Announcing the 16th Annual Anti-Racist Action Network Conference: July 22-25, 2010 – Portland, Oregon
Rose City Antifa is pleased to announce that we will be hosting the 16th annual Anti-Racist Action (ARA) Network Conference in Portland, Oregon from July 22 to the 25, 2010. The conference will include ARA’s annual plenary, caucuses, and discussion on current issues facing antifascists. We are also organizing several workshops and social events that will be open to non-members. We hope all ARA members as well as anti-fascists who agree with our four Points of Unity will join us in July!
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In protest against the Salute to Israel Parade in New York City, a small grouping came together of Islamist antisemites with the Islamic Thinkers Society (http://www.islamicthinkers.com/), self-described Leftists of ANSWER, and the Orthodox Jewish anti-zionists of Neturei Karta.
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By the Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society of Greater London
In the first part of this article we will consider the various reasons being put forward to justify the nation. Some of them are clearly unfashionable these days and thus it might seem somewhat tedious and unnecessary to engage on this level with them. However, these justifications are not as obsolete as one might hope and furthermore have an implicit existence in citizenship law.
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From the Introduction:
These notes suggest that anti-Semitism is different from racism and that it has a direct relationship with ‘modernity’s’ attempt at reconciling it’s constituting contradiciton, that is the class antagonism between capital and labour. These notes go thus beyond a mere commentary on anti-Semitism: the issue is not just ‘anti-Semitism’ but, rather, the negative dialectic of enlightenment. in this way, the notes provide a critique of the ‘Enlightenment’ through the lens of ‘anti-Semitism.’ The argument, in short, is that anti-Semitism has to be seen as subsisting in and through the negative dialectic of Enlightenment. Without a critique of the Enlightenment, a study of anti-Semitism would merely allow a historical-sociological argument that already presupposes what it wants to show. It presupposes the ‘eternity’ of anti-Semitism regardless of historical circumstances and thus the changing mode of existence of anti-Semitism. In this way, anti-Semitism becomes to be seen as a fate to which one has to resign oneself, a fate that cannot be put into the museum of history.
Download the text here: “Notes on Antisemitism”. Bonefeld, Werner. Common Sense. 1997.
Guest post by Watching the Detectives
One of the more interesting aspects of Anti-semitism is how it often tries to hide itself. For example, some writers like to proclaim things taken directly from the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ while, at the same time, denying that they are Anti-semitic.
Infoshop.org, one of the most popular anarchist websites, has a different take on things: when comments by its registered readers argue that an article is Anti-semitic and it should be removed, the site instead deletes the ability to comment from the article altogether.
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In a debate in the Platypus Review Jerzy Sobotta outline’s “nationalism’s transformation from an emancipatory bourgeois ideology into a civilizational cataclysm.” Here: “On nationalism:
An anti-fascist intervention.” It is a reply to a reply to Sobotta’s original text (Rosa Luxemburg’s corpse: The stench of decay on the German Left, 1932–2009) in the Review, which although extremely short and overly simplistic, covers some of the antisemitic incidents that the German Left, namely the Red Army Faction, participated in in previous decades. Check out Sobotta’s text “On Nationalism.” It’s worth a read!
Nationalism was originally a liberal project advanced by revolutionaries. A democratic nation-state promised the third estate political empowerment and the legal protection of the individual. The creation of the nation was the project of an oppressed majority and constituted its attempt for political emancipation. The 18th and early 19th century liberal nation-states created the foundation for the advancement of capitalism, the mode of production that started to emerge in the previous centuries and which revolutionized the social forms of all of society. As a result, the abstraction and individuation of people changed the way that individuals encountered each other from then on: as legal subjects.
Created as an expression of freedom, bourgeois subjectivity, however, soon encountered its limitations as capitalism itself progressed. The mechanisms of social domination embedded in the economic system bypassed the individual liberties the revolutionaries had fought for. In the first crises of the early 19th century it became obvious that the rules the economy followed were not controlled by a group of people, although they were put in place and constantly reproduced by human beings themselves. Industrialization and the emergence of the working class rendered bourgeois freedom formal at best. Their grim lives and brutal working conditions revealed the coercive character of this social system and the freedom of which it boasted. From the standpoint of the proletariat, as Georg Lukács pointed out in the twenties, it was possible to grasp the inherent antinomies of bourgeois thought and to formulate a practical answer to the problem of capitalism: revolutionary social transformation. With the proletariat established as a class, bourgeois freedom was to be clarified: In Marx’s formula, “the free development of each (must become) the condition for the free development of all.” This could only mean the proletariat seizing power in order to abolish its own existence as a class and with it the capitalist social order.
The contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the working class surfaced in the revolutionary attempts of 1848 which took place, as Leon Trotsky wrote, in one way “too early and in another too late. That gigantic exertion of strength which is necessary for bourgeois society to settle radically with the lords of the past can only be attained either by the power of a unanimous nation rising against feudal despotism, or by the mighty development of the class struggle within this nation striving to emancipate itself.”[3] The bourgeoisie, at that point, experienced an internal friction: while it needed the workers’ support, it was afraid to lose the privileges it already gained. It gave up on the revolution and turned its back on the struggling workers. The proletariat, however, was not yet fully developed as a class. It lacked the organization and experience necessary to carry out the revolution on its own. The outcome of the failure of the Revolution of 1848 was the disintegration of bourgeois liberalism as an emancipatory ideology—and with it, the nation-state as an emancipatory project. As Marx recognized clearly in Louis Bonaparte’s France, nationalism had become a project of the Right. The year 1871 reveals this disintegration of liberal nationalism in two world historical events. The first is Bismarck’s reactionary unification of Germany under Prussian aristocratic supremacy. The second is the Paris Commune, in which the newly emerged working class was able to organize itself as a political force and attempted to seize political power. Both mark, once and for all, the decay of bourgeois ideology as a vehicle for emancipation. It had degenerated into a counterrevolutionary force that stood in the way of any further advancement of human freedom.
The following decades of classical imperialism are the geopolitical and national counterparts of this ideological regression. The nation-state could no longer serve as the site for the advancement of liberal freedom, but could only be critically assessed as a catalyst for the capitalization of backward countries, a necessary evil for the development of the proletariat that inherits the emancipatory potential.
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