#Occupy
I just posted a piece on Occupy Wall Street and Occupy London at my blog. Here is a brief extract, looking at antisemitism in the American movement. Below is an extract from History is Made at Night, which mentions some manifestations in the UK.
I hadn’t realised there is a whole #OccupyJudaism thing going on at the margins of #OWS and other US occupations (here’s Occupy Judaism’s official blog, Facebook page and Twitter account). See, e.g. this broadcast on the very interesting radio613 of from the Yom Kippur Services that took place at #OccupyWallStreet and #OccupyPhilly, or this useful article in The Forward, or this round-up of items from Kung Fu Jew at Jewschool. (Comical tangent: Jewish occupiers put up a “Sukkah”; the NYPD appeared to have better halachic knowledge, noting that you couldn’t see the stars through it therefore not a proper Sukkah – although more halachically trained folks say the NYDPD got it wrong.)
In contrast, the right (at times hysterically) has put a lot of attention into hunting down examples (or at least “hints”) of antisemitism in the Occupy movement. (For one of the more articulate litanies against the antisemitism, read David Brooks on milquetoast radicals; for a good round-up of the evidence see PJ Tatler; for another video see BreitbartTV.) It is undeniable that there is antisemitism in the movement, and it has manifested itself in several of the events. (I haven’t seen examples from the UK yet, but won’t be surprised when I do.) It is incumbent on the movement, and on anti-capitalists in general, not to ritually denounce it, but to be honest and aware about it, and to understand where it comes from. Where it comes from, in my view, is: a limited anti-capitalism that focuses on finance capital rather than on capital in general which segues easily into a “socialism of the fools” antisemitism. This, I think, is not an indictment of some inherent antisemitism in the left, but rather a consequence of the failure of the left, a failure to coherently argue for, and win people over to, a thorough anti-capitalist politics. This failure has left a vacuum, which is filled with conspiracy theory, vulgar materialism of the blood-for-oil/blame-the-Fed variety, a populist discourse of patriotic defence of the national economy being looted by the banks, and other extra-left forms of politics.
It is also the case that the scattered instances of antisemitism in the protest are no more prevalent than the scattered instances of racism and antisemitism in the tea party movement, which the right (correctly) argued were epiphenomenal and not central to tea partyism. And these scattered instances, involving handfuls of oddballs at the margins of the occupations, must be balanced against the thousands of people in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, DC and elsewhere turning up to Kol Nidre prayers and sukkot. Highlighting a few incidents of antisemitism in a large, disparate, weeks-long movement and claiming that renders the whole thing is to play the antisemitism card. I particularly recommend A Jay Adler on The Putrid Cynicism of the Emergency Committee for Israel for a good rebuttal of one example of this, promoted at CIFWatch.
Matt at Ignoblus has a nice, short post written after his attendance at a Kol Nidre service at Occupy Wall Street. His concern is not with the antisemitism as such, but the way the lens of Zionism/anti-Zionism distorts the movement’s understanding of the world. The Tent City protests in Israel were a major episode in the so-called “movement of the squares”, the wave emanating out of the Jasmine Revolution via Tahrir Square which the Occupy protests want to surf. But they air-brush it out of the account because it was not against the other occupation, the Israeli one of Palestine. Ignore the fact that pro-Hamas Islamists and pro-Israeli Coptic Christians, for example, were part of the Tahrir moment: Arabs can be as politically correct as they like but Israelis had better denounce their state if they want to enter our big tent.
From History is Made At Night:
There are some odd alternative economy models around in the occupations, notions of capitalism without finance capital (the ‘real economy’), of monetary reform, of a resource-based economy that is beyond capitalism and communism (this is the line of the new-agey Zeitgeist Movement who had a banner on steps of St Pauls). It is not just that some of these ideas seem to have very little understanding of what capitalism actually is and misrepresent it as a conspiracy by a few rich bankers rather than a global mode of production and exchange. It’s far worse than that, because some of these ideas have very murky antecedents and indeed dubious present-day associations.A lot of ‘monetary reform’ notions just read like recycled ‘Social Credit’ ideas, as developed before the Second World War by CH Douglas. As Derek Wall pointed out in his article Social Credit: The Ecosocialism of Fools (Capitalism Nature Socialism, September 2003), Douglas was not only an extreme right wing racist, but his monetery ideas are saturated with an anti-semitic world view. Likewise, the Zeitgeist Movement basically rehash the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, simply subsituting the word ‘bankers’ for ‘jews’ (see Zeitgeist Exposed at the Third Estate).
At the Bristol occupation at the weekend this racist conspiracy theory view of capitalism was openly articulated by someobody telling the occupation that ‘Zionists want a new world order’. What was disgraceful about this episode was that people dutifully repeated this poison and cheered him rather than kicking the guy out. And that whoever was responsible for ‘Occupy Bristol update’ on youtube thought this was uncontroversial enough to give the guy a platform.
The ‘human microphone’ thing in the occupations is in danger of becoming an absurd fetish. In Wall Street people repeated the phrases of speakers to make sure that people further back could hear speeches when a microphone was banned. In most cases where there is no ban it would be surely be better – and very simple – just to set up a PA or use a megaphone, like people have been for years. By the looks of the Bristol occupation, there was no need for anything as the crowd seemed small enough for everybody to hear. It did look like a religious ‘call and response’ exercise, and involved people in the bad faith exericse of speaking nonsense which on reflection I would hope many would prefer not to utter.
I know that there are plenty of good sound people camping out at St Pauls now, and I think it is very important to get involved and challenge reactionary ideas. To just walk away holding our noses could allow some of these dangerous ideas to get a foothold in the very high profile occupation movement.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Capitalism/anti-Capitalism, U.K., U.S., neoliberal capitalism, social movements. 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 October 18, 2011 negative potential wrote:
“Marx believed that the conditions of life and work of the proletariat would force the working class to behave in ways that would ultimately transform society. In other words, what Marx said was: We’re not talking about going door-to-door and making workers into ideal socialists. You’ve got to take workers as they are, with all their contradictions, with all their nonsense. But the fact that society forces them to struggle begins to transform the working class. If white workers realize they can’t organize steel unless they organize black workers, that doesn’t mean they’re not racist. It means that they have to deal with their own reality, and that transforms them. Who were the workers who made the Russian Revolution? Sexists, nationalists, half of them illiterate. Who were the workers in Polish Solidarity? Anti-Semitic, whatever. That kind of struggle begins to transform people.”
http://libcom.org/library/workers-reality-martin-glaberman
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 20th, 2011 at 11:14 am
…or it transforms the struggle.
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negative potential Reply:
October 20th, 2011 at 3:31 pm
Sure, always a risk. But you yourself agree that the cranks and weirdos are a minority.
As for the mainstream, well people have all kinds of wrong shit floating around in their heads, but the course of a social movement depends upon many more factors than the subjective ideologies of its participants. In fact, I think it’s an odd paradox that the very same critics who otherwise vehemently maintain the objective, abstract nature of capitalist rule nonetheless ascribe huge power to subjective agency when it comes to the confused ideas of activists.
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 22nd, 2011 at 2:18 pm
The “cranks” and “weirdos” of the Anonymous bloggers are however not minor players. And their conspiracy theory propaganda opens the door to outright antisemitism. Adbusters too is not marginal, and their previous antisemitic statements (see here: http://radicalarchives.org/2011/10/20/lasn-adbusters-helps-you-find-the-jews/ ) make it permissible to blame Jews for the economic crisis.
on October 19, 2011 Tagesschau « Entdinglichung wrote:
[...] Beiträge von Bob from Brockley, heute empfohlen ein Beitrag auf Contested Terrain zum Thema jüdische Beteiligung und Antisemitismus in der Occupy-Bewegung und auf seinem eigenen Blog einige Meldungen zur EDL, hieraus ein kurzer [...]
on October 19, 2011 negative potential wrote:
A couple of systems analysts at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich mapped the relationships between 43,0000 transnational corporations and identified a relatively small group of institutions with significant control over the global economy:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world.html
Presumably even suggesting that capitalists exist and exercise power within the global economy is a form of “structural anti-Semitism”.
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on October 20, 2011 negative potential wrote:
An interesting interview from Jungle World of all places, with Andrei Markovitz, certainly no friend of antisemitism.
The title says it all: “In Amerika werden Banker nicht mit Juden assoziiert.” (“In America banks are not associated with Jews.”)
http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2011/42/44154.html
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 22nd, 2011 at 9:08 pm
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on October 23, 2011 negative potential wrote:
[There wasn't a reply button under the comment I wanted to respond to, so this is going to mess up the threading a bit]
“The “cranks” and “weirdos” of the Anonymous bloggers are however not minor players. And their conspiracy theory propaganda opens the door to outright antisemitism.”
Eh, I dunno. Antisemitism is definitely a conspiratorial worldview, but I don’t think conspiratorial worldviews lead to Antisemitism (I assume your useage of “opens the door” means something like “leads to”). Somebody has to have a tick about Jews in the first place, and if that’s so, then they were already an Antisemite. I know Anonymous has that video where they condemn “the bankers”. Most people will watch that and think “Bankers = Bankers”. Antisemites will watch that and go “Bankers = Jews”. So we haven’t gained any insight here, just the tautology that Antisemites hate Jews and blame Jews for everything.
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negative potential Reply:
October 23rd, 2011 at 2:22 pm
P.S. I should note that I’m not saying that people who don’t have a conception of capitalism as a mode of production shouldn’t be introduced to a deeper critique of capitalism. I wouldn’t translate so much Marxology if that were the case. I’m just saying that hastily drawing an association with antisemitism might close off people to a critique they were otherwise open to hearing. Especially if, you know, they’re not antisemites.
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schalom libertad Reply:
October 23rd, 2011 at 5:33 pm
That sounds very static. Nobody is born an antisemite. Social conditions and social context (and yes also social movements) create the conditions for antisemitism to become prevalent as a social trend in society, and that is the purpose of this site, of identifying these trends and combating them.
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on October 23, 2011 negative potential wrote:
Nobody is born an Antisemite, but it seems to me that Antisemitism is sort of a package deal, something people embrace when the ideology is presented to them, and not an ideology they start to embrace only after they’ve been prepared for it by a conspiratorial worldview.
The “capitalism = bankers” thing is wrong because it’s incorrect, not because it’s potentially antisemitic. I’m fully on board with the idea that capitalist automatically generates fetishistic perceptions of social reality in the minds of its subjects, but this is a mode of production that encompasses almost all nooks and crannies of society. To say that the spontaneous forms of thought it generates are “potentially” antisemitic is as trivial as saying that they’re “potentially” communistic, or “potentially” affirmative of the status quo, or “potentially” bourgeois liberal or conservative. In other words, capitalism “potentially” generates all sorts of diverse ideologies that people use to try to make sense of the world.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight actual, real antisemites in social movements. Of course we should. I’m just taking issue with the idea that a truncated critique of capitalism is fertile ground for antisemitism. Of course it is, but that’s a totally trivial observation. It’s also fertile ground for a lot of nice ideas that we’d like these people to take up. One course of development isn’t necessarily more “likely” than the other.
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 23rd, 2011 at 10:12 pm
“Antisemitism is sort of a package deal”.
Why?
It seems to me much better to understand antisemitism — as well as racism — as something that operates in gradations and something that does not necessarily lead back to identifying “the antisemite” behind the act. It can emerge unconsciously, even from people who think of themselves as being opponents of antisemitism. I think some people who respond to charges of racism by saying “I love black friends” are infact genuine *in their conviction* that they are anti-racist. It does not however mean that what they do and say doesn’t nurture racism or contribute to an environment in which it can grow. I see antisemitism and racism as social and ideological forms which are much more dynamic than how you are treating them.
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on October 24, 2011 negative potential wrote:
“It does not however mean that what they do and say doesn’t nurture racism or contribute to an environment in which it can grow. ”
This is just too vague and formless to me in the way that it mixes up subjective intentions with social structures/relationships. You probably have already seen this, but just in case, Adolph Reed on the problems of “anti-racism”: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Antiracism.html
TL;DR Reed takes issue with concepts of “anti-racism” as being overly focused on personal sensitivities rather than structural inequalities. The Civil Rights movement and Black Power movement were aimed concretely at gaining certain civil and human rights for black folk in the U.S.
Antisemitism I think is distinct from other racisms because it’s really not about the ideological processing of objective power relations between racially coded groups; it’s a delusional mania that ascribes a certain power over society to a specific group. Combating Antisemitism means fighting these delusional perceptions, and not concrete demands for granting previously denied “rights” to Jews in a legal or political context (although this was different in early 20th century America, where material discrimination against Jews in WASP-dominated institutions in the US was quite real).
So given that Antisemitism and combatting Antisemitism really is about these sort of subjective, delusional ideological ways of processing reality, I think it’s imperative to maintain a focus on forms of Antisemitism that *really are* Antisemitism: for example, all the currency cranks who ascribe the emergence of the Federal Reserve system to Jewish machinations.
On the other hand, other manifestations of truncated anti-capitalism, like an over-emphasis on financial capital, I don’t think it’s useful or sensible to speak of Antisemitism unless Jews really are a target.
I’ve never even asked you this, but I suppose I should: what do you actually think of the notion of “structural Anti-semitism”? As you already know, I don’t really have much regard for it.
Here’s an example: one of the most prevalent examples of truncated anti-capitalism is not so much hostility to financial capital, but hostility to managers. The majority of people in their daily lives who are beaten down by the system don’t deal with bond traders or bankers, but rather teachers, social workers, and managers at work. At every real job I’ve ever held, I have never once dealt with a Jewish person (either in a religious or “ethnic/cultural” sense) in a managerial position. Of course, having benefited from a Marxist education, I don’t associate capitalism with “managers”. But assuming I did, it’s difficult for me to see how such a truncated anti-capitalism could be construed as “structurally antisemitic”. On the contrary, it strikes me as a delusional perpetuation of antisemitic stereotypes to draw this association of Jews with capital. And I’m really not convinced that most people spontaneously draw that association.
So if “structural antisemitism” really refers to any and all truncated forms of anti-capitalism, then it strikes me as a rather insidious form of perpetuating antisemitic stereotypes. If, however, it only refers to truncated forms of antisemitism that are only focused on finance — and not, say, managers — then it strikes me as culturally and geographically limited in scope. As Markovitz points out, Jew = Banks is not really a traditional American association, since WASPS are really the more dominant “ethnic” group in terms of elite finance. And then there’s the question of how to think about “ethnic” Chinese in Southeast Asian countries: is the delusional association of Chinese people with trade and finance in Indonesia a form of “Antisemitism”? Although they’re not Jews?
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 24th, 2011 at 10:53 am
You don´t want to look at the movement or a social context as dynamic but as flat. Your self described “old-school” position wants to only see antisemitism where specific reference to Jews is made. First off, things are much more complicated than that. And it is not just a matter of finding the “code words” but understanding patterns of thought, and how social contexts present different opportunities for these patterns of thought to grow. Hence the title of this blog “contested terrain.” There are always these conflicts occurring, and an emancipatory left has to recognize this, and to act to oppose antisemitism in its broader struggle for human emancipation.
Despite your “old school” approach which only sees antisemitism when someone shouts “Jew”, there have been and continue to be specific targetings of Jews. Here is the latest example:
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 24th, 2011 at 11:08 am
I don´t see how you can first recognize the “delusional” character of antisemitism as you did in this comment, and then immediately afterwards treat antisemitism as if it is responding to real situation of Jews: “Jew = Banks is not really a traditional American association, since WASPS are really the more dominant “ethnic” group in terms of elite finance”.
Antisemitism is not a movement that opposes “Jewish power”, as the antisemites want people to believe, but a movement that *attributes* power to Jews.
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on October 24, 2011 negative potential wrote:
What does that have to do with the real situation of Jews? The point is that in places where the geographical and historical context is different than Europe, people don’t necessarily make the Jews=finance association. Do you think it’s a very traditional association in, say, Southeast Asia?
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 24th, 2011 at 2:44 pm
It comes off like a form of american exceptionalism to say that in America Jews aren’t identified with banks, as you and Markowitz claim, since the claim flies in the face of public opinion polls revealing the contrary.
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 24th, 2011 at 2:55 pm
I get the impression that you are working entirely from very abstract theory, completely divorced from empirical data. You want me to answer your question about Southeast Asia and antisemitic sentiments regarding the connection between Jews and bankers. Did you even look into anything? Or am I supposed to do your homework for you? It´s your question, your homework. You can start here: Malaysia: Anti-Semitism without Jews*”>. Or here: SOUTHEAST ASIA. Is there a search function on your computer other than of Marxists.org?
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on October 24, 2011 negative potential wrote:
“You don´t want to look at the movement or a social context as dynamic but as flat.”
I already addressed this point above. The shifting, dynamic social context is capable of generating all sorts of ideologies and responses. I don’t see why it should *necessarily* generate antisemitism.
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schalom.libertad Reply:
October 24th, 2011 at 2:35 pm
No one here said it should. You are either barking up the wrong tree (with your witch-hunt against those who support an “structural antisemitism” argument), or rather misunderstanding their argument altogether.
My point — as already explained — is that there exists the possibility of outright antisemitism when patterns of thought (such as those produced through conspiratorial, apocalyptic, violent anti-banker propaganda as seen in the Anonymous Bloggers’ web video) converges with outright targeting of Jews and Judaism as seen not only on the margins, but also by key actors such as Adbusters.
If you want to engage with that argument, go for it. Otherwise, let it be.
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on October 24, 2011 admin wrote:
Dear Negative Potential,
If you would like to address a particular issue, such as that of “structural antisemitism”, please post a new item on the blog, rather than pursuing that particular issue ad nauseam in comment threads. Otherwise, this comes off as trolling.
Thank you,
Admin
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