From Radical Archives:
Judith Butler:
I think: Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important. That does not stop us from being critical of certain dimensions of both movements. It doesn’t stop those of us who are interested in non-violent politics from raising the question of whether there are other options besides violence. So again, a critical, important engagement. I mean, I certainly think it should be entered into the conversation on the Left. I similarly think boycotts and divestment procedures are, again, an essential component of any resistance movement.
AWL. The identification of global capitalist power with the Jews and Britain goes back before the Nazis to sections of the British left at the time of the Boer war — when they condemned as a “Jewish war” — and to the Populist movement in the USA in the late 19th century.
Moishe Postone: Yes, and it’s coming back in the United States now. The so-called “tea parties”, the so-called right-wing grass-roots fury about the financial crisis, have definite anti-semitic overtones.
Source: Postone interviewed by Martin Thomas of the Alliance for Workers Liberty (linked to here)
Back in 2004, Anne Summers writing at Engage noted that
Connoisseurs of déjà vu will be impressed by Claire Hirshfield’s article ‘The Anglo-Boer War and the Issue of Jewish Culpability’, published in the Journal of Contemporary History as long ago as 1980.
That war, which saw the first concentration camps set up by the British military to keep Boer villagers, mainly women and children, from supporting their own soldiers and guerillas between 1899 and 1902, was widely opposed within left and liberal circles in Britain. There was justified suspicion that a specious pretext had been found for invading the Boer republics, in which the British government, Transvaal mineowners, Cecil Rhodes and others were implicated.
However, the ugly side of ‘pro-Boer’ agitation was its stress on the involvement of Jewish settlers in South Africa.
I recalled this when noting Judeosphere’s post, which contains a large extract from another Hirshfeld article and is well worth reading for that extract.
Here are some extracts from the Journal of Contemporary History article:
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From Internationalist Perspective
In this essay, I want to make, and elaborate on, three claims. First, that the Holocaust is a transformational event,(1) a qualitative break in the historical trajectory of capitalist civilisation; indeed, a break so great that, as Enzo Traverso has argued, the Nazi genocide `requires us to rethink the twentieth century and the very foundations of our civilisation.’(2) Second, that as a qualitative break in the trajectory of capitalism, the Holocaust poses a fundamental challenge to Marxist theory, such that, for Alex Callinicos, `[n]o human phenomenon can put a stronger demand on the explanatory powers of Marxism.’ (3) However, it seems to me, that orthodox Marxism, at any rate, has been inadequate to that challenge, has failed to provide us with a coherent or persuasive explanation of the `Final Solution.’ Third, no explanation of the Holocaust, of its origins or unfolding, that does not link it to the immanent tendencies of decadent capitalism, capitalism in its phase of social retrogression, one salient characteristic of which is the transformation of war into race war, can provide us with a purchase on what Traverso has termed this tear in the very fabric of history (L’Histoire déchirée).(4) In my view, it is necessary to forge a direct link between the Nazi genocide and the unfolding of the operation of the law of value; to recognize, with the German dramatist, cultural critic, and Marxist, Heiner Müller, that `Auschwitz is the altar of capitalism.’ (5)
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Excerpt from Democracy and Nature:
One of the most vexing questions that the Left faces (however one may define the Left) is the role played by nationalism in social development and by popular demands for cultural identity and political sovereignty. For the Left of the nineteenth century, nationalism was seen primarily as a European issue, involving the consolidation of nation-states in the heartland of capitalism. Only secondarily, if at all, was it seen as the anti-imperialist and presumably anticapitalist struggle that it was to become in the twentieth century.
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From the conference “30 Years of the Islamic Revolution: The Tragedy of the Left” organized by the The Platypus Affiliated Society in November of last year.
Danny Postel: The central question, which I will approach indirectly, is whether the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was a tragedy for the Left.
In the conventional narrative of the Iranian Left the answer to our question has long been, “Yes.” The 1979 Revolution was a failure insofar as it was hijacked by one faction of a broader coalition that included the Iranian revolutionary Left. The faction in question was the Islamist or Khomeinite faction, which, once it gained control, proceeded to decimate, destroy, murder, imprison, and drive into exile its erstwhile comrades. There is a lot of truth to this leftist narrative, but it is only part of the story. It is largely self-exculpatory and elides the role the Iranian Left played in its own immolation. An account of this self-defeat can be found in Maziar Behrooz’s book, Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran, a salutary and, indeed, definitive reconsideration of the history of the pre-revolutionary Iranian Left.
As Maziar explains, the Iranian Left, or at least certain key fractions of it, helped fashion the noose the Islamists ultimately hung them with. According to Behrooz, the Khomeinites were able to do this in large part because the Tudeh party, the Fadaiyan Majority, and many other Iranian Marxist parties, whatever their differences with the Islamists, shared with them a profound hostility toward liberalism. Like [Ruhollah al-Musavi] Khomeini’s followers, dominant trends on the Iranian Left viewed democratic rights, civil liberties, and women’s rights as no more than elements of what they described interchangeably as “western,” “colonial,” or “bourgeois” ideology.
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