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