A short critique from Doug Henwood of attempts to separate finance capital from “productive capital,” and the relation such positions have to antisemitim, racism, and nationalism.
From Left Business Observer #119, July 2009.
The whole point of production under capitalism is not the satisfaction of needs, but the accumulation of money. In other words, it’s impossible to separate the economic world into a good productive side and a bad financial side; the two are inseparable. The monetary surpluses generated in production—the profits of capitalist businesses—accumulate over time and demand some sort of outlet: bank deposits, bonds, stocks, whatever. It’s going to be that way until we replace capitalism with something radically different.
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Some of these are more scholarly than others:
- Bernd Sommer “Anti-capitalism in the name of ethno-nationalism: ideological shifts on the German extreme right” Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 42, Number 3, July 2008 , pp. 305-316(12). Abstract: “Sommer examines the (re-)emergence of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization themes within the ideology and discourses of the German extreme right. He argues that it would be short-sighted to interpret this development simply as another opportunistic attempt by the extreme right to incorporate Zeitgeist issues into its political agenda in order to appeal to a broader spectrum of supporters. An analysis of the latest campaigns of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD)—the most successful extreme-right party in recent years—as well as the activities of groups that exist within the larger German extreme-right milieu, the so-called freie Kameradschaften, reveals that the taking up of social questions as well as anti-capitalist and anti-globalization themes marks a deeper shift within the political agenda of the extreme right in Germany. However, the analysis shows that racist and antisemitic issues do not disappear with this shift, but are linked with and incorporated into anti-capitalist and anti-globalization discourses.”
- Werner Bonefeld, Kosmas Psychopedis Human dignity: social autonomy and the critique of capitalism (Chapter by Bonefeld: “Nationalism and AntiSemitism in Anti-Globalization Perspective” – a Marxist analysis of the issue). See also Werner Bonefeld and Sergio Tischler “What is to be Done? Leninism, anti-Leninist Marxism and the Question of Revolution today“. See also Bonefeld, W. (1997), ‘Notes on Anti-Semitism’, Common Sense, no.21, pp. 60–76. Bonefeld, W. (2000), ‘The Spectre of Globalization’, in Bonefeld, W. and K. Psychopedis (eds), The Politics of Change, Palgrave, London. Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (1996), ‘Conclusion: Money and Class Struggle’, in Bonefeld, W. and J. Holloway (eds), Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money, Palgrave, London.
- Andrei S. Markovits “European Anti-Americanism (and Anti-Semitism): Ever Present Though Always Denied“. Extract: “It is by dint of America’s proximity to Israel that the latter has become such a bogeyman to the anti-globalization movement. We were all witnesses to that ugly – but telling – political theater by demonstrators at the Davos meeting in 2003 when one person sported a Donald Rumsfeld mask and a yellow Jewish star of David (the kind the Nazis made the Jews wear everywhere in German-occupied Europe) with the word “sheriff” on it. His companion was dressed like a cudgel-wielding Ariel Sharon. They and their colleagues danced around a golden calf embodying money and wealth. And surely most, if not all, of the anti-globalist protesters in that scene viewed themselves as leftists, not as rightist. Similar openly anti-Semitic iconography was commonplace at anti-globalist meetings in Porto Alegre and Durban among others.”
- Josef Joffe “Nations We Love to Hate: Israel, America and the New Antisemitism” The Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Extract: On Jose Bove: “So here was a spokesman of the anti-globalization movement who was conflating globalization with Americanization and extending his loathing of both to Israel.”
- Antiglobalism’s Jewish Problem, by Mark Strauss Foreign Policy 2003. Abstract: “Anti-Semitism is again on the rise. Why now? Blame the backlash against globalization. As public fears grow over lost jobs, shaky economies, and political and social upheaval, the far right and extreme left are seeking solace in conspiracy theories. Modern anxieties are merging with old hatreds and the myths on which they rest.”
- Mark Weitzman “MAGICAL LOGIC: GLOBALIZATION, CONSPIRACY THEORY, AND THE SHOAH” Simon Wiesenthal Center. Extract: “I have used Duke’s writings to sketch out some of the newer themes that have become part of the current far-right discourse. These motifs, such as the emergence of anti-globalization or ecology were often seen as part of the left or liberal agenda. They have been reworked to fit into right wing extremist discourse, retooled by giving them an antisemitic cast.” (p.1)
- Robert Wistrich European Antisemitism Reinvents Itself, American Jewish Committee 2005. Extract: “[In Germany,] Israel-bashing emerged as a highly popular mass spectator sport and as a point of convergence between far-right and left-wing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. It enabled “pacifist” antiglobalists from the far right and left to embrace Osama bin Laden and the radical Islamists as part of a coming “anti-Zionist” and anti-American revolution.” (p.25)
From anarchistnews.org
“Mere hours after the National Socialist Movement marched through downtown Jefferson City, Missouri angry working class people trashed windows and the ATMs of the First National and UMB Banks in Columbia, some 30 miles north. Unlike the Fascists that marched, we understand who the real enemy of working class people is and always has been. The rich bankers are not of any one religious, ethnic, or racial background. Even If one were to make such a generalization, they surely would come to the conclusion that whites that proclaim themselves Christian are in the majority of those exploiting us, not Jews, blacks, or immigrants.”
– communiqué from Missouri, November 2008
The communiqué above agrees that the fascists are right to blame the “bankers” but wrong to call the bankers Jews. This misses the point entirely and reproduces the half-way critique of capital that only focuses on finance, with all its propensity for resentment and personification. Coupling this mystification with anti-racist slogans does not erase this propensity. Instead of merely changing the answer to the question “who controls the world?” we ought to reply by asserting that this is the wrong question.
By personifying the class enemy as the archaic image of the rich banker (or more abstractly, as “international banking interests”), anarchists end up accepting the anti-capitalist thesis of National Socialism: that productive society is dominated by “parasitic” finance capital. Anarchists add only a nominal denouncement of its racist or anti-semitic conclusions.
Given all this, why, exactly, do anarchists focus on banks?
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From Slackbastard
In the late 1990s, Horst Mahler, a former leader of the Red Army Faction and scion of the radical left, announced his affinity for the extreme right and joined the NPD—Germany’s principal far right party. Later distancing himself from party politics, he founded the Deutsches Kolleg, a far right think tank that promotes German nationalism. Although ostensibly now a rightist, Mahler has synthesized much of his original left-wing ideology into a far right Weltanschauung that features nationalism, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, with a strident critique of capitalism. As such, it has the potential to appeal to some segments of the contemporary anti-globalization movement, the international extreme right, and even Islamists.
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Ann Althouse thinks so:
The most striking thing in [Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story] was the religion. I think Moore is seriously motivated by Christianity. He says he is (and has been since he was a boy). And he presented various priests, Biblical quotations, and movie footage from “Jesus of Nazareth” to make the argument that Christianity requires socialism. With this theme, I found it unsettling that in attacking the banking system, Moore presented quite a parade of Jewish names and faces. He never says the word “Jewish,” but I think the anti-Semitic theme is there. We receive long lectures about how capitalism is inconsistent with Christianity, followed a heavy-handed array of — it’s up to you to see that they are — Jewish villains.
Am I wrong to see Moore as an anti-Semite? I don’t know, but the movie worked as anti-Semitic propaganda. I had to struggle to fight off the idea the movie seemed to want to plant in my head.
Myself, I think this is a bit of a stretch, although I haven’t seen the film yet. But I think there are two serious points here worth making.
1. It doesn’t actually matter whether Michael Moore “is” an antisemite. What matters is whether it does something antisemitic. That is, if, as Althouse suggests, the movie “worked as anti-Semitic propaganda”, then that’s what matters. There are, to be sure, plenty of ideologically motivated, deeply antisemitic people. But lots of decent, anti-racist people also find themselves saying or doing antisemitic things without realising it. Combating antisemitism is not about rooting out the antisemitic people; it is about coming to a reckoning with how antisemitic discourses and actions work practically, and disseminating that knowledge. Combating antisemitism should not be a liberal moralistic, guilt-tripping exercise; it should be an exercise in understanding.
2. What Althouse is pointing to in the post is something like what many on the German left call structural antisemitism (see here, here). That is, a structure of thinking that is inherently antisemitic, even if it does not explicitly name Jews. This structure of thinking is often associated, as Moishe Postone’s work shows, with certain partial forms of anti-capitalism: forms of anti-capitalism which attempt to personalise capitalism in evil individuals (bloated plutocrats, Jewish bankers, parasitical locust-like financiers) rather than understanding it as a web of social relations. Such partial forms of capitalism also tend to focus on the evil of finance capital, and tend to valorise productive capital. Michael Moore, with his roots in the rust belt radicalism of Flynt, Michigan, as portrayed in Roger and Me, is deeply involved in this kind of productivist socialism.
Hat tip AGT/Jogo.
By Werner Bonefeld
I
The Nazi ideologue Rosenberg (1938) formulated the modern essence of antisemitism succinctly when he portrayed it as an attack on Communism, Bolshevism, and Jewish capitalism, a capitalism not of productive labour and industry, but of parasites – money and finance, speculators and bankers.
There is of course a difference between the antisemitism that culminated in Auschwitz and the antisemitism of the post-1945 world. However, whether antisemitism persists because or despite of Auschwitz is, ultimately, an idle question. The notions ‘despite’ and ‘because’ give credence to Auschwitz as a factory of death that is assumed to have destroyed antisemitism. Furthermore, and connected, antisemitism is viewed as a phenomenon of the past, that merely casts its shadow on the present but has itself no real existence. In this way, overt expressions of antisemitism are deemed ugly merely as pathological aberrations of an otherwise civilized world. In this context the critique of antisemitism is either belittled as an expression of ‘European guilt’ or rejected as an expression of bad faith: a camouflage for insulating Israel from criticism (Keaney, 2007).
The paper argues that modern antisemitism is the ‘rumour about Jews’ as personification of hated forms of capitalism. I will first look at some contemporary expressions of antisemitism, and theses IV and V explore Adono’s and Horkeimer’s (1989) and Postone’s (1986) understanding of Nazi antisemitism.
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From Engage:
Reflections on the Antinomies of Capitalist Modernity: History, the Holocaust, and the Left
Moishe Postone Professor in the History Department at the University of Chicago
The author of Time, Labour, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, his research and teaching focus is on critical social theories of capitalist modernity. He is particularly interested in self-reflexive theories of historical context — theories that seek to grasp social, economic, and cultural processes in ways that illuminate the relation of such processes to the theories themselves. His work also focuses on the problematic of modern anti-Semitism and questions of history, memory, and identity in postwar Germany, as well as on the issue of the global transformations of the past three decades and their implications for understanding the historical trajectory of the 20th century.
‘History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism’ by Moishe Postone is available for free download on the Engage website here
This event is co-hosted by the Unit for Global Justice at Goldsmiths and the Centre for Jewish Studies at SOAS
Event to be held at 7.00pm, Monday 15 June 2009,
Room G50,
School of Oriental and African Studies
University of London
Thornhaugh Street
Russell Square
London WC1H 0XG
Antifa groups from Germany and Austria have just published a pamphlet about antisemitism and anti-zionism. It includes basic texts, including critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “Theses on Antisemitism”; two texts by Moishe Postone, one on Nazi antisemitism, the other on contemporary forms of anti-capitalism; and a text on anti-Zionism. The pamphlet is downloadable from their website. More information below.
Why your revolution is no liberation!
With this reader, we want to take a stand against the currently predominating analyses, of the anti-globalisation movement, which, articulating themselves as in the broadest sense left-wing and anticapitalist, constantly boisterously trumpet their opinion, that another world was possible. We have serious doubts that this “other” world, was going to be of a better constitution than the current one. This anti-globalisation movement is of course not at all marginalised, but is enjoying broad sympathy, which reaches from the “bourgeois left” right to the so-called centre of society and which is even shared by Neo-Nazis
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This is an essay from 2002, published in the German-language internationalist magazine iz3w. Lucky for us, they’ve translated a few good texts.
By Stephan Günther
In their criticism of neoliberalism and globalisation the Left and the Right are sometimes uncannily close. One has to look very carefully to find the differences between their struggles against “financial capital” or “speculators.” Left-wing critics of globalisation often defend themselves with the assertion that there is no protection against uninvited support.
…continue reading the article here
The text below is from a leaflet distributed at the anti-G8 mobilization in Germany, by the Berlin group, Theorie, Organisation, Praxis (TOP).
Capitalism is no conspiracy and the Hamas is not the Rebel Alliance
Against Antisemitism within the activist scene
You consider yourself an activist, a radical, maybe an anarchist. In any case you are someone who is an outspoken critic of capitalism and who wants to end oppression and injustice as the left all over the world wants to.
At the same time, all over the world, Antisemitism is on the rise again. It takes many forms, some of which are violent such as verbal and physical attacks, while others are more subtle.
Antisemitism has a long and gruesome history: Since the middle ages, Christianity supported pogroms against Jews. Later, the natural sciences came up with the idea of an inferior Jewish „race“, and generally speaking Jews often got blamed for all evil in the world. The climax were the gas chambers of Auschwitz and other concentration camps where six million Jews were murdered.
The activist movement, however, seems to ignore this history and the fact that Jews still are not secure. Rather than acknowledging Antisemitism as another means of oppression that needs to be fought – such as racism or sexism – quite a few of its members actively take part in pushing antisemitic attitudes.
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