Gerhard Hanloser’s Critique of “Structural Anti-Semitism”
The truncated understandings of Marx’s Capital by Postone and the German Krisis group, among others, come in for a rigorous Marxological critique.
contested terrain
platform against antisemitism and for emancipationGruppe Soziale Kämpfe: Anti-Muslim Racism from Above and Below
Originally published in German in ak – analyse & kritik – zeitung für linke Debatte und Praxis / Nr. 533 / 21.11.2008
The successful prevention of the “Anti-Islamification” Congress in Cologne last September was the result of one of the largest anti-fascist and anti-racist mobilizations of the last few years. The abortive congress can be regarded as an attempt by the European right to consolidate its forces by means of the theme of the “Islamification of Europe” and the promotion of a pan-European right-wing party. The counter-mobilization also raised questions concerning anti-racist positions and strategies against rising anti-Muslim racism in Europe, and brought these questions to the attention of a broader public.
Broad coalitions – such as that in Cologne – are important and necessary components of a struggle for hegemony. It is just as important to bring an anti-racist critique into these struggles, a critique that does not appeal to tolerance, cultural difference, or freedom of religion. These “values” do not break with the logic of culturalization, but rather strengthen it from the “left”. Strategies must be developed concerning how to push back against (local and everyday) mobilizations against immigrants as “Muslims” without falling into the trap of culturalization. Thus, the following two questions are of foremost importance for us:
The National Competitive State and Security Policies
1) Why is “Islam” such an attractive bogeyman for so many people? The right’s capacity for mobilization has to be considered within the context of capitalism’s upheavals and neoliberal and authoritarian strategies of the ruling block. 2) To what extent can we actually speak of an anti-Muslim racism (AMR for short) without therefore falling into the trap of overlooking right-wing elements within Islamic movements? Reactionary political-religious movements within Islam must be criticized along with the social conditions in which they emerge, taking into account the racism of the majority society and the economic, cultural, and political contradictions of globalized capitalism.
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From the Vaults: Wolfgang Pohrt on The Radical Left and National Liberation
From: Wolfgang Pohrt, Linksradikalismus und nationaler Befreiungskampf (1982) , collected in the book Kreisverkehr, Wendepunkt. Über die Wechseljahre der Nation und die Linke im Widerstreit der Gefühle. The first paragraph has been omitted from this translation, as it contains an ephemeral polemic of little interest to a contemporary English-speaking audience
The usual accusation made against Israel or Zionism is that this state was founded where other people were already living. But the founding acts of all hitherto existing polities were never acts of justice, but rather always acts of violence. Even the storybook peace of idyllic tribes and peoples cultivating the land of the fathers in concord and harmony with their neighbors is usually a peace resting upon an original act of land seizure and displacement. The right of nations, peoples and tribes to distinguish between themselves and foreigners and to regard these foreigners as intruders and chase them away when they wish to take up residence – a right as inseparable from the concept of the nation as it is logically imperative – this right is merely the original violent act of land seizure and expulsion made legal and continuous.
No people ever had its place on earth adjudicated by an extraterrestrial authority according to the stipulations of legal tenure. Rather, at some point in history every people took its place by force; not just for practical reasons – there is no righteous extraterrestrial authority granting such claims – but also because in an emphatic sense there can be no exclusive right of Germans, the French, or Israelis to possess any patch of land and because it is an injustice when people can‘t live on some patch of land merely because they are Turks, Vietnamese, Jews, or Palestinians. The right of national autonomy and state sovereignty is merely another name for the injustice of harassing, deporting, and expelling people on the grounds that they possess the wrong passport or birth certificate. And this injustice is not a corruption of the idea of the nation-state but rather its essence – admittedly rendered milder on occasion by the tolerance of reasonable people.
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Bombs good, Mossad baaad!
According to this report from Spiegel Online, a little mini-controversy has erupted between Renate Künast, chairwoman of the parliamentary fraction of the German Greens and former minister of Consumer Protection, Food, and Agriculture under the Red-Green government, and the Stop the Bomb campaign, which advocates the termination of all German and Austrian business relationships with Iran as a means of pressuring the Iranian government to abandon its nuclear program and which is supported by such luminaries as Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004.
According to campaign activist “Thomas H.”, who was attempting to collect signatures in front of an entrance to the Bundestag, Künast, who also heads the party’s electoral list going into the 2009 federal elections, refused to give her signature, saying “Your organization isn’t Kosher” and then, while stepping into her limousine, “you are in fact an organization of the Mossad!”
Künast vigorously denies the allegation, which was reported by the Jerusalem Post.
According to the Spiegel Online article, the question of whether or not to support the campaign is hotly contested within the party itself. According to Green Party parliamentarian Omid Nouripour, who opposes the campaign, “the alliance does not exclude the option of a military first strike. That has nothing to do with Green politics, and for that reason we can’t lend our signatures.”
So let me get this straight: a political party which was directly responsible for leading the first German war since WWII has suddenly rediscovered its pacifism?
Postscript: The SPON article also contains this delightful blast from the past from Green “left” fig leaf Hans-Christian Ströbele: “The Iraqi missle attacks [on Israel, during the 1990 Persian Gulf War -- translator's note] are the logical, almost compelling consequence of Israel’s policies.”
Hal Draper: How to Defend Israel (1948)
the attack upon the Jews’ right to self-determination comes from a deeply reactionary social class – the Arab lords – whose reactionary aims in this case are not alleviated by the fact that they themselves suffer from the exploitation of British imperialism (at the same time that they cling to that imperialism in order to defend their privileges against their own people).In this conflict, as socialists – that is, as the only thoroughgoing and consistent democrats, we not only support the Palestine Jews’ right to self-determination but draw the necessary conclusions from that position: for full recognition of the Jewish state by our own government; for lifting the embargo on arms to Israel; for defense of the Jewish state against the Arab invasion in the present circumstances.But for us this is not the end of the question but only the beginning.
