By Moishe Postone
As is well known, the period since the early 1970s has been one of massive historical structural transformations, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism through post-Fordism to neo-liberal global capitalism), entailing the undermining of the state-centric order of the mid-20th century. This transformation of social, economic and cultural life has been as fundamental as the earlier transition from 19th century liberal capitalism to the state-interventionist, bureaucratic forms of the 20th century.
Because these transformations have also involved the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union and of European Communism, they have been interpreted as marking the end of Marxism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx’s critical social theory. Yet recent historical transformations have also reasserted the central importance of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes – the problematic at the heart of Marx’s critique (and precisely that which eludes the grasp of the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era – those of Foucault, Derrida, Habermas).
Focusing on this problematic casts a number of important issues in a different light. For example, the question of the relation of democracy to capitalism and its presumed negation, communism – and, more generally, of the relation of historical contingency (and, hence, politics) to necessity – becomes inflected differently when considered in relation to the overarching historical transformations of the past three decades.
Recent structural transformations involve the reversal of what had appeared to be a logic of increasing state centrism. Consequently, they call into question linear notions of historical development – whether Marxist or Weberian. Moreover, the existence of large-scale historical patterns such as the rise of Fordism out of the crisis of 19th century liberal capitalism and, then, the demise of the Fordist synthesis indicates that the scope of contingency is constrained in capitalism. Focusing on the realm of politics alone, such as the differences between conservative and social democratic governments, for example, cannot explain why regimes everywhere in the West, regardless of the party in power, deepened and expanded welfare state institutions in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, only to cut back such programs and structures in subsequent decades. There have been differences, of course, but these have been differences in degree rather than in kind.
The existence of such large-scale patterns, which, I would argue, are ultimately rooted in the dynamics of capital, has been largely overlooked in discussions on democracy as well as in debates on the merits of social coordination by planning versus that effected by markets. These patterns imply a degree of historical necessity. By grounding such patterns in the categories of his critique, Marx grounded them in historically specific forms of heteronomy and indicated that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming exploitation and structural inequality; it also entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expanding the realm of historical contingency and, hence, the horizon of politics.
To the degree to which we choose to use the term “indeterminacy,” then, it should be as a goal of social and political action rather than as an ontological characteristic of social life. Positions that attempt to posit the latter emphasize that freedom and contingency are related. They overlook, however, the constraints on contingency exerted by capital as a form of social life. Within the framework I am presenting, the term “communism” can be reappropriated as the indeterminacy that becomes possible when the constraints exerted by capital are overcome; social democracy would refer to attempts to ameliorate inequality within the framework of the necessity imposed structurally by capital. As indeterminate, communism can only arise as a historically determinate possibility generated by the internal tensions of capital, not as a “tiger’s leap” out of history.
A second general issue raised by recent historical transformations is that of internationalism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War has opened the possibility of a reinvigorated internationalism that is globally critical – as opposed to those Cold War forms of “internationalism” that were critical of one camp in ways that served as a legitimating ideology for other camps, which were very much part of a larger whole that should have been the object of critique.
In this essay, I shall begin addressing this second general issue, that of historical change, internationalism, and political mobilization today. However central Marx’s analysis might be to grasping the contemporary world, there has been a major hiatus between his critical theory of capitalism and much recent anti-hegemonic mass mobilization. I shall present some very preliminary reflections on what I regard as an impasse reached by many anti-hegemonic movements today, while reflecting critically on different forms of political violence.
The impasse to which I am referring has been dramatized recently by many responses on the Left – certainly in the USA, perhaps in Europe – to the suicide bombing of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as by the character of the mass mobilizations against the Iraq War. In both cases the Left found itself faced with what should have been viewed as a dilemma – a conflict between a global imperial power and a deeply reactionary counter-globalization movement in one case, and a brutal fascistoid regime on the other. And in neither case did the Left (at least in the US) problematize this dilemma and try to analyze this configuration with an eye toward the possibility of beginning to formulate what has become exceedingly difficult in the world today – a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developing a form of internationalism that broke with the dualisms of a Cold War framework that frequently legitimated as “anti-imperialist” state structures and policies that were no more emancipatory than many authoritarian and repressive regimes supported by the American government.
Instead of breaking with such a framework, however, much of the Left has recently taken recourse to precisely such earlier conceptual frameworks and political stances whose increasingly anachronistic character highlights the difficulties of formulating an adequate critique today. At the heart of this neo-anti-imperialism is a concretization of the abstract, a fetishization of capital on the global level as the USA, or, in some variants, as the USA and Israel. It goes without saying that the disastrous imperious character of the Bush administration has helped mightily in this process. Nevertheless the results of this worldview, which in many respects recapitulates one of a century ago in which the subject position of the USA and Israel were occupied by Britain and the Jews, are very negative for the constitution of adequate anti-hegemonic politics today.
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By Moishe Postone
What is the relation of anti-Semitism to National Socialism? The public discussion of this problem in the Federal Republic has been characterized by a dichotomy between liberals and conservatives, on the one side, and the Left, on the other. Liberals and conservatives have tended to emphasize the discontinuity between the Nazi past and the present. In referring to that past they have focused attention on the persecution and extermination of the Jews and have tended to deemphasize other central aspects of Nazism. By underlining the supposed total character of the break between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, this sort of emphasis on anti-Semitism has paradoxically helped avoid a fundamental confrontation with the social and structural reality of National Socialism. That reality certainly did not completely vanish in 1945. The condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism, in other words, has also served as an ideology of legitimation for the present system. This instrumentalization was only possible because anti-Semitism has been treated primarily as a form of prejudice, as a scapegoat ideology, thereby obscuring the intrinsic relationship between anti-Semitism and other aspects of National Socialism. On the other hand, the Left has tended to concentrate on the function of National Socialism for capitalism, emphasizing the destruction of working-class organizations, Nazi social and economic policies, rearmament, expansionism, and the bureaucratic mechanisms of party and state domination. Elements of continuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic have been stressed. The extermination of the Jews has not, of course, been ignored. Yet, it has quickly been subsumed under the general categories of prejudice, discrimination, and persecution. [1 <#1>]
In comprehending anti-Semitism as a peripheral, rather than as a central, moment of National Socialism, the Left has also obscured the intrinsic relationship between the two. Both of these positions understand modern anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish prejudice, as a particular example of racism in general. Their stress on the mass psychological nature of anti-Semitism isolates considerations of the Holocaust from socioeconomic and sociohistorical investigations of National Socialism. The Holocaust, however, cannot be understood so long as anti-Semitism is viewed as an example of racism in general and so long as Nazism is conceived of only in terms of big capital and a terroristic bureaucratic police state. Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka should not be treated outside the framework of an analysis of National Socialism. They represent one of its logical end points, not simply its most terrible epiphenomenon. No analysis of National Socialism that cannot account for the extermination of European Jewry is fully adequate. In this essay I will attempt to approach an understanding of the extermination of European Jewry by outlining an interpretation of modern anti-Semitism. My intention is not to explain why Nazism and modern anti-Semitism achieved a breakthrough and became hegemonic in Germany. Such an attempt would entail an analysis of the specificity of German historical development, a subject about which a great deal has been written. This essay attempts, rather, to determine more closely what it was that achieved a breakthrough, by suggesting an analysis of modern anti-Semitism that indicates its intrinsic connection to National Socialism. Such an examination is a necessary precondition to any substantive analysis of why National Socialism succeeded in Germany. The first step must be a specification of the Holocaust and of modern anti-Semitism. The problem should not be posed quantitatively, whether in terms of numbers of people murdered or of degree of suffering. There are too many historical examples of mass murder and of genocide. (Many more Russians than Jews, for example, were killed by the Nazis.) The question is, rather, one of qualitative specificity.
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By Ellen Willis
Early ’90s, post-Bosnia conversation with a longtime political friend I’ve met by chance on the street: “I’ve come to see nationalism as regressive, period. I can’t use phrases like ‘national liberation’ and ‘national self-determination’ with a straight face anymore.”
“You know, Ellen, there’s one inconsistency in your politics.”
“What’s that?”
“lsrael.”
I’m not a Zionist—rather I’m a quintessential Diaspora Jew, a child of Freud, Marx and Spinoza. I hold with rootless cosmopolitanism: from my perspective the nation- state is a profoundly problematic institution, a nation-state defined by ethnic or other particularist criteria all the more so. And yet I count myself an anti-anti- Zionist. This is partly because the logic of anti-Zionism in the present political context entails an unprecedented demand for an existing state–one, moreover, with popular legitimacy and a democratically elected government-not simply to change its policies but to disappear. It’s partly because I can’t figure out what large numbers of dis- placed Jews could have or should have done after 1945, other than parlay their relationship with Palestine and the (ambivalent) support of the West for a Jewish homeland into a place to be. (Go “home” to Germany or Poland? Knock, en masse, on the doors of unreceptive European countries and a reluctant United States?) And finally it’s because I believe that anti-Jewish genocide cannot be laid to rest as a discrete historical episode, but remains a possibility implicit in the deep structure of Christian and Islamic cultures, East and West.
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By Rebeca Siegel
A large part of the academic left aids and abets, promotes and develops Judeophobic discourse. Both in the spirit of dissent and reflection that any pluralistic society owes itself, especially from left-wing intellectuals, it is imperative that progressive academics who deplore racism or gender discrimination fight for our discursive spaces within the left by repudiating Judeophobia, the only locus where the left and the right consistently coincide.
Since the Al Aksa intifada there has been an upsurge of anti-Semitism, worrisome not only to Jews but to anyone who opposes any kind of racism. For progressive Jewish intellectuals working in American universities these anti-Semitic sentiments have significantly increased in the last two years and have taken their toll in our capacity to engage many members of the academic left. Many of us feel ostracized from this community, our inevitable quorum (and strategic discursive allies) if our research engages gender or ethnic studies, class and labor studies, popular culture, the cultural production of postcolonial countries or countries with a strong colonial legacy, cultural studies.
Especially if we traditionally identify with left-wing politics, we feel the more isolated if we do not align fully with the political agenda of the academic left which mostly adopts en bloc and as a given an “anti-Zionist” stance. Anti-Zionism, currently defined, not only criticizes Israel’s policies, but ultimately calls for the dismantling of the state and the configuration of a bi-national polity. Sadly, anti-Zionism has become the litmus test for progressives, an anti-Zionism that expresses itself as anti-Semitism. This worsening hostility not only within American academe, but other intellectual forums outside of the United States, has led me to engage a theoretical debate that many left wing scholars, Jewish and not, find indispensable.
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