The Attitude of the State

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 For as much as I didn't understand a lot of this reading—and trust me, I was lost throughout most of reading this—there was one part that I really liked.

    The political emancipation of the Jew or the Christian—of the religious man in general—is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general. The state emancipates itself from religion in its own particular way, in the mode which corresponds to its nature, by emancipating itself from the state religion; that is to say, by giving recognition to no religion and affirming itself purely and simply as a state. To be politically emancipated from religion is not to be finally and completely emancipated from religion, because political emancipation is not the final and absolute form of human emancipation.

    The limits of political emancipation appear at once in the fact that the state can liberate itself from a constraint without man himself being really liberated; that a state may be a free state without man himself being a free man....Thus the state may have emancipated itself form religion, even though the immense majority of people continue to be religious. (Marx 32)

Underneath all the anti-religious (and especially anti-semetic) rhetoric is a great point that I believe to be, quite frankly, commonsensical. A political society can claim to have certain values without the people actually having those values. That is because a government is defined (and commonly characterized) by its procedures and its bylaws. In the same way that a country could (rightly) claim to be secular even though the people themselves are deeply religious, a country could claim to not be racist or sexist and still produce racist or sexist outcomes. The true attitude of a state is the attitude "of the individuals who compose the state" (Marx 32). We hear people defend the status quo by pointing out how the pieces of legislation like the 1964 Civil Rights Act stop racism or sexism from being institutionalized. "If some people or even the immense majority" still felt obliged (knowingly or not) to treat others in racist or sexist ways, that state could claim to not be racist or sexist so long as it takes the political steps to defend those rights. Yet, in doing so, the oppressive people in that state are absolving themselves of any wrongdoing "in a devious way" because they are using the state's not being politically discriminatory as a substitute for not being discriminatory themselves. Thus there can exist an interesting contradiction between oneself and the Rousseuean body politic one may claim to be a member of. This could partially be going back to Brettsschneider in the sense that nominally or politically protecting rights doesn't do much if they aren't substantively protected. I hope I'm making sense. Marx's point that political emancipation and human emancipation are not synonymous just really resonated with me because it is something that I felt I always understood, but was constantly told otherwise, and so it was really cool to have it explained in such a clear way.

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