File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9710, message 82


Date: Wed, 08 Oct 1997 14:07:18 +0100
From: Fergal Finnegan <fergalf-AT-meta.dublin.iona.ie>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Can Marxism "explain" the Holocaust?



I apologise for filling up people mailboxes
with material that has appeared already
on thaxis but I have just reread Louis Proyect's
thought provoking piece on the Holocaust
( see below)

I think there is a lot worth discussing in this
article. I don't know if Louis answers all the
questions he raises. What, if anything, is singular
about the Holocaust of the Jews?. Do we have the
language and ideas which can begin to describe
and explain an event such as the Holocaust?.
Why does virulent anti-semitism continue to be
an ideological mainstay in certain forms of right
wing thinking in countries like Poland and Russia
where because of diaspora and holocaust there has 
been no significant Jewish population for generations?.
This was a feature in the the transition to early 
capitalism in Britain where The Jew of Malta and The
Merchant of Venice were written despite the fact that 
Jews had been banned from England since the 14th
century. Before the advent of capitalism during the 
Crusades often armies on the march to  pogroms agai

I am not sufficiently well informed enough to posit
an answer but I would be particularly interested in 
hearing what people have to say on this topic. Has 
anyone read Bordiga's and other ultra-left interpretations
of the holocaust ?. Returning to the dialectic of enlightenment
what do you think of Adorno and Horkheimer's ideas about
anti-semitism?. 

Thanks,

Fergal 

Louis' original mail is below





At 14:11 29/09/97 -0400, you wrote:
>Abram Leon wrote "The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation" in 1941
>when he was all of 24 years old and at a time when his hands were filled
>leading the Belgian Trotskyist movement under conditions of fascist
>repression. Eventually, the Gestapo captured him and sent him to
>Auschwitz. He did not make it out alive.
>
>Leon's first involvement with radical politics was with the Hashomir
>Hatzoir, a Zionist-socialist youth group. He grew disenchanted with
>Zionism and became a Trotskyist at the time of the Moscow trials. This
>showed a certain independent streak since the Hashomir-ites were
>pro-Stalin, as well as being Zionist.
>
>While Leon devoted himself to the Trotskyist movement from this point on,
>he never lost interest in the "Jewish Question." He was anxious to answer
>the claims of the Zionists, as well as explain the virulent anti-Semitism
>that had swept Germany. What was the explanation for the failure of the
>Jews to assimilate? Why had this peculiar combination of race, nationality
>and religious denomination persisted through the ages? What was the nature
>of the hatred against the outsider Jew?
>
>Leon took his cue from Karl Marx who wrote in " On the Jewish Question",
>"We will not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but we will
>look for the secret of the religion in the real Jew." This led Leon to
>examine the socio-economic relations that might explain both the identity
>of the Jews and, by the same token, their persecution.
>
>He believed that the key to understanding the Jewish question was their
>status as a "people-class." The Jews, according to Leon, "constitute
>historically a social group with a specific economic function. They are a
>class, or more precisely a people-class." That economic function is
>tradesman. The Jew, from the days of the Babylonian exile, have functioned
>as tradesmen. Their location in the Mid-East facilitated commercial
>exchanges between Europe and Asia. As long as the Jew served in this
>economic capacity, the religious and national identity served to support
>his economic function.
>
>Leon was strongly influenced in his views by Karl Kautsky, a leader of the
>Second International, who theorized the identity of a class with a people
>in pre-capitalist societies: "Different classes may assume the character
>of different races. On the other hand, the meeting of many races, each
>developing an occupation of its own, may lead to their taking up various
>callings or social positions within the same community: race becomes
>class." The chief difference between Kautsky and Leon is that Leon made
>the equation between class and people specific. Where Kautsky saw
>tendencies, Leon saw a dialectical unity.
>
>The period that lasted from classical antiquity to the Carolingian epoch
>was a time of prosperity and relative well-being for the Jews. In the
>Hellenistic era, Jews were part of the commercial elite in cities such as
>Alexandria, Antioch and Seleucia. The rise of the Roman Empire saw their
>continued success, as cities such as Alexandria continued to function as
>trading centers between the West and East. The role of Jews at Alexandria
>was so important that a Jew, Tiberius Julius Alexander, was appointed
>Roman governor of the city.
>
>It is important to note that what united the Jews in this period was not
>wealth and power per se, but their economic role as tradesmen. Within the
>group were poorer peddlers and artisans. In the decline of the Roman
>Empire, many of these individuals were hardest hit. Their desperation,
>argues both Kautsky and Leon, explains the emergence of the Christianity
>cult which expressed class hatred of the rich in theological terms.
>
>With the advent of the middle ages, the economic role of the Jew shifts
>somewhat. This is the period when the native merchant class begins to sell
>commodities produced in artisan workshops, the embryonic form of the
>factory. The trade that the Jew engaged in prior to this period was
>separate from production, but the Christian tradesman is part of the
>network of commodity exchange. Leon notes that "The evolution in exchange
>of medieval economy proved fatal to the position of the Jews in trade. The
>Jewish merchant importing spices into Europe and exporting slaves, is
>displaced by respectable Christian traders to whom urban industry supplies
>the principal products for their trading. This native commercial class
>collides violently with the Jews, occupants of an outmoded economic
>position, inherited from a previous period in historical evolution."
>
>These circumstances force the Jew to make his living as a usurer. He lends
>money to the feudal lords and the kings to finance their war expenditures
>and their luxuries. One of the main ways this is done is through "tax
>farming." The King "farms out" the collection of tax revenues to a "Court
>Jew", who gets a percentage of the take. My family name "Proyect" means
>the "counting house of a tax farmer."
>
>This primitive form of banking eventually clashes with banking based on
>the production of exchange values, which has been emerging during the same
>period as that of the artisan workshops and early factories. The usurer is
>hated not only by the lord to whom he charges high interest, but by the
>peasants who confront the Jew in his capacity as tax collector. The hatred
>builds to a fever pitch in places like London, Lincoln and Stafford,
>England in 1189 when massacres of Jews take place. Shakespeare's "Shylock"
>reflects the lingering animosity toward the Jew long after these
>historical events took place and the Jew had been driven out of England.
>The most infamous campaign against the Jew took place in Spain during the
>Inquisition, when they were burned at the stake. The true motive was
>economic rivalry, according to Leon.
>
>The Jews take flight to Eastern Europe and Poland in particular, where
>feudalism continues long after the emergence of capitalism in the West. An
>1810 travel diary notes the following: "Poland should in all justice be
>called a Jewish kingdom... The cities and towns are primarily inhabited by
>them. Rarely will you find a village without Jews. Jewish taverns mark out
>all the main roads... Apart from some are manors which are administered by
>the lords themselves, all the others are farmed out or pledged to the
>Jews. They possess enormous capitals and no one can get along without
>their help. Only some very few very rich lords are not plunged up to their
>neck in debt with the Jews."
>
>In the late nineteenth century, capitalist property relations begin to
>develop in the Polish and Russian countryside. Lenin writes about this
>development in order to refute the Narodniks who held out the possibility
>of a village-based socialism. The transformation of Christian peasants
>into landless and debt-ridden laborers has dire consequences for the Jew
>who is not integrated into the new forms of capitalist property relations.
>They continue to act as intermediary between the peasant and plebeian
>masses in the countryside on one hand and the wastrel nobility in the big
>city on the other. As tensions arise, the first pogroms take place.
>
>Also, at this time, the Jews begin to undergo class differentiation under
>the general impact of capitalism. A Jewish proletariat develops, which
>works in small artisan shops producing clothing and household utensils.
>This deeply oppressed social grouping is the target of pogroms, which
>indiscriminately attack rich and poor Jew alike. The deep insecurities of
>this period give rise to the Chassidic sects which function in much the
>same way that Christianity functions in the Roman Empire. It gives solace
>to a deeply insecure and economically miserable people.
>
>Eventually the economic suffering takes its toll and mass migrations back
>to the West take place, both to Austria and Germany, and across the
>Atlantic to the United States. The ancestors of most Jews living in the
>United States arrived in this period.
>
>Nobody could have predicted at the turn of the century the awful
>consequences of the exodus into Germany. Notwithstanding the vile
>utterances of Richard Wagner, Germany had a well-deserved reputation for
>tolerance. The German Jews, as opposed to their recently arrived Yiddish
>speaking brethren from the East, spoke German and were assimilationist to
>the core. Some of the Jewish elites tended to argue for acceptance of the
>new Hitlerite regime on its own terms, which they viewed as simply another
>species of ultra-nationalism.
>
>For Leon, the rabid anti-Semitism of the post-WWI period fell into the
>same category as the age-old forms. It was virulent economic rivalry that
>grew out of the collapse of the German economy:
>
>"The economic catastrophe of 1929 threw the petty-bourgeois masses into a
>hopeless situation. The overcrowding in small business, artisanry and the
>intellectual professions took on unheard of proportions. The
>petty-bourgeois regard his Jewish competitor with growing hostility, for
>the latter's professional cleverness, the results of centuries of
>practice, often enabled him to survive 'hard times' more easily.
>Anti-Semitism even gained the ear of wide layers of worker-artisans, who
>traditionally had been under petty-bourgeois influences."
>
>When a Trotskyist veteran first presented this theory to me in 1967, it
>had powerful explanatory aspects. The true cause of anti-Semitism was the
>capitalist system, not some latent and free-floating animus toward the
>Jew. The key to the survival of the Jewish people was not the Zionist
>state of Israel, but the abolition of the capitalist system.
>
>Recent controversy over the Goldhagen thesis, which tries to explain
>anti-Semitism in metaphysical terms, has forced me to rethink Leon's
>nominally Marxist interpretation. We must revisit the question of the
>explanatory power of Leon's thesis in light of the exterminationist policy
>of the Hitler regime. It is very likely that Leon himself had not been
>aware of the pending genocide, which did not take shape until 1943 at the
>Wansee Conference. Leon was trying to explain an anti-Semitism that was in
>many ways no more vicious than the anti-Black racism of the American
>south. The Nuremburg racial laws of 1935 stripped Jews of their German
>citizenry and made intermarriage illegal. This was deplorable, but after
>all Blacks could not vote or marry whites in the Deep South in 1935
>either.
>
>Another weakness of Leon's work is that he de-emphasizes the people side
>of the people-class equation. Most of his work is devoted to an
>examination of the Jew's relationship to the means of production, but very
>little to their religion, language, culture and values. This is one of the
>criticisms found in the chapter on Leon in Enzo Traverso's "The Marxists
>and the Jewish Question: The History of a Debate 1843-1943". The
>importance of this was driven home to me last night while I watched a 90
>minute documentary on Jewish liturgical music on PBS. There is an immense
>variety of influences on Cantorial chanting. The Falashas of Ethiopia echo
>African harmonies, while the Turkish Jews employ the oud and tamboura,
>typical instruments of the region. In all cases, the prayers are nearly
>identical. The narrator of the documentary asks one Cantor for his
>explanation of the unity of the Jews over a 3500 year period, when other
>nationalities have disappeared from the face of the earth. His answer: the
>geographical dispersion of the Jews is the answer. If the Jews had
>remained tied to the same territory, they would have gone the way of the
>Babylonians, Romans, Greeks, etc. This certainly makes wonder if an ironic
>twist lies in store for the state of Israel.
>
>It could be argued that this deficiency in Leon has a lot to do with the
>exigencies of trying to write about the social and economic factors when
>so many others had covered the cultural aspects. It is more likely, as
>Traverso points out most tellingly, that the reason for this lack has to
>do with Leon's intellectual dependence on Kautsky.
>
>Kautsky's Marxism was deeply problematic. It comes close to economic
>determinism. The Second International tended to follow a simplistic
>base-superstructure model of Marxism. At its worst, it allowed social
>democrats to side with the bourgeoisie against the Russian Revolution.
>Since the base of the Russian economy was not fully mature in a capitalist
>sense, the Bolshevik seizure of power was premature, adventuristic and
>would lead to dictatorship.
>
>The same methodological error appears in Leon. He tries to explain German
>anti-Semitism almost exclusively in economic terms. The problem, however,
>is that this explanation tends to break down when the Nazi regime
>institutes the death camps. After all, there is no plausible economic
>explanation for such behavior. It can only be called madness.
>
>In 1933, ten years before the death camps, Leon Trotsky wrote "What is
>National Socialism." This article does an excellent job of diagnosing the
>madness of the Nazi movement which had just taken power:
>
>"Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only
>in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of
>the twentieth century the tenth of the thirteenth. A hundred million
>people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and
>exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous
>transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who
>pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man's genius wear amulets on their
>sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance,
>and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet, fascism has given
>them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the
>national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the
>normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat;
>capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the
>psychology of National Socialism."
>
>Nazism as undigested barbarism seems much closer to the mark than the
>base-superstructure model. Trotsky goes even further than this. In 1938, a
>midway point between date of the preceding article, and the death camps,
>Trotsky predicts the impending genocide. In December of that year, in an
>appeal to American Jews, he writes: "It is possible to imagine without
>difficulty what awaits the Jews at the mere outbreak of the future world
>war. But even without war the next development of world reaction signifies
>with certainty the physical extermination of the Jews."
>
>These remarks are cited in the first paragraph of Norman Geras's "Marxists
>before the Holocaust", an article which appears in the special July/August
>1997 issue of New Left Review on the holocaust. This issue features a
>lengthy critique by Norman Finkelstein on Goldhagen. While Finkelstein's
>rather devastating attack on the scholarship and implicitly pro-Zionist
>ideas of Goldhagen have achieved a high profile, Geras's article is worthy
>of discussion as well, since it occupies a space much closer to
>Goldhagen's than to Marxism.
>
>Geras argues that Marxism can not explain the holocaust. His attack is not
>directed at Leon's economic determinism. Rather it is directed at Trotsky
>and Ernest Mandel who try to explain the holocaust as an expression of
>capitalism in its most degenerate and irrational phase. Geras says that
>the murder of the Jews is radically different than the bombing of
>Hiroshima, the war in Indochina and other acts of imperialist barbarism
>cited by Mandel in an effort to put the genocide in some kind of context.
>The difference between the death camps and the slaughter of the Vietnamese
>people is one of quantity, not quality. This outrages Geras, who says that
>Mandel and the German "revisionist" historian Ernst Nolte should be
>paired.
>
>"What follows should only be said bluntly. Within this apologia there is a
>standpoint bearing a formal resemblance to something I have criticized in
>Mandel. I mean the energetic contextualization of Nazi crimes by Nolte,
>even while briefly conceding their singular and unprecedented character:
>his insistence that they belong to the same history of modern times as the
>American war in Vietnam, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the exodus
>from Vietnam of the boat people--a 'holocaust on the water'--the Cambodian
>genocide, the repression following on the Iranian revolution, the Soviet
>invasion of Afghanistan and, above all, the liquidation of the kulaks, and
>the Gulag. Against that backdrop, Nolte urged that the Third Reich 'should
>be removed from the isolation in which it still finds itself.' This is
>what came, in the debate in question, to be called 'relativization' of the
>Holocaust; and it is what Mandel himself calls it in taking issue with
>Nolte's views. Mandel continues even now to assert that the Holocaust was
>an extreme product of tendencies which are historically more general. But
>he perceives a need, evidently, to balance the assertion with a greater
>emphasis on the singularity of the Jews."
>
>Geras says that he will try at some point to offer his own analysis of why
>the Jews were exterminated. Since I am not familiar with his work, I
>hesitate to predict what shape it will take. I suspect that there will be
>liberal appropriation of the type of idealist obfuscation contained in
>Goldhagen. That would be unfortunate. What is needed to understand Nazism
>is not essentialist readings of German history, but a more acute
>historical materialist understanding of these tragic events.
>
>When I was in grade school in the 1950s in the Catskill mountains in
>upstate New York, there were large numbers of Jews who spent their summers
>there and shopped in my father's fruit store. I remember seeing the
>tattoos of numbers on many of their forearms and asked my father what they
>represented. It was very unusual for a Jew to be tattooed because orthodox
>rituals stipulated that you must be buried with the same outward
>appearance you were born with. He explained to me that these Jews had been
>in concentration camps and murdered by the millions. The shoppers with
>tattoos were "survivors." I did not understand this. What was their crime
>to be punished so?
>
>In the 1950s, a time of deep material abundance and spiritual poverty,
>there was something else that I could not understand. We had to practice
>nuclear air-raid drills in our school. We had to "duck and cover" in the
>basement of the building. This would protect us from a H-bomb. This seemed
>crazy to me. If the United States and the USSR had an all-out nuclear war,
>wouldn't everybody die? A blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter wrote "The
>Boy With Green Hair" in these years to dramatize what I and every other 7
>year old was thinking.
>
>Why would anybody consider the possibility and prepare for nuclear war,
>which would be a new Holocaust of even greater dimensions than the Nazi
>murder of the Jews. This Holocaust would kill everybody on the planet and
>all living things. Measured by the ordinary laws and values of capitalist
>society, this made no sense at all.
>
>No, it did not make any sense whatsoever, but the Pentagon was planning on
>just such scenarios. Not only was it escalating the arms race, it engaged
>in nuclear brinksmanship over and over again. Nixon argued for an A-bomb
>attack on the Viet Mihn forces at Dien Bhien-Phu in 1954. Kennedy brought
>the world to the brink of war in his confrontation over Cuban missiles.
>While nuclear war did not occur, the chances were not so remote as to be
>beyond comprehension.
>
>The American government was not run by madmen, who were representative of
>"undigested barbarism." Oliver Stone, the film-maker who is supposedly
>highly sensitive to madmen, has made films which attempt to burnish the
>reputation of Nixon and JFK alike. "Our" capitalist politicians would
>never blow up the world, would they? Well, yes they probably wouldn't.
>
>But try to imagine a United States in steep economic decline, mired in
>imperialist war on three continents. Instead of Bill Clinton in the White
>House, imagine Pat Buchanan or David Duke instead. He is advised by
>Christian fundamentalists in the Cabinet who believe that we are in the
>"final days" before Armageddon. If the reward of Christian soldiers is
>life eternal at the right hand of Jesus Christ, perhaps all-out nuclear
>war against Communist or Muslim infidels "makes sense."
>
>The point is that capitalism has a deeply irrational streak. The system is
>prone to wars and economic crisis. It should have been abolished
>immediately after World War One. The only reason that is wasn't is that
>the revolutionary movement came under the control of Stalin, who time and
>time again showed that he did not understand how to defeat capitalist
>reaction. The success of Hitler is directly attributable to the failure of
>the German Communist Party to fight him effectively.
>
>Unless the socialist movement finds a way to put an end to capitalism and
>disarm the war-makers, the survival of the planet remains in question.
>While we can not "explain" the genocide adequately no matter how sharp our
>theoretical weapons, one thing is for sure. We have a sufficient
>explanation for the need to abolish capitalism: it is an inherently
>irrational system which threatens the human race.
>
>Louis Proyect
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>





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