Deciding what aspect of Marxism to consider in the 200th year after Karl Marx’s birth (5th May 1818) was made considerably easier when some comments, purportedly by a ‘Jewish leader’ about ‘why black people are economically behind’ and what can be done to make them rich, arrived in my inbox.
It immediately reminded me of the controversy that surrounded some statements Marx made in his 1844 ‘On the Jewish Question’. Basically, the advice of this supposed Jewish leader is the commonplace one of black people uniting and working together and focusing upon capital accumulation rather than consumption. It has not missed me that such suggestions are usually too a historical to be of any practical use, and given all that is taking place today in Israel, this specific one fails to properly assess its downside if applied in an ethnically diverse place such as Guyana. Furthermore, I am not so naive as to not realise that the entire story of this Jewish leader might be fictitious but is being utilised because it is widely believed that Jews live in a semi-closed community that favours accumulation and are generally rich.
Therefore, the story is being deployed as a kind of ‘dog whistle’ to help to shore up a largely African-supported coalition government under severe pressure from its own constituency for underperformance. In the above mentioned work, Marx sought to root the German Jewish problem and its overcoming in the concrete conditions of Jewish life rather than in Judaism as such and perhaps it is a methodology worthy of consideration.
