Raymond Geuss writes: Marx is generally considered to be a thinker who had little time for the spiritual dimension of human life. This is correct if the spiritual life is understood as depending on reference to theological or transhuman entities or to metaphysical properties. In his work there are no gods, demons, disembodied human souls or celestial hierarchies of angels, and no afterlife as a locus of redemption or damnation. Yet he concludes one of his most important later works, Critique of the Gotha Programme, with the Latin phrase dixi et salvavi animam meam (‘I have spoken out and have saved my soul’). Perhaps this is just a literary flourish not to be taken too seriously, or perhaps Marx is speaking like the atheist who still occasionally finds himself saying, ‘God help the people on that sinking boat’. Or does Marx actually think there is something like ‘the salvation of my soul’? One might argue, for instance, that in our society it requires a strenuous process of emotional, intellectual and moral self-discipline to see through the mystifications that surround us, to discover the truth and to express it fearlessly. This process has some significant similarities to the spiritual exercises practised in traditional religions. Seeing and saying the truth can be a kind of secular (and ‘materialist’) way of saving one’s soul. Arguably, this is the strand in Marx that Walter Benjamin, and following him Paul Celan, developed when they claimed that close and proper attention to any subject matter is a naturalist form of prayer.
What, then, in our current situation do we need to pay especially close attention and what important truth do we need to see and express?
Two nuclear armed powers, the US and the state of Israel, have aggressively initiated a major war with Iran. This is already said to have cost the US more than all of the second World War, has had significant negative effects on the world economy and threatens to draw other countries into the conflict, including some that are also armed with nuclear weapons. The war is clearly not in the American interest and is opposed by the vast majority of the population. It is likely to set off a severe worldwide economic depression if it continues and, in the worst case, might lead to the collapse of our economic system, without any structures in place to replace it.
Why is the US administration engaged in this war, which is costing them so dearly and has little domestic support? Is some vital Western interest at stake that is invisible to the population as a whole but can be discerned over the horizon by particularly far-seeing US politicians? Is the US seeking to protect the rule of law in the international sphere, or to create a world of greater peace, security and prosperity for humanity? Is there some other great human value to be realised or goal to be attained?
Of course not. It is not even the case that people in the US have an irrational but entrenched dislike of Iran (as they do of Russia). Rather, they are mostly indifferent to Iran and its fate, which may not be admirable but at least means they are not driven toward war by an active animus. What is evident is that the government of Israel, an expansionist ethnosupremacist state, has pulled the US into a war that is being waged exclusively to allow Israel to engage without let or hindrance (eg from Iran) in ethnic cleansing and the murder of civilians on a large scale in Lebanon, and in genocide in Occupied Palestine. European countries have no reason to congratulate themselves on having escaped active participation in this war. All of them have maintained close economic and political ties with Israel, and most of them have sold, and continue to sell, weapons to the apartheid state. In addition, they have provided it with other forms of material assistance to help it oppress the subjugated population in the Occupied Territories and conduct its war effort against its neighbours. All of them, too, will suffer the grave economic consequences of the war.
Compared with the nexus of real practical support (and the suffering of real consequences), it might seem that what people say about Israel, its intentions, its history and its policies toward its neighbours and the Palestinians is at best of subordinate importance. That seems right as far as it goes, but speaking (or not speaking) has an effect not only on others, but also on ourselves. Not speaking out against egregious evils in which one is clearly complicit is a way of destroying one’s soul, and in the case of the recent slaughter in West Asia the silence from European countries, which had previously prided themselves on their commitment to liberal, universalist values, is deafening. It is worth reflecting on how perverse this is. It is one thing for France during the anticolonial struggle in Algeria to betray in its own interest the norms and ideals it had publicly espoused for over a century. France had what it considered to be weighty reasons of state for doing what it did, and it also had sufficient residual decency to try to hide what it was doing. It is another thing for France to remain silent in the face of even worse atrocities than those in Algeria, which no one even bothers to try to hide, and to do this in the interest of another country, Israel. Have we all gone mad? Perhaps the silence is more comprehensible, although no more excusable, if one understands it as a response to a combination of self-interest, fear and shame (or a misplaced and objectionable discretion).
Many European countries have a clear economic interest in maintaining good relations with Israel because selling weapons, and other things, to them is big business. Many are terrified of the potential US reaction to saying a word about the ongoing genocide in West Asia. The US, after all, has a very powerful and ruthless government that worships a fetish: it demands from its ‘allies’ unconditional support of Israel and can show itself to be highly vindictive when that support is not forthcoming. Perhaps some European governments are paralysed because when we look at Israel we see the true face of our own societies, the ugly reality – colonialism, racism, asset-stripping, ecological devastation for political purposes, mass murder – which was always there, under the mask, and which successive generations of ideologues have tried to hide from others and from ourselves. That, of course, is the sympathetic reading of what is going on, but there is a darker interpretation: perhaps many Europeans don’t actually find what they see in Gaza to be objectionable – certainly don’t think it worth making a fuss about – or even rather approve of it and simply prefer not to say so. The German chancellor Friedrich Merz, after all, remarked about the unprovoked and illegal war on Iran that Israel and the US were doing Europe’s ‘dirty work’.
Supposing that at least some Europeans do not share Merz’s deeply reprehensible attitude, do they then simply fear the power of the US? ‘Power’, as in the ability to deploy kinetic energy (drop bombs, etc), is not the same thing as ‘power’ in the sense of being able to attain the goals one sets oneself. It is easy to impress others with the theatricality of exhibitions of kinetic power, but the ability to bring about the outcomes one prefers is a highly complex and context-dependent ability. The possession by the Soviet Union of the Tsar Bomba, a fifty-megaton nuclear device, the largest tested, could not ensure that the regime had the ability to survive. Equally, a chess player with a pistol can kill her opponent but this is irrelevant if her goal is to win the chess game. Israel has applied overwhelming kinetic power to Gaza without attaining any of its goals – assuming it has political goals, such as dismantling Hamas and expelling the Palestinians or at least subjugating them to its will. Sometimes it seems as if causing massive explosions and destroying people and property has become for Israelis an end in itself. This may be a sign not of sadism, but merely of frustration: we can neither exterminate, nor expel, nor (finally) control the Palestinians, but at least we can still blow up their hospitals, schools and houses.
It makes sense to tread warily when in the presence of someone, like the US government, who can wreak havoc and is notoriously thin-skinned; it makes even better sense to keep one’s distance from a kinetically powerful agent who is wounded or demented – or in this case both wounded and demented. The conflict in West Asia has shown that although the US has followed Israel in putting all its eggs in the basket of kinetic violence, its weapons don’t work as well as advertised. None of the war aims of either Israel or the US has been attained despite massive effort. The US has ended up doing things that are certain to make its own situation objectively worse and destroy whatever remains of the internal political structures that would allow it to orient itself in the world realistically and act rationally. There are people in positions of authority in the US who know very well that this is the case, which makes it even more dangerous.
Marx was sceptical about a great many traditional values and ideals, but you do not need complicated ideas about values to recognise that a state whose main recent achievement is the production of mountains of corpses, destroyed cities, starvation, landscapes of rubble as far as the eye can see, polluted land, water and air, and children surgically executed by snipers with a single shot to the head is a great evil. Failure to speak out about this is a form of cognitive and moral self-stultification. It reduces our possibilities of learning and changing, and it damages our ‘spirit’, which, as Hegel emphasised, is not a thing or object with fixed features, properties and capacities, but rather a perpetual process of potential and transformation and self-transformation of who I am and who we are.
Speaking out about Gaza will not in itself put an end to the genocide – only mass action will do that – but it is something that one does for one’s own sake, as much as for the sake of whatever effect it might produce. It is, among other things, a way to save one’s soul. Silence in the face of appalling atrocities is toxic to those who maintain it. Furthermore, if it is bad enough to sell one’s soul, as Faust did, for success or prosperity, it is even worse to sell it to maintain an alliance with decadence and failure.
Raymond Geuss’s latest book is Tracks in Chaos: Philosophical Orientation and Political Reflection (2026, Polity).