the right
of man "of enjoying and of disposing at his discretion of
his goods and income, of the fruits of his labor and industry."
There remains the other rights of man: equality and security.
Equality, used here in its non-political sense, is nothing but
the equality of the liberty described above -- namely: each man
is to the same extent regarded as such a self-sufficient monad.
***
And security?
Article 8 (Constitution of 1793): "Security consists in the
protection afforded by society to each of its members for the
preservation of his person, his rights, and his property."
Security is the highest social concept of civil society, the concept
of police, expressing the fact that the whole of society
exists only in order to guarantee to each of its members the preservation
of his person, his rights, and his property. It is in this sense
that Hegel calls civil society "the state of need and reason".
The concept of security does not raise civil society above its
egoism. On the contrary, security is the insurance of egoism.
None of the so-called rights of man, therefore, go beyond egoistic
man, beyond man as a member of civil society -- that is, an individual
withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests
and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the
rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being;
on the contrary, species-like itself, society, appears as a framework
external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original
independence. The sole bound holding them together it natural
necessity, need and private interest, the preservation of their
property and their egoistic selves.
It is puzzling enough that a people which is just beginning to
liberate itself, to tear down all the barriers between its various
sections, and to establish a political community, that such a
people solemnly proclaims (Declaration of 1791) the rights of
egoistic man separated from his fellow men and from the community,
and that indeed it repeats this proclamation at a moment when
only the most heroic devotion can save the nation, and is therefore
imperatively called for, at a moment when the sacrifice of all
the interest of civil society must be the order of the day, and
egoism must be punished as a crime. (Declaration of the Rights
of Man, etc., of 1793.) This fact becomes still more puzzling
when we see that the political emancipators go so far as to reduce
citizenship, and the political community, to a mere means for
maintaining these so-called rights of man, that, therefore, the
citizen is declared to be the servant of egotistic man, that the
sphere in which man acts as a communal being is degraded to a
level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being, and
that, finally, it is not man as citizen, but man as private individual
[ bourgeois ] who is considered to be the essential and true
man.
"The aim of all political association is the preservation
of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man." (Declaration
of the Rights, etc., of 1791, Article 2.)
"Government is instituted in order to guarantee man the enjoyment
of his natural and imprescriptible rights." (Declaration,
etc., of 1793, Article 1.)
***
Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of
the old society on which the state alienated from the people,
the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old
society? It can be described in one word -- feudalism. The character
of the old civil society was directly political -- that
is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property,
or the family, or the mode of labor, were raised to the level
of elements of political life in the form of seigniory, estates,
and corporations. In this form, they determined the relation of
the individual to the state as a whole -- i.e., his political
relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from
the other components of society. For that organization of national
life did not raise property or labor to the level of social elements;
on the contrary, it completed their separation from the state
as a whole and constituted them as discrete societies within
society. Thus, the vital functions and conditions of life of civil
society remained, nevertheless, political, although political
in the feudal sense -- that is to say, they secluded the individual
from the state as a whole and they converted the particular
relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general
relation to the life of the nation, just as they converted his
particular civil activity and situation into his general activity
and situation. As a result of this organization, the unity of
the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this
unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear
as the particular affair of a ruler isolated from the people,
and of his servants.
The political revolution which overthrew this sovereign power
and raised state affairs to become affairs of the people, which
constituted the political state as a matter of general-concern,
that is, as a real state, necessarily smashed all estates, corporations,
guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of
the separation of the people from the community. The political
revolution thereby abolished the political character of civil
society. It broke up civil society into its simple component parts;
on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the
material and spiritual elements constituting the
content of the life and social position of these individuals.
It set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were,
split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys
of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political
spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established
it as the sphere of the community, the general concern
of the nation, ideally independent of those particular
elements of civil life. A person's distinct activity and
distinct situation in life were reduced to a merely individual
significance. They no longer constituted the general relation
of the individual to the state as a whole. Public affairs as such,
on the other hand, became the general affair of each individual,
and the political function became the individual's general function.
But, the completion of the idealism of the state was at the same
time the completion of the materialism of civil society. Throwing
off the political yoke meant at the same time throwing off the
bonds which restrained the egoistic spirit of civil society. Political
emancipation was, at the same time, the emancipation of civil
society from politics, from having even the semblance of a universal
content.
Feudal society was resolved into its basic element -- man, but
man as he really formed its basis -- egoistic man.
This man, the member of civil society, is thus the basis,
the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized
as such by this state in the rights of man.
The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty,
however, is rather the recognition of the unrestrained
movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the
content of his life.
Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious
freedom. He was not fred from property, he received freedom to
own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he
received freedom to engage in business.
The establishment of the political state and the dissolution of
civil society into independent individuals -- whose relation with
one another on law, just as the relations of men in the
system of estates and guilds depended on privilege -- is
accomplished by one and the same act. Man as a member of civil
society, unpolitical man, inevitably appears, however, as the
natural man. The "rights of man" appears as "natural
rights", because conscious activity is concentrated on the
political act. Egoistic man is the passive result of the
dissolved society, a result that is simply found in existence,
an object of immediate certainty, therefore a natural object.
The political revolution resolves civil life into its component
parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or
subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world
of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of
its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation
and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as a member
of civil society is held to be man in his sensuous, individual,
immediate existence, whereas political man is only
abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person.
The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual,
the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen.
Therefore, Rousseau correctly described the abstract idea of political
man as follows:
"Whoever dares undertake to establish a people's institutions
must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature,
of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete
and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which,
in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of
substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and
independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers,
and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without
the help of other men."
All emancipation is a reduction of the human world
and relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand,
to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual,
and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person.
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.