Marx is responding to Bauer's belief that there can't be political emancipation in a religious state (Germany was officially Christian)
Bauer believes emancipation comes from abolishing religion.
Marx, however, takes issues with Bauer's premise. Political emancipation doesn't come through a secular state. Disaffiliating the state with an official religion won't result in emancipation. Marx then begins interrogating what is at the heart of political emancipation. Bauer's questioning only attends to the religious state and emancipation, not the political state and emancipation. The state could be secular, Marx contends, and the people still religious. So, it isn't the state-emancipation from religion that will set the people free.
If man frees himself through the state, he must free himself through a medium, an intermediary, that provides the system from which one may become free. If freedom comes through the state, the man exists in partiality to the state itself.
Marx points out that edicts from the state (no private property ownership necessary to vote, free primary education, etc.) doesn't erode the natural boundaries of those systems. I think he's trying to show that freedom can't come from the political state. He's showing that the power of the state the change norms (de jure) didn't really change anything (de facto). The state can never abolish these conditions; "the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence."
Marx likens civic bodies, governments, to heavens (all powerful universalities of a species' perfection) and civil life (private, self-interested, imperfect species) to seculary (earthly) belonging. Only in civic, political life does the man become universal, "the imaginary member of an illusory sovereignty...deprived of his real individual life and endowed with an unreal universality." The "differences" of men in civil society are mere "sophistry," to Marx, wordplay that establishes false contradictions.
"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 state exists in presupposition to private property, law, religion, etc. Any revolution that seeks abolition of such things requires a forever revolution. Its only counterpart results in the reestablishment of the presuppositions it requires to exist.
"The so-called Christian state needs the Christian religion in order to complete itself as a state. The democratic state, the real state, does not need religion for its political completion. On the contrary, it can disregard religion because in it the human basis of religion is realized in a secular manner. The so-called Christian state, on the other hand, has a political attitude to religion and a religious attitude to politics. By degrading the forms of the state to mere semblance, it equally degrades religion to mere semblance."
Having established the possibility of political emancipation without religious emancipation (both of which aren't synonymous with human emancipation), Marx turns to the Enlightenment notion of universal "rights of man."
The rights of man exist in community; "Their content is participation in the community, and specifically in the political community, in the life of the state."
The rights of man denote that rights are individually, and privately held. Therefore, civic law provides the conditions for civil universality.
The rights of man include "liberty," whose purview includes that which does not harm others, and harm is defined through law. The universal right of man is thus wrapped completely in the political state's definition of harm, liberty, etc.
Man's right to liberty is based on the disassociation of man. It's mans' right to be withdrawn into himself. Marx argues this is enmeshed with the right to private property; the right to property exists "without regard to other men, independently of society, the right of self-interest." As such, fellow men become barriers to liberty, not the conduit for it. If liberty comes from self-interest, then the citizenry are obstacles to liberty. Equality then is based on the liberty defined above. We are equal, then, in our liberty to pursue self-interest. Security is, then, the security of liberty.
The rights of man, then, are universal egoism. The irony is that the political body serves the interest of the withdrawn, separated man. In Marx's view, the state is a supreme species to the individual. It doesn't follow that the "communal being is degraded to a level below the sphere in which he acts as a partial being." Such a system sees the partial man as the "essential and true man." Marx's idea of human perfection rests within the state. The communal man stands above the isolated man.
The rights of man are paradoxical, however, as they cease to exist when they come "into conflict with political life, whereas in theory political life is only the guarantee of human rights, the rights of the individual, and therefore must be abandoned as soon as it comes into contradiction with its aim, with these rights of man." Here, Marz argues that the rights of the individual cannot supersede the collective rights of the individual. Freedom of the press ceases to exist when they threaten the system that secures the freedom of the individual. The practice of the rights of man stand in contrast to its theory. The political body provides the security of the rights of man, which means that liberty ceases to exist once those rights of man threaten the political body.
Man's political emancipation from feudalism was not human emancipation. "man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom. He was not freed from property, he received freedom to own property. He was not freed from the egoism of business, he received freedom to engage in business."
Marx argues that the "political revolution" termed "natural" as rights the preconditions necessary for the basis of its existence. The political emancipation fragmented from into the real--fallen man--and the true--political idea man. The real man--egoist. The true man--citizen.
Only when man recognizes and reorganizes his "own powers as social powers, and, consequently, no longer separates social power form himself in the shape of political power, only then will human emancipation have been accomplished."
SECTION II
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