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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Conspiracy theory continues to enjoy a generally positive reception within many sectors of the contemporary North American anarchist movement. As this presentation will argue, conspiracy models of social reality consistently distort and obfuscate the power relations they purport to explain. Instead of examining or refuting specific instances of conspiracy thinking within the popular anarchist milieu, this analysis will concentrate on the logical structure of conspiracy theory as such, and attempt to illuminate its psychological, political, philosophical, and historical roots.
This is a recording of a presentation given by Peter Staudenmaier at the 2004 Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. Peter Staudenmaier is an anarchist historian whose work focuses on modern European right-wing thought. He teaches at the Institute for Social Ecology.
Listen to the presentation here: Part 1, Part 2.
By Moishe Postone
As is well known, the period since the early 1970s has been one of massive historical structural transformations, frequently referred to as the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism (or, better, from Fordism through post-Fordism to neo-liberal global capitalism), entailing the undermining of the state-centric order of the mid-20th century. This transformation of social, economic and cultural life has been as fundamental as the earlier transition from 19th century liberal capitalism to the state-interventionist, bureaucratic forms of the 20th century.
Because these transformations have also involved the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union and of European Communism, they have been interpreted as marking the end of Marxism and of the theoretical relevance of Marx’s critical social theory. Yet recent historical transformations have also reasserted the central importance of historical dynamics and large-scale structural changes – the problematic at the heart of Marx’s critique (and precisely that which eludes the grasp of the major theories of the immediate post-Fordist era – those of Foucault, Derrida, Habermas).
Focusing on this problematic casts a number of important issues in a different light. For example, the question of the relation of democracy to capitalism and its presumed negation, communism – and, more generally, of the relation of historical contingency (and, hence, politics) to necessity – becomes inflected differently when considered in relation to the overarching historical transformations of the past three decades.
Recent structural transformations involve the reversal of what had appeared to be a logic of increasing state centrism. Consequently, they call into question linear notions of historical development – whether Marxist or Weberian. Moreover, the existence of large-scale historical patterns such as the rise of Fordism out of the crisis of 19th century liberal capitalism and, then, the demise of the Fordist synthesis indicates that the scope of contingency is constrained in capitalism. Focusing on the realm of politics alone, such as the differences between conservative and social democratic governments, for example, cannot explain why regimes everywhere in the West, regardless of the party in power, deepened and expanded welfare state institutions in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, only to cut back such programs and structures in subsequent decades. There have been differences, of course, but these have been differences in degree rather than in kind.
The existence of such large-scale patterns, which, I would argue, are ultimately rooted in the dynamics of capital, has been largely overlooked in discussions on democracy as well as in debates on the merits of social coordination by planning versus that effected by markets. These patterns imply a degree of historical necessity. By grounding such patterns in the categories of his critique, Marx grounded them in historically specific forms of heteronomy and indicated that overcoming capital entails more than overcoming exploitation and structural inequality; it also entails overcoming determinate structural constraints on action, thereby expanding the realm of historical contingency and, hence, the horizon of politics.
To the degree to which we choose to use the term “indeterminacy,” then, it should be as a goal of social and political action rather than as an ontological characteristic of social life. Positions that attempt to posit the latter emphasize that freedom and contingency are related. They overlook, however, the constraints on contingency exerted by capital as a form of social life. Within the framework I am presenting, the term “communism” can be reappropriated as the indeterminacy that becomes possible when the constraints exerted by capital are overcome; social democracy would refer to attempts to ameliorate inequality within the framework of the necessity imposed structurally by capital. As indeterminate, communism can only arise as a historically determinate possibility generated by the internal tensions of capital, not as a “tiger’s leap” out of history.
A second general issue raised by recent historical transformations is that of internationalism. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War has opened the possibility of a reinvigorated internationalism that is globally critical – as opposed to those Cold War forms of “internationalism” that were critical of one camp in ways that served as a legitimating ideology for other camps, which were very much part of a larger whole that should have been the object of critique.
In this essay, I shall begin addressing this second general issue, that of historical change, internationalism, and political mobilization today. However central Marx’s analysis might be to grasping the contemporary world, there has been a major hiatus between his critical theory of capitalism and much recent anti-hegemonic mass mobilization. I shall present some very preliminary reflections on what I regard as an impasse reached by many anti-hegemonic movements today, while reflecting critically on different forms of political violence.
The impasse to which I am referring has been dramatized recently by many responses on the Left – certainly in the USA, perhaps in Europe – to the suicide bombing of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as by the character of the mass mobilizations against the Iraq War. In both cases the Left found itself faced with what should have been viewed as a dilemma – a conflict between a global imperial power and a deeply reactionary counter-globalization movement in one case, and a brutal fascistoid regime on the other. And in neither case did the Left (at least in the US) problematize this dilemma and try to analyze this configuration with an eye toward the possibility of beginning to formulate what has become exceedingly difficult in the world today – a critique with emancipatory intent. This would have required developing a form of internationalism that broke with the dualisms of a Cold War framework that frequently legitimated as “anti-imperialist” state structures and policies that were no more emancipatory than many authoritarian and repressive regimes supported by the American government.
Instead of breaking with such a framework, however, much of the Left has recently taken recourse to precisely such earlier conceptual frameworks and political stances whose increasingly anachronistic character highlights the difficulties of formulating an adequate critique today. At the heart of this neo-anti-imperialism is a concretization of the abstract, a fetishization of capital on the global level as the USA, or, in some variants, as the USA and Israel. It goes without saying that the disastrous imperious character of the Bush administration has helped mightily in this process. Nevertheless the results of this worldview, which in many respects recapitulates one of a century ago in which the subject position of the USA and Israel were occupied by Britain and the Jews, are very negative for the constitution of adequate anti-hegemonic politics today.
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By Moishe Postone
What is the relation of anti-Semitism to National Socialism? The public discussion of this problem in the Federal Republic has been characterized by a dichotomy between liberals and conservatives, on the one side, and the Left, on the other. Liberals and conservatives have tended to emphasize the discontinuity between the Nazi past and the present. In referring to that past they have focused attention on the persecution and extermination of the Jews and have tended to deemphasize other central aspects of Nazism. By underlining the supposed total character of the break between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, this sort of emphasis on anti-Semitism has paradoxically helped avoid a fundamental confrontation with the social and structural reality of National Socialism. That reality certainly did not completely vanish in 1945. The condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism, in other words, has also served as an ideology of legitimation for the present system. This instrumentalization was only possible because anti-Semitism has been treated primarily as a form of prejudice, as a scapegoat ideology, thereby obscuring the intrinsic relationship between anti-Semitism and other aspects of National Socialism. On the other hand, the Left has tended to concentrate on the function of National Socialism for capitalism, emphasizing the destruction of working-class organizations, Nazi social and economic policies, rearmament, expansionism, and the bureaucratic mechanisms of party and state domination. Elements of continuity between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic have been stressed. The extermination of the Jews has not, of course, been ignored. Yet, it has quickly been subsumed under the general categories of prejudice, discrimination, and persecution. [1 <#1>]
In comprehending anti-Semitism as a peripheral, rather than as a central, moment of National Socialism, the Left has also obscured the intrinsic relationship between the two. Both of these positions understand modern anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish prejudice, as a particular example of racism in general. Their stress on the mass psychological nature of anti-Semitism isolates considerations of the Holocaust from socioeconomic and sociohistorical investigations of National Socialism. The Holocaust, however, cannot be understood so long as anti-Semitism is viewed as an example of racism in general and so long as Nazism is conceived of only in terms of big capital and a terroristic bureaucratic police state. Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Maidanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka should not be treated outside the framework of an analysis of National Socialism. They represent one of its logical end points, not simply its most terrible epiphenomenon. No analysis of National Socialism that cannot account for the extermination of European Jewry is fully adequate. In this essay I will attempt to approach an understanding of the extermination of European Jewry by outlining an interpretation of modern anti-Semitism. My intention is not to explain why Nazism and modern anti-Semitism achieved a breakthrough and became hegemonic in Germany. Such an attempt would entail an analysis of the specificity of German historical development, a subject about which a great deal has been written. This essay attempts, rather, to determine more closely what it was that achieved a breakthrough, by suggesting an analysis of modern anti-Semitism that indicates its intrinsic connection to National Socialism. Such an examination is a necessary precondition to any substantive analysis of why National Socialism succeeded in Germany. The first step must be a specification of the Holocaust and of modern anti-Semitism. The problem should not be posed quantitatively, whether in terms of numbers of people murdered or of degree of suffering. There are too many historical examples of mass murder and of genocide. (Many more Russians than Jews, for example, were killed by the Nazis.) The question is, rather, one of qualitative specificity.
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By Ellen Willis
Early ’90s, post-Bosnia conversation with a longtime political friend I’ve met by chance on the street: “I’ve come to see nationalism as regressive, period. I can’t use phrases like ‘national liberation’ and ‘national self-determination’ with a straight face anymore.”
“You know, Ellen, there’s one inconsistency in your politics.”
“What’s that?”
“lsrael.”
I’m not a Zionist—rather I’m a quintessential Diaspora Jew, a child of Freud, Marx and Spinoza. I hold with rootless cosmopolitanism: from my perspective the nation- state is a profoundly problematic institution, a nation-state defined by ethnic or other particularist criteria all the more so. And yet I count myself an anti-anti- Zionist. This is partly because the logic of anti-Zionism in the present political context entails an unprecedented demand for an existing state–one, moreover, with popular legitimacy and a democratically elected government-not simply to change its policies but to disappear. It’s partly because I can’t figure out what large numbers of dis- placed Jews could have or should have done after 1945, other than parlay their relationship with Palestine and the (ambivalent) support of the West for a Jewish homeland into a place to be. (Go “home” to Germany or Poland? Knock, en masse, on the doors of unreceptive European countries and a reluctant United States?) And finally it’s because I believe that anti-Jewish genocide cannot be laid to rest as a discrete historical episode, but remains a possibility implicit in the deep structure of Christian and Islamic cultures, East and West.
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By Rebeca Siegel
A large part of the academic left aids and abets, promotes and develops Judeophobic discourse. Both in the spirit of dissent and reflection that any pluralistic society owes itself, especially from left-wing intellectuals, it is imperative that progressive academics who deplore racism or gender discrimination fight for our discursive spaces within the left by repudiating Judeophobia, the only locus where the left and the right consistently coincide.
Since the Al Aksa intifada there has been an upsurge of anti-Semitism, worrisome not only to Jews but to anyone who opposes any kind of racism. For progressive Jewish intellectuals working in American universities these anti-Semitic sentiments have significantly increased in the last two years and have taken their toll in our capacity to engage many members of the academic left. Many of us feel ostracized from this community, our inevitable quorum (and strategic discursive allies) if our research engages gender or ethnic studies, class and labor studies, popular culture, the cultural production of postcolonial countries or countries with a strong colonial legacy, cultural studies.
Especially if we traditionally identify with left-wing politics, we feel the more isolated if we do not align fully with the political agenda of the academic left which mostly adopts en bloc and as a given an “anti-Zionist” stance. Anti-Zionism, currently defined, not only criticizes Israel’s policies, but ultimately calls for the dismantling of the state and the configuration of a bi-national polity. Sadly, anti-Zionism has become the litmus test for progressives, an anti-Zionism that expresses itself as anti-Semitism. This worsening hostility not only within American academe, but other intellectual forums outside of the United States, has led me to engage a theoretical debate that many left wing scholars, Jewish and not, find indispensable.
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January 1st, 2007 | admin
from Workers’ Liberty
The following is an abridged translation of a speech given by Haury in Halle (Saale) in 2003. His speech summarised the arguments he had developed at greater length in “The Logic of German Anti-Zionism”.
Introduction:
In the 1990s the question of left anti-semitism triggered strong emotions and even aggression: surely it is impossible for people on the Left to be anti-semitic? How can the two go together? After all, left-wingers are anti-fascist, leftist, and revolutionary; therefore, they cannot be racist and anti-semitic.
By way of an introduction, let me quote five statements:
“Do not buy from Jews!”
The “Jewish world movement” is led by “Jewish multi-millionaires who are to be found everywhere in the world,” and who “meet up again and again in private conferences.”
“The domination of the world’s media by Jewish propaganda” is an established fact.
“The goal of Jewish politics: World domination?!”
Jewry is “the enemy of all people.”
These are anti-semitic statements. But all five statements are to be found in left-wing propaganda against Israel. The second one is from the Palestine Solidarity magazine Al Karamah in the 1980s, the third is from the Anti-Imperialist Information Bulletin in 1971, the fourth is from the “Vienna Anti-Imperialist Co-ordination” in 2002, and the fifth is from the “Hamburg Autonomous Middle East Group” in 1989.
But I have falsified the quotes in one decisive respect: where “Zionist” or “Zionism” is mentioned, I have replaced these terms by “Jewish” and “Jewry”. The statement “Do not buy from Jews!”, however, is to be found in exactly those words in the Green Calendar, published by “Edition Sunshine” in 1982.
There is therefore clearly anti-semitism on the Left which manifests itself as anti-Zionism. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it must be said, this was not a question of individual persons or individual groups, but of the mainstream Left. There were differences in degree, but the basic positions were the same everywhere. How is this anti-semitic anti-Zionism of the Left to be explained?
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September 12th, 2006 | admin
The Return of the Radical Right in Poland:
The Betrayal of Solidarity and the Politics of Discontent
By Brian Porter
Something has gone very, very wrong in Poland. After elections last September, a group called “Law and Justice,” led by a longtime Solidarity activist and right-wing politician named Jaroslaw Kaczynski, emerged as the largest party in parliament. Victory in the following month’s presidential election went to Kaczynski’s identical twin Lech.
Cartoonists had an easy time lampooning these two former child actors, with their famously short stature and uncharismatic appear-ance. The fact that their name derives from the word for “duck” (kaczor), and that the two highest offices in the Polish state are now occupied by men who can only be distinguished because of a small mole on Jaroslaw’s nose, gave satirists even more ammunition. But there is nothing funny about Poland’s new government.
The Kaczynskis formed a coalition with an agrarian populist group called “Self-Defense” and a radical-right party with the innocuous name of “The League of Polish Families.” Polite Western journalists have labeled this government “center-right” or “conservative,” but it is hard to find anything centrist about those holding power in Warsaw today. Even Europe’s mainstream conservative parties have publicly disavowed any affiliation with Law and Justice (not to mention the other two coalition members). Put simply, the extreme right now rules Poland, and people widely considered marginal and dangerous even a year ago are now within the corridors of power.
By appointing Roman Giertych, the leader of The League of Polish Families, to the position of vice-premier and minister of education, the Kaczynskis have bestowed legitimacy on a volatile extremist who traces his ideological roots to “National Democracy,” a radical right movement from the interwar years. Giertych has filled a number of second-tier government positions with supporters who were active in neo-fascist groups as recently as the late 1990s. The Kaczynskis themselves have established close ties to the “Radio Maryja” media network, which propagates a combination of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and ultra-conservative Catholic religiosity. Although neither of the brothers have any personal history of anti-Jewish remarks (even in private, by all accounts), they have found plenty of ways to appeal to a racist electorate while keeping their own hands clean.
Continue reading this article in Jewish Currents
December 12th, 2003 | admin
By Peter Staudenmaeir
In August 1999, just a few months before the newly invigorated anti-capitalist movement scored a provisional victory in Seattle, an unemployed white supremacist named Buford Furrow shot a group of children at a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles. Furrow went on to kill an Asian-American mail carrier before turning himself in. This murderous outburst happened a month after a frighteningly similar racist rampage in Chicago. Such atrocities obviously represent the opposite of everything that the movement against global capital stands for. Yet Furrow’s motivations, murky as they may be, reveal a peculiar relationship with the reactionary and racist aspects of vague critiques of “international finance”.
In August 1999, just a few months before the newly invigorated anti-capitalist movement scored a provisional victory in Seattle, an unemployed white supremacist named Buford Furrow shot a group of children at a Jewish preschool in Los Angeles. Furrow went on to kill an Asian-American mail carrier before turning himself in. This murderous outburst happened a month after a frighteningly similar racist rampage in Chicago. Such atrocities obviously represent the opposite of everything that the movement against global capital stands for. Yet Furrow’s motivations, murky as they may be, reveal a peculiar relationship with the reactionary and racist aspects of vague critiques of “international finance”.
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