chapotraphouse

When asked about gangs Tupac once said, "What I want to know, though, is why all of a sudden is everybody acting like gangs are some new phenomenon in this country? Almost everyone in America is affiliated with some kind of gang. We got the FBI, the ATF, the police departments, the religious groups, the Democrats and the Republicans. Everybody's got their own little clique and they're all out there gangbanging in their own little way."

He didn't deny that any black person was in a violent gang, he said that they were no more likely to be in gangs than anyone else was. Likewise Marx wasn't going to try to tell an antisemite like Bauer that no Jew anywhere was greedy. He was saying that if they are its because we all live in a system that allows for and encourages people to be like that.

There's an article I can't find and really wish I could link, because it's obviously much more eloquent, where a black theorist shows the almost exact parallels between On the Jewish Question and an interview with Tupac Shakur saying exactly this. The interviewer asks some bullshit about are black men actually violent, gun-toting etc., and most black interviewees would give one of two answers - either they say no, and the interviewer would just point to racial violence stats, or they say yes but I'm one of the good ones. Instead Tupac said yes, and that's the obviously correct decision in the world they're forced to live in. Black men live in a dangerous world where becoming violent and having firearms is the only way to survive - and the only way to change that is to fundamentally change the society they live in.

On the Jewish Question is a reply by Marx (both of whose parents were Jewish, but converted to escape antisemitism) to an actual antisemite arguing for the exclusion of Jewish people from society. Marx's response was basically, fuck you, why not, all these horrible things you've said about Jews are true - because these things are intrinsic to capitalism. You're just describing the inner """Jewishness""" of capitalism, and if you want to get rid of it, if you want Jewish people (and everyone else!) to stop acting like that, the only way to do it is to overcome capitalism. I not only don't think Marx was wrong to make the argument this way, I think it's a powerful critique and I think it remained true when Tupac independently came up with basically the same thing. But then, I was led to this conclusion by a much more well-written article.