Jack Jacobs

The Dualisms of Capitalist Modernity: Reflections on History, the Holocaust, and Antisemitism

universality and concrete particularity – as remaining bound within the framework of capitalist modernity, however much positions based on each of them have understood themselves to be fundamentally “critical” or “radical,” pointing beyond the existing order. This essay seeks to problematize such “critical” positions by highlighting the one-sided character of each and by drawing attention to a historical shift from the predominance of critiques based on abstract universalism, characteristic of classical liberal thought and, with important differences, working-class movements, to the ascendancy of positions focused on concrete particularity, such as those expressed by liberation struggles that can be deemed anticolonial in the broadest sense. By suggesting that both sorts of responses remain immanent to capitalism, to its double character, the approach presented here problematizes the relation of each to the Holocaust and to antisemitism while contributing to a reflexive critique of emancipatory theory. Far from delineating issues of peripheral importance for critical theories of capitalism then, the problem complex of responses to the Holocaust and the changing configurations of capitalist modernity touches upon issues of fundamental importance for such theories. Within the framework outlined in this chapter consideration of those changing responses not only reveals their generally problematic character, but also illuminates the limits of the left in terms of its most fundamental selfunderstanding as a practical and theoretical critique of the capitalist order. What mediates these various moments, as I shall elaborate, is the issue of antisemitism. I shall only be able to present a preliminary sketch of this argument here. To do so I shall briefly describe the main features of the two general historical configurations of postwar capitalist modernity and also outline an analysis of antisemitism that distinguishes it from racism in general while showing it to be deeply intertwined with history as constituted by capital. Such an analysis could help conceptually distinguish political terror and mass murder (as expressed metaphorically by Buchenwald and Hiroshima) from extermination (as represented by Auschwitz). These distinctions are important not because the one crime is “worse” than the other but because the left, which has had few problems dealing conceptually with political terror and mass murder, has had difficulty grasping extermination. This difficulty reveals an inadequate understanding of antisemitism and relatedly an underlying weakness in apprehending the fundamental object of the left’s critique: capitalism. 44 Moishe Postone terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107256521.003 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University College London, on 18 May 2017 at 08:41:12, subject to the Cambridge Core Considering the contours of the twentieth century helps elaborate these contentions. The course of the past century can be described in terms of three overarching periods. The first, from the beginning of the century until after Second World War, was an “Age of Catastrophe” – to use Eric Hobsbawm’s term – marked by two world wars; the Great Depression; the rise of Fascism, Stalinism, and Nazism; and by the Holocaust. A Fordist “Golden Age” followed, lasting until the early 1970s, characterized by high rates of economic growth, the expansion of welfare states, relative political stability, and worldwide processes of decolonization. This period of high Fordism ended in the early 1970s, followed by a new crisis-ridden period marked by the increased mobility of capital and of labor, growing social differentiation and unemployment, the rise of new centers of capital accumulation, and catastrophic downturns in other parts of the world. The relation of state and economy has changed with each of these configurations. The first period witnessed a number of different, generally statist, attempts to react to the world crisis of nineteenth-century liberal capitalism. The second period was marked by an apparently successful state-centered synthesis in both East and West, which benefited the majority of metropolitan populations. In the final third of the century this configuration unraveled. Nation states were weakened as economically sovereign entities, welfare states in the West and bureaucratic party states in the East were undermined, and unchecked market capitalism reemerged, apparently triumphant. Viewed retrospectively with reference to these changing configurations the rise and fall of the Soviet Union can be seen to have been closely related to those of state-centered capitalism. This suggests that the USSR should be understood with reference to a larger historical development of the capitalist social formation, however great the antagonism had been between the Soviet Union and Western capitalist countries. 3 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). 4 For a cogent overview of these trends see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 121–197. Also see Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 2009 [1994]), pp. 309–370; Tony Smith, Globalization: A Systematic Marxian Account (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009 [2005]). For an account with an emphasis on unemployment, see Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio, The Jobless Future, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 [1994]). The Dualisms of Capitalist Modernity 45 terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107256521.003 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University College London, on 18 May 2017 at 08:41:12, subject to the Cambridge Core This pattern, I suggest, is not simply an imposition by historians on a reality that actually is formless, but delineates a historical actuality. David Harvey and others have noted that during the period of postwar prosperity Western states engineered stable economic growth and living standards through similar policies, although very different political parties were in power. Subsequently the welfare state synthesis unraveled and was rolled back in the course of the 1970s and 1980s in all Western states, regardless of which parties were in power. In both periods, the specific policies differed among states, but the tendency was general. The general character of this large-scale historical pattern suggests the existence of an overarching historical dynamic driven by a structure of imperatives and constraints that cannot be explained in local and contingent terms and that underlies the sorts of large-scale epochal changes outlined previously. Recognizing the general historical patterns that characterize the twentieth century calls into question poststructuralist understandings of history as essentially contingent. It does not, however, necessarily involve ignoring the critical insight that informs such understandings – namely, that history, understood as the unfolding of an immanent necessity, constitutes a form of unfreedom. This form of unfreedom, I suggest, is the object of a critical theory of capital. Rather than deny the existence of historical unfreedom by focusing on contingency, such a critical theory – which differs from more traditional socialist critiques inasmuch as it does not affirm history – takes the existence of a historical dynamic to be an expression of such unfreedom. It seeks to analyze the grounds of that unfreedom with reference to historically specific, abstract forms of domination expressed by categories such as “capital.” 5 Despite their deep theoretical differences, the following accounts contain strikingly similar descriptions of this overwhelming confluence of state policies away from welfare models and toward a neoliberal regime: Marion Fourcade-Gourinchas and Sarah L. Babb, “The Rebirth of the Liberal Creed: Paths to Neoliberalism in Four Countries,” American Journal of Sociology, CVIII, 3 (November 1, 2002), pp. 533–579; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 2–3, 5–38; and Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity. Leon de Mattis similarly refers to this general tendency, pointing out that in “some . . . countries like France, it was ‘socialists’ who had to obey the capitalist injunction” referring to François Mitterand’s dramatic reversal of his social campaign promises in 1983 (17). Leon De Mattis, “What Is Communisation?” SIC: International Journal for Communisation 1 (2011), pp. 11–30. 6 The theory of capital with which I hope to illuminate changing responses to the Holocaust is not, moreover, narrowly economic, delineating a presumed “material base” of social life 46 Moishe Postone terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781107256521.003 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. University College London, on 18 May 2017 at 08:41:12, subject to the Cambridge Core The changing configurations of twentieth-century capitalist modernity outlined here can be related to changing public responses to the Holocaust, including those on the left, on the basis of such a theory of capital as well as of a determinate understanding of modern antisemitism. Antisemitism is frequently apprehended simply as a variant of racism. They differ in important ways, however, although both have in common as forms of essentializing discourse an understanding of social and historical phenomena in innate – biological or cultural – terms. Whereas most forms of racism attribute concrete physical and sexual power to an Other that is considered inferior, modern antisemitism does not treat Jews as inferior but as dangerous purveyors of evil. It attributes great power to Jews

Jews and Communism in the Soviet Union and Poland

What I want to do in this chapter is to examine how prominent was the presence of Jews in the government and security apparatus of the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of Poland and how this participation should be evaluated. The position of the Bolsheviks on the “Jewish question” is well known. National issues were seen by them as instrumental. They were to be judged on how they advanced the interest of the world revolution and the Soviet state. Where national groups were supported, this was a tactical alliance, like the alliance with the peasantry. The ultimate goal was the creation of a new socialist man, who would be above petty nationalist divisions, and a single world socialist state. All those responsible for Jewish policy within the Bolshevik Party sought this final goal; the only difference between them was their view on how long Jewish separateness could be tolerated. The aim was assimilation – a new version of Clermont-Tonnerres view that the Jews were to be given everything as individuals and nothing as a community. The Jews, according to Bolshevik theory, were not a nation. In the course of the Bolsheviks’ conflict with the Bund, Lenin had asserted that “the idea of a Jewish nation was essentially totally false and reactionary.” This view was confirmed by Stalins study of the problem, carried out at Lenins request in 1913. According to this, a nation should have four characteristics: a common territory, a common language, a common economic system, and a common culture. As Stalin himself put it, “The demand of national autonomy for Russian Jews is something of a curiosity – proposing autonomy for a people without a future and whose very existence has still to be proved.” The long-term fate of the Jews, whom he described as “a fiction bereft of territory,” was clearly to be integrated into the nations among whom they lived, and ultimately, especially during the Stalinist period, into the emerging Soviet nation. The Bolsheviks recognized that the Jews possessed some protonational characteristics and that they were found in considerable numbers in the Soviet Union. In order to facilitate their integration into the new socialist world, for a period a specific socialist Jewish identity, expressed through a secularized version of Yiddish, could be tolerated.

Deutscher and the Jews: On the Non-Jewish Jew - An Analysis and Personal Reflection

Isaac Deutschers concept of the “non-Jewish Jew” has been adopted by many secular leftist Jewish intellectuals as a badge of identity. Defined by a universal and humanist outlook that is rooted in Jewish thought, his is a construct that draws inspiration from Jewish thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, whom he sees as revolutionaries of modern thought who transcended their Jewish background. In what perhaps is the most lucid passage of his provocative essay Deutscher attributes their exceptional breadth to the fact that as Jews they lived in the boundaries of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures and were born and grew up on the boundaries of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other, and they inhabited the nooks and crannies of their respective nations, living in society but not being part of it. This was, Deutscher avers, what enabled them to lift their gaze above their own community and nation, beyond their times and generations, and to strike mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future (27). Although an apt description of the real, historical phenomenon of Jews that revolutionized thought and society, Deutscher includes himself in his depiction of the “non-Jewish Jew” and thus reveals his subtle but clear sense of dissociation, his attempt to put a distance between him and the Jewish world he left behind. For the secular, universalistic Jew that may be understandable in the context of the world in which Spinoza, Heine, Marx, and Luxemburg lived, but it was much less so in 1958, the year when Deutscher wrote this essay, only thirteen years after the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War. This dissociation became all the more conspicuous against the background of a Freud and a Trotsky, who having witnessed the rise and consolidation of the German antisemitic regime (they died in 1939 and 1940, respectively) expressed their unequivocal solidarity with the persecuted Jews.