Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 13:12:31 -0700 (PDT)
From: Sureyyya Evren <sureyyyaevren-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Istanbul 'postanarkist' in berlin


Hi, 
 
I will be in Berlin at the end of this August. will you be around, can we meet?
 
best
 
Sureyyya


Tadzio Mueller <tadziom-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:
hey all,
just some comments on the anti-germans (AGs), a
political phenomenon that emerged in germany a couple
of years ago from within the ANTIFA-movement.

but first a question: i had planned for a while to
write something about them, a kind of
politico-theoretical critique in English - that is
because the whole debate, which has been massive, has
all been in german so far - to make info about the AGs
accessible to non-german readers. my friends and
comrades in brighton, however, told me that i
shouldn't give them any more air-time than they have,
and i dropped the idea (the AGs thrive on
confrontation, being labelled the bad guys, it allows
them to position themselves, by proxy, as the victim
of all that remains anti-semitic in europe and the
world). what do you people think?

anyway, here are the substantive points: the AGs are a
faction within the german antifa-movement, which
structures its political positions around the
imperative that, as germans, and as communists (they
are mostly libertarian communists), it is their prime
duty to struggle against anti-semitism. the reason for
the anti-semitism bit is obvious from a german
perspective, and the way this is married to
anti-capitalism happens thus: they argue that
capitalism, since auschwitz, tends not towards its
revolutionary sublation in communism (adorno, hegel,
and an absurdly old-fashioned reading of marx all rear
their heads here), but a kind of capitalist
transcendence of capitalism, such that the
class-antagonism inherent to capital is transcended in
the persecution of the jew. this is a crisis tendency
of capital (late capitalism), and, since capital is in
crisis all the time today, it always and everywhere
tends towards anti-semitism.

so much for the (dodgy) theory - now their even
scarier politics. given that the AGs have now managed
to discursively link, at their root, the struggle
against capitalism and anti-semitism; and given that
they interpret every political event/process in the
world through the prism of pro-zionism/anti-semitism,
you suddenly get the following strange constellation:
the war against iraq is interpreted in such a manner
to suggest that saddam hussein was an exponent of
'arab fascism', aiming to drive israel into the sea.
thus, support for the war, for bush, for blair, for
the war agianst terror in general is what is required
of the committed anti-capitalist. get it? capital
tends towards a non-dialectical/non-communist
sublation in anti-semitism; hussein is an arab
fascist/anti-semite; bush fighst against arab fascism,
thus preventing the non-communist closure of the class
antagonism; thus supporting bush is the necessary
position of the anti-german communist (i've got a
flyer from one of their conferences i attended during
my research in berlin, whose headline is 'bush the man
of peace').

the AGs endorse an extremely crude marxist
developmentalism (marxism before the fall of the 50s
and 60s, so to speak, before even dependency theory),
whereby we first need more, or proper capitalism in
the rest of the world until the class antagonism can
develop in its 'proper' form and get us towards
communism, rather than be stunted in underdeveloped
(arab) fascist regimes. the problem for many of the
anti-germans is not too much imperialism, but rather
too little of it. in other words, the anti-germans
take explicitly right-wing positions in nearly all
contemporary debates. famously, parts of the berlin
ANTIFA marches with israeli, as well as us-flags these
days; holds banners, on the 1st of may, calling for
more weapons to be sold to israel; think that the
globalisation-critical movement is tendentially (or to
the core) anti-semitic (witness its attacks on finance
capital, for finance capital read 'jew', and with the
lack of critique of productive capital read stunted
sublation of the antagonism...)...

as has been pointed out, there are parallels here
between these anti-germans and contemporary
US-neocons, who started their political journey in
trotskysim in the 1950s. eventually, of course,
today's neocons made the jump from the left to the
right, and this is what may be the goal of the AGs:
having ditched all identifiably left positions;
displaying an extremely overt dislike for the
'symbols' of the left (be they political or more
broadly subcultural); it is possible to suggest that
they are in fact preparing their exit from left
politics for good. as it is today, the term
'communism' is still used extensively in their
extremely aggressive political propaganda, but really
only as an empty signifier, or rather an as empty
place around which ones political views can move from
the left to the right: if the struggle for communism
in the future implies the taking of reactionary
positions today, how long until the future referent
disappears entirely, and we are left with
unadulterated imperialist developmentalism?

These AGs wouldn't as such be a problem, if it weren't
for the fact that the appearance of this faction has
split the radical german left somewhere down the
middle, with fist fights occurring at demos, political
groups splitting (the formerly powerfully large
Autonome Antifa Berlin split into two wings, one more,
the other less anti-german), friendships breaking
up... as one of their pamphlets put it: 'a spectre is
haunting the german left. the spectre of anti-german
communism.'

i will now get down to reading the text about KRISIS.
but it would be interesting to start some kind of
discussion here about these AGs - because, while i am
far from being part of this faction, i think they DO
raise some interesting questions about our political
discourses. why, for example, do some of my otherwise
dearly beloved swedish comrades run around with
hoodies reading 'burn, israel, burn'? what does the
reduced critique of finance capital in the
globalisation movement mean (one of my marxist
professors here at sussex delights in quoting keynes'
quip about the 'euthanasia of the rentier' - not much
fantasy needed to read this otherwise)...

i'll leave it here. and again, if someone can help me
figure out whether to write any of this down, or
whether i should let sleeping dogs lie, since outside
of germany these people will never find a big
following, since it is really only in the specific
educational and historical conditions of radical
leftism in germany that this wing can flourish. until
then, i hope this made some sense. always happy to
answer more questions about german political
pathologies...

tadzio




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