99 Problems
This is a text, signed by “Some Anarchist Occupiers”, published at Rififi Bloomington, a site produced by activists from Occupy Bloomington, in Bloomington, Indiana.
Pronoun note: “We” here refers to us (the authors) and you (if you so choose to include yourself). “We” is NOT the occupation, the “movement,” or you (if you don’t choose to include yourself).
When Tea Partiers bad-mouth “welfare queens” or “border jumpers,” folks are quick to point out their racist stigmatizations, and that’s a good thing. However, everyone could do best to question their own assumptions as well, especially around the 99% rhetoric that large swaths of the occupy movement have claimed as a starting point. This rhetoric is antisemitic (definition: hatred or discrimination of Jews) and deserves to be called into question just as much as racist Tea Party rhetoric, and to be taken just as seriously as any other form of racism.
We’re not calling anyone out for personal acts of antisemitism, although we are concerned about these more broadly. Personal antisemitism does run rampant in this country; my own grandfather denies the holocaust happened, and we’ve had to correct co-workers who claim they’ve just been “jewed.” What we are concerned about here at the Bloomington Occupation (and the Occupy movement more broadly) is the underlying antisemitism that is laced through the “99% v. 1%” rhetoric and the critique of financial capital. We can say that this antisemitism is structural or institutional because is is part of a larger cultural phenomenon that has been in place for thousands of years.
Antisemitic arguments from the middle ages (ostensibly that Jews control the money / banks / world) have been in play continuously since then; the personification of the “rich banker” or “Wall Street trader” as class enemy #1 plays into this and proves that these arguments have moved through history seamlessly. This populist rage against Wall Street for “betraying” or “selling out” America amounts to a contemporary redux of the “stab in the back myth,” a staple of nazi lore that blames “Jews and other subversives” for the betrayal of the German people, the loss of WWI and subsequent floundering of the German economy. Just as there was no conspiracy that was singlehandedly responsible for undermining the German war effort (it was already done in), there isn’t a cabal of Wall Street bankers to blame for selfishly wrecking the economy for their own gain.
The left here is just as culpable as the extreme right, with popular criticism of the Israeli State, the IDF or Zionism manifesting as completely indistinguishable from antisemitism – CounterPunch’s article “Israeli Organ Harvesting- the New Blood Libel?” is just one particularly glaring example. Not to mention the postwar-Left’s nearly wholesale adoption of conspiracy theory – notably 9/11 truth – often explicitly or subtly antisemitic in it’s ludicrous claims that Jews completely control the U.S. government, media and business interests. We point these things out to challenge the idea that, because antisemitism is systemic, that it is out of our control or is just semantic; contrarily, these threads work their way into our language, our assumptions, and our movements in quite sinister and penetrative ways.
To accept the thesis that banks, the circulation of money, or “the rich” are the problem only accepts a halfway-critique of capitalism (remember, the National Socialists are anti-capitalist as well; the German Marxist August Bebel famously referred to antisemitism as “the socialism of fools”). Banks and “bankers” are an easy target because they stand as the visible monetary centers, but this analysis completely ignores the primary functions of capitalism: the production of commodities, the exploitation of human labor, and the extraction of surplus value. Capitalism is not a conspiracy.
And thus the sinister overtones of the 99% vs. 1% logic emerges; it becomes clear that historically, national bodies (Germany, for instance) have mobilized popular antagonism against constructed sociological minorities to strengthen their own positions. Needless to say, a political analysis based solely on this construction is deeply troubling in it’s implications.
Positively, we want to participate in an articulate, complex and multi-faceted struggle, one that does not fall into the traps of populist rhetoric for lowest-common-denominator sake. The simplification of the class struggle to asinine statistics and percentages completely steamrollers all the different complexities and forces at play, and ignores the subtle interplay of power that exists everywhere and between us all. We agree that the problems of environmental devastation, poverty, racism, militarization, patriarchy, education cuts, and austerity are serious ones, but we reject the idea that these misfortunes are thrust upon us from above, that we are somehow pure or that we have no part in perpetuating these things among ourselves; denying our own agency would be shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot. Hopefully, armed with solid critique, we can get past the consideration of who is or isn’t “part of the 99%” and begin to consider our relationships to one another in more personal and specific terms.
Solidarity, Some Anarchist Occupiers
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 at 12:08 am and is filed under Capitalism/anti-Capitalism, Occupy Movement, U.S., conspiracism, tea party protests. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on February 23, 2012 negative potential wrote:
Hey, why not say “99% vs. 1%” rhetoric is also “structurally” anti-Chinese? I mean, all those Chinese merchants in Southeast Asia are associated with merchant and financial capital. Doesn’t matter if the Occupy demonstrators never mention Chinese folks explicitly. After all, we’re talking “structural” anti-Chinese sentiment.
On the off chance that there are still people reading this blog who aren’t already firm ideological partisans of the “finance capital = Jews” school of thought (talk about perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes!), here’s a refresher link to Gerhard Hanloser’s demolition of the fatuous concept of “structural antisemitism”: http://communism.blogsport.eu/2011/07/18/attac-the-critique-of-globalization-and-structural-antisemitism/
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on February 24, 2012 Waterloo Sunset wrote:
What NP said. Worse, to suggest that talking about “the personification of the “rich banker” or “Wall Street trader” as class enemy #1″ is an antisemitic position is to imply that, in fact, antisemites are entirely correct to suggest that Jews and finance capital are the same thing. I believe that’s an analysis the author shares with Rush Limbaugh.
Whether a finance-centric criticism of capital is highly flawed, or the question of whether a populist analysis is de facto problematic are entirely different and legitimate questions.
To pick out a few more serious flaws:
le. Not to mention the postwar-Left’s nearly wholesale adoption of conspiracy theory – notably 9/11 truth –
Citation needed. I know stuff is different in the US than the UK, but I find that hard to believe.
remember, the National Socialists are anti-capitalist as well
That’s not true. From 1929 onwards, German big business overwhelmingly supported the NSDAP and a policy of privatisation was carried out. That’s standard in fascism- where fascists have come to power, they’ve always made their peace with the capitalist establishment. Where that didn’t happen (Codreanu’s Iron Guard) they’ve been crushed. What the author is doing here is taking Nazi propaganda and repeating it as fact.
We agree that the problems of environmental devastation, poverty, racism, militarization, patriarchy, education cuts, and austerity are serious ones,
I will merely observe the lack of suggestion here that capitalism is an issue. This is identity politics.
denying our own agency would be shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot.
Utterly anti-Marxist, anti-Anarchist and a retreat into liberalism. To argue that we are “all to blame” is to deny that the class struggle is, at its heart, the struggle between the bourgeois and the proletariat.
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on February 24, 2012 negative potential wrote:
Also rather icky is the line about “welfare queens” and “border jumpers” at the beginning. As if the victimization of welfare recipients and the poor is comparable to attacks on securities traders!
Waterloo S.
“To argue that we are “all to blame” is to deny that the class struggle is”
To be fair, the groups and individuals in Germany that promote the “structural anti-Semitism” doctrine (Anti-Germans and the Nuremberg “Wertkritik” school) basically deny any importance to class struggle, or indeed, even the category of surplus-value production in Marx’s work. Their reception of Capital basically stops after the first chapter, so it’s rather ironic that they’re always hurling around the accusation of “truncated anti-capitalism” since their reception of Marx is the most truncated of all.
But the “structural Antisemitism” thesis is basically an German theoretical export that (thankfully) hasn’t managed to really find wide reception in the English-speaking left. Whenever I encounter this sort of thing (like the above document), I know I’m dealing with somebody who has spent time in Germany and is in the initial phase of ascribing profundity to a theoretical novelty.
I think if most people would stop to examine this daft “theory”, they’d realize it basically amounts to a trivialization of real anti-semitism. It’s one thing to examine the role of the “Economic Jew Stereotype” (Hal Draper’s useful term) in anti-Semitic ideology. It’s another thing entirely to claim that anyone declaiming the influence of the financial sector while neglecting production is an anti-semite.
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on February 24, 2012 Waterloo Sunset wrote:
Actually, as an afterthought, if we take “antisemitism” to mean something other than “hatred of or towards Jews” how can we possibly object to the “but Palestinians are semites too!1!1eleventy-one” crowd? If you accept that the very core definition of antisemitism is up for grabs, there is no logical reason to reject other people also choosing to make up their own definitions for political purposes. (Or, in that case, pure ignorance about the etymology and history of the term).
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on February 24, 2012 schalom libertad wrote:
This is a really strange and sloppy text for many reasons. An attempt to adapt the “structural antisemitism” critique from the German context to the US context. But it fails in so many regards. A critique of the 99% slogan and one of personalized critiques of capitalism (and the potential connections to antisemitism) is important in advancing a systemic critique of capitalist society, but I don’t think this text is at all successful in doing that. The 99% slogan is not in itself antisemitic. It is however, no mere accident that antisemitic rants about “Jewish bankers” appear on the OWS website, (whereas the 99% slogan produces no similar rants about Chinese merchants). There certainly is a connection between simplified or personified critiques of capitalism and antisemitism, yet the connection is much more complicated than how it is laid out in this text, and does not mean, as Hanloser insists, that those who discuss the link actually believe that finance=Jews. I would be curious to know how this text came about and who is involved in producing it, but I guess that info is anonymous?
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on February 24, 2012 negative potential wrote:
“There certainly is a connection between simplified or personified critiques of capitalism and antisemitism”
Yep, the latter is a particular manifestation of the former; or more exactly, the latter is a racial worldview that sometimes incorporates elements of the former (not all — or even most — anti-semites would regrad themselves as “anti-capitalists”). But that’s also why the concept of “structural antisemitism” is so daft.
When somebody bitches about the boss in their workplace, that’s not a manifestation of “antisemitism”, that’s merely an immediate, instinctual response to the daily humiliations of capitalism. People in their daily interactions don’t encounter an abstraction like “the law of value”: they encounter their boss, their landlord, their welfare case worker, the immigration authorities, the loan officer at the bank.
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on February 24, 2012 negative potential wrote:
Also, the theory of “structural anti-semitism” absolves anti-semites of any culpability for their positions. If everybody is just blindly executing impersonal structural imperatives, how is anybody morally responsible for anything? How could one even hold the Nazis responsible for their crimes? Wouldn’t they just be the unconscious puppets of structural processes?
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on March 2, 2012 BobFromBrockley wrote:
I agree to some extent with most of the criticisms here. I think there is a legitimate critique to be made of conspiracy thought and populism in the Occupy movement, and perhaps even in the 99% slogan, but see no evidence for “structural antisemitism” in the slogan at all. I find it interesting and curious that these ideas should have reached Bloomington, and am also interested in who wrote this.
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