Internationalist Perspective

Marxism and the Holocaust

July 29, 2008 on 6:50 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

The following exchange took place after a reader of IP wrote with some comments on the article “Marxism and the Holocaust” which appears in the latest issue of IP.

Letter to IP

I’ve been working through the ‘Marxism and the Holocaust’ article and found it surprising that Postone was never mentioned in it. His essay ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’ seems pretty fundamental to mapping out a Marxist response to the Shoah.

The article in IP does not answer two major questions: 1) Why Germany? and 2) Why the Jews?

“In that sense, the Nazi vision of a `racially pure community,’ a Volksgemeinschaft, was directly linked to the effects of capitalism’s destruction of all genuine communal bonds, and to the void that it left in its wake.”

Capitalism has destroyed genuine communal bonds everywhere. Why was there no holocaust in other countries? Why did other states not attempt to create a “racially pure community”?

I strongly disagree with the Aly and Heim argument about extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe being done out of economic interest in destroying surplus population. How was it in the interest of the German state to divert huge amounts of resources to the holocaust in the midst of a two-front war? What was utilitarian about the holocaust? The fact that it was not utilitarian (in fact, it was against the immediate economic and military interests of the German state) is what is so terrifying and also unique. As Postone wrote – “No functionalist explanation of the Holocaust and no scapegoat theory of anti-Semitism can even begin to explain why, in the last years of the war, when the German forces were being crushed by the Red Army, a significant proportion of vehicles was deflected from logistical support and used to transport Jews to the gas chambers.”

Because the attempted extermination of the Jews was not utilitarian – and because of the specificity of anti-semitism, I do not think the Shoah can be compared to the other genocides mentioned at the end of the article. (That is not to say, of course, that these other genocides are not horrible). I think y’all are correct in saying that the Shoah requires us to reexamine Marxism (I would add: and raise serious questions about the optimistic conception about the struggle for communism), but I don’t think y’all went far enough.

How could a working class that not too many years before was engage in the most intense wave of class struggle in history, perhaps even a ‘revolutionary wave’, between 1917 and 1923, so actively participate in the extermination of European Jewry – oftentimes with brutality that surprised even Nazi leaders who encouraged it? Why were there pogroms even within anti-Nazi partisan forces?

It’s also confusing to me why Callinicos is referenced. Isn’t he the main “theorist” (ideological party hack) for the British SWP? I think that Callinicos has a particularly uninteresting formulation of Marxism in keeping with his Trotskyite politics. It’s also ironic that he’s quoted in an article about the holocaust, since the SWP openly supports and has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a militantly anti-semitic organization that worked hand-in-hand with the Nazis during the holocaust (one of the MB leaders actually organized SS divisions during the war).

Reply by IP

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on my essay, “Marxism and the Holocaust.” I will try to respond to your specific comments and criticisms, and to situate them within the overall perspective that animated the essay.

Let me start with your objections to including references to Callinicos (or I might add, Mandel too). The thinkers to whom I refer in the essay, with the exception of Goldhagen, use Marxist categories to grapple with the phenomenon of the Holocaust. None of them share my “politics;” none of them — not Marcuse, Adorno, Anders, Aly, Geras, etc. – draw the “class line.” And the same is true for those thinkers to whom I refer in terms of theoretical constructions of Marxism – Bloch or Althusser, for example. I would not turn to any of them for an understanding of the nature of Stalinism, nationalism, or inter-imperialist war, for example, where it is precisely the class line that must be clearly drawn. But, I have no hesitation, when discussing the Paris Commune or Marx’s Grundrisse, for example in utilizing thinkers, Henri Lefebvre, for the Commune or Roman Rosdolsky for the Grundrisse, to take two examples, whose politics I reject, but for whom I have a high regard when it comes to wielding Marxist theory in specific domains. I cannot imagine, for example, grappling with Marx’s understanding of the value form without seriously reading I. I. Rubin’s Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. Yet Rubin was an old Menshevik! In the specific case of Callinicos, however, the point was simply that here was a self-professed Marxist for whom the Holocaust constituted a challenge to orthodox Marxist theory.

Now to Postone. I have a very high regard for Postone’ work on the value form, as well as for some of his insights about modern anti-Semitism and its links to the trajectory of capitalism. With more time and space I would certainly have included a discussion of Postone, and of several other thinkers, such as Mosse and Mayer. But my primary goal in this essay was to do two things: first to link the Holocaust to the trajectory of capitalism, and second to show that genocide, of which the Holocaust is emblematic, but not the exclusive “case,” has become a hallmark of decadent capitalism. Postone’s focus is on the Nazi genocide of the Jews, and he clearly shows that it was not utilitarian (a point that I also make), and that the ideology of modern anti-Semitism was both central to it, and linked to the trajectory of value production. However, I believe that the specific link that Postone forges between modern anti-Semitism and the dual character of the commodity form; with anti-Semitism focusing on the abstract value linked to finance capital, and connected to the Jews, while ignoring industrial capital, is too limited to account for the Nazi genocide. I have no doubt that distinctions between the two types of capital characterized many anti-Semitic thinkers, and provided an “explanation” for the need to rid Germany of its Jews, but I also think that that factor is not sufficient to account for the power of the ideology of Jew-hatred that propelled the Holocaust. In that regard, I stand by my effort to expand the factors that made modern anti-Semitism so potent an ideology in Germany, and indeed in Europe during the 1930’s and ‘40’s.

However, it is in attempting to show that the Holocaust was but one link, especially horrible, in a chain of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, that constitutes an immanent tendency of decadent capitalism, that I seek to go beyond Postone’s analysis. You ask, “Why did other states not attempt to create a ‘racially pure community’?” My point is that other states have: Cambodia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Serbia, Sudan, Burma, for example, where ethnic cleansing and genocide are clearly linked to ideologies of a racially pure community. And as economic crisis deepens, we can expect to see this tendency expand, both in its violence and its geographical scope – from which I fear even the most advanced capitalist states will not be immune. The point is not to claim that Sudan or Serbia is the same as the Holocaust, but rather that it exemplifies similar tendencies inherent in capitalism at this historical stage. Too exclusive a focus on Nazism and modern anti-Semitism, while necessary in examining the Shoah as a determinate event, can obscure the very tendency to which I seek to call attention in my essay, what I have termed “the futural dimension of the Holocaust.”

Comradely greetings,

Mac Intosh

Suicide Note

July 15, 2008 on 2:47 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

Recently, there was an uproar in Germany about the death of Bettina Schardt. It was not the fact that she died which provoked strong feelings, but the way in which she died. The 79 year old woman, a retired X-ray technician from the Bavarian city of Würzburg, chose to end her life through assisted suicide. She was neither sick nor dying, but she was old and worn out; she needed help. She had no alternative but to sell her home and move to a nursing home. No alternative but death. Death seemed far preferable to Bettina than to be institutionalized in a warehouse for the dying.

How many millions of people in the world are in exactly the same situation as Bettina? How fast are their numbers growing? All around the world, governments are cutting budgets for social programs. Everywhere, the wages of the nursing home personnel are being squeezed. Everywhere, they are forced to take care of more patients with fewer people. There are surely many dedicated people amongst those caregivers, but they are powerless to resist the squeeze, the urge of capital to get rid of unproductive costs to protect the nation’s profitability, which translates in the life of nursing home patients to more misery.

Meanwhile, the world has close to 2 billion unemployed people. Could it be that amongst them, there are many who would gladly spend their days making the lives of old people happier? When I visited a nursing home in Belgium a couple of years ago, I met several refugees who worked there and were much beloved by the patients. While waiting for their cases to be handled, they were not allowed to work for money. Rather than watching daytime TV, they worked for free in the nursing home. Doing nothing is not what most unemployed prefer to do. Most of them would like to do something useful and creative, and it just so happens that there is so much useful and creative work to do: So many needs which could be met; so much pain which could be avoided or erased. If only we stop letting value and profit dictate what we do and what we don’t. If only we understand the obvious: that we should employ our resources directly to meet human needs. We may think that we do so already but the means – production for profit, the market, the accumulation of capital- has become its own end which employs humans as its means. If you are of no use for the accumulation of capital, you have no job, you are nothing.

What unites all forms of bourgeois thought is the idea that capitalism is a given. That it is part of the unmovable forces that condition our lives, like the forces of nature which we must accept and make the best of it. That is the essence of their message. Capitalism must be accepted. Whether they are from the left or the right, their disagreements are minor compared to this common point of departure.

The reactions of the right and the left to Bettina’s suicide illustrate this point. Predictably, Germany’s conservative chancellor Angela Merkel condemned all forms of assisted suicide as “inhumane,” and the rest of the right agreed, all in the name of “the sanctity of life”, which in no way prevents them from imposing austerity measures which make life unbearable for so many, nor from waging war in Afghanistan or selling weapons around the world. Roger Kusch, the promoter of assisted suicide who helped Bettina to kill herself, received praise from the left side of the political spectrum. They defended his practice in the name of “the right to die in dignity”.

What about the right to live in dignity? The implicit assumption of Kusch’s defenders is that people like Bettina don’t have such a right; that the loneliness, alienation and poverty that is increasingly the fate of people who are unproductive for capital is unavoidable, so that the best that can be done for them is to assist them in making themselves disappear.
‘Assisted suicide’ is an apt metaphor for the role of the left as a whole at a moment in which global capitalism, compelled by its contradictions becomes increasingly destructive. There is too much capital that cannot be profitably invested and that includes ‘variable capital’, people. From the point of view of the needs of the accumulation process, it needs to be discarded. Capital needs the superfluous to commit suicide and the left stands ready to assist them so that they can destroy themselves “with dignity”. Capitalism’s crisis provokes massive unemployment which the bourgeois left accepts as unavoidable, but it wants the layoffs to occur “with dignity”. It accepts wars as unavoidable, but it wants them to be waged “with dignity”. And so on. The left is the proletariat’s suicide assistant.

Sander

Post-script: Two days after the article that inspired the lines above, The New York Times had more ‘suicide news’ on its front page: “Despair Drives Suicide Attacks By Iraq Women” (July 5). To say that in this case too the suicides are assisted, is an understatement. Here the role is carried out by Islamists, who promise Heaven to an exhausted depressed woman who means nothing to them. She is just one more cheap commodity to be consumed in the struggle for Islamic power. That is a struggle of a capital to make room for itself in a world already crowded with capitals and whose inner dynamic leads to an ever greater concentration of capital. The more the system’s tendency to breakdown becomes pronounced, the more cracks appear in the global order and the more sensible an investment violence becomes. While chasing only their narrow capitalistic power dream, the Islamic suicide assistants are loyal agents of capital as a whole which is bent on destruction to make room for itself.