Reading notes on Chapter 10 of The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate By Enzo Traverso

The Jewish Question: History of a Marxist Debate 

By Enzo Traverso 

Translated by Bernard Gibbons

Brill, [2018]

The below are my underlinings/highlightings of Traverso. My own thoughts appear, if at all, as [N.B.].

Jay

Chapter 10: Post-war Marxism and the Holocaust

....lack of a Marxist debate on the causes, forms and consequences of the destruction of the European Jews 

....During the 1940s and 1950s Marxism became an essential component of anti-fascist culture, in which the Jewish tragedy was reduced to a marginal aspect of the gigantic conflict that had ravaged Europe. 

[N.B. For Traverso's 'anti-fascist culture,' read Stalinist/Eurocommunist "culture." . JR]

....Shortly after the war other philosophers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or situated at its periphery, such as Leo Löwenthal, Herbert Marcuse and Gunther Anders, made Auschwitz the starting point for their critique of modern civilization. 

....Frankfurt School Marxism (and notably its radical version represented by Gunther Anders, the most interesting of its 'fellow travellers') seemed to take on a more and more antiuto-pian dimension. Ultimately, it based itself on a paradigm that we could call, at the antipodes from Ernst Bloch, the 'principle of despair' ( das Prinzip Verzweiflung). Anders replaced Ernst Bloch's ontology of the not yet (Noch-Nicht-Sein) with an anti-Utopia of waiting for annihilation ( noch-nicht-Nichtsein), which turned him into a kind of Heideggerian Marxist.5 Its radical critique of civilisation went together with an attitude of despair, scepticism and a tragic feeling of impotence (to the point of opposing student protest movements, as Adorno and Horkheimer would do in 1968).

1 The Frankfurt School

....effort to rethink history in the wake of Auschwitz was undertaken by Adorno and Horkheimer towards the end of the war in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. 

..... The Final Solution is presented there as the paradigm of a barbarism towards which the whole trajectory of Western civilisation, characterised as a process of the 'self-destruction of Enlightenment' ( Selbstzerstörung der Aufklärung), has converged.

....to turn upside down the positivist vision of a long, linear, automatic human development towards progress, seeing in National Socialism the terminus of the Western world's course. Auschwitz unveils the destructive dimension of Aufklärung, which has now revealed itself in place of Hegel's Absolute Spirit to be the true content of history.

[N.B. Needless to say, such generalizations are completely anti-Marxist and promote both intellectual obscurantism and surrender/atomization. JR]

2: Ernest Mandel

....Mandel's work undoubtedly contains the most coherent attempt to interpret the Jewish genocide in the light of classical Marxism, and in this way developed further Trotsky's approach. 

....Mandel, by contrast, developed a critical theory of society that was inseparable from a political project that located its subject in the exploited classes. His Marxism was utopian, generous and constantly on the look-out for turning points or 'bifurcations' in history that might be transformed into revolutionary breaks. Mandel reached his zenith as a political thinker in the period after May 1968. The neoliberal outcome of the 1989–91

     crisis of the Soviet bloc failed to break his spirit. His trajectory was thus very much distinct from that of Adorno and Anders. The only element that they shared despite everything was a rejection of Stalinism. 

....In his opinion, the absurdity of the tragedy was only a surface appearance, since it was the product of 'a world in torment'. Although any explanation seemed 'to fall short of the full horror of the reality' in the face of the ghettos, mass executions, gas chambers and ovens, he warned against the temptation of seeing it as 'a sudden, unique catastrophe' in history. True, the Jews had been 'hit harder than any other people', but it must not be forgotten that their destruction took place  at a time when the whole human race had nearly fallen into a bottomless pit. 

...During the decades that separated his first 1946 text from the rest, he devoted several studies to the problem of fascism, but without paying any particular attention to its anti-Semitic dimension.

....scholarly and public discussion on the historical singularity of the Holocaust took place in Western Germany only in the 1980s

..... In his writings in this last period, Mandel did not hesitate to recognise the uniqueness of the Jewish genocide. The 'deliberate and systematic killing of six million men, women and children simply because of their ethnic origin', he wrote, can only be understood as a 'unique' event in history – though this does not mean that we cannot explain it, still less that we cannot compare it with others.

....uniqueness of the Jewish genocide, therefore, did not consist in the Nazis' greater inhumanity when compared with their European forbears, nor in the specific nature of their anti-Semitism.

....One of the basic texts of Nazi anti-Semitic politics, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which vulgarised the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy, was of Russian origin.

[N.B. The Protocols as a "vulgarization" of an anti-Semitic trope is a peculiar - to be generous - formulation.  Is Traverso concerned it is vulgar because he thinks Jew-haters should seek to raise the level of their discourse?  In seriousness, this is a perfect example of the sloppy pretzel of anti-Marxist left rhetoric Traverso employs to explain/obscure his subject. JR]

....Mandel rejected the mystical cult of the Holocaust. The Jewish genocide must be treated historically; its specificity can only be seen clearly on the basis of an analytical approach of a comparative type. In this perspective, this crime seems much less like the outcome of age-old Judeophobia than as a paroxysm resulting from the modern violence deployed by imperialism against peoples judged to be 'inferior', 'subhuman' or inassimilable. In The Meaning of the Second World War Mandel wrote: Traditional semi-feudal and petty-bourgeois anti-Semitism led to pogroms, which were to the Nazi murderers what knives are to the atom bomb. The seeds of the gas chambers resided in the mass enslavement and killing of Blacks via the slave trade, in the wholesale extermination of the Central and South American Indians by the conquistadors. In such cases, the term genocide is fully justified …

    The unique character of the destruction of the Jews was not linked to the nature of the Nazis' anti-Semitic hatred, which was not qualitatively different from other forms of racism that were very widespread at the time inside as well as outside Germany. 

..... He articulated contingencies and long-term tendencies, linked military strategies to their economic bases and to the extraordinary technological changes engendered by the war, and finally connected the ideologies of its actors with the great cleavages of modernity: Enlightenment versus counter-Enlightenment, emancipation against imperialism, socialism or barbarism. In his vision, the Second World War was a plurality of intertwined conflicts: a war between great powers for international hegemony, a defensive war of the USSR against Nazi aggression, a liberation war of the European countries occupied by the Axis forces, a civil war between anti-fascism and collaborationism, and a war of the colonised countries against imperialism that in China turned into a socialist revolution. Analysing the different but correlated dimensions of this war, Mandel analyzed the Nazi violence and the atomic bomb, pointing out both their similarities and their discrepancies, and connecting them with the legacy of Western imperialism and racism. He depicted the historical background of the Holocaust, but his analysis remained as general and abstract as Horkheimer's and Adorno's diagnosis of the 'self-destruction of Enlightenment'. 

....Auschwitz and Hiroshima were not products of technology but of relationships of social forces – in other words, they were the (provisional) terminus of the great historical defeats of the international proletariat after 1917

....During a colloquium held in Salzburg in 1990, Mandel cited Ernst Bloch in order to explain the 'non-synchronism' or 'non-contemporaneity' ( Ungleichzeitigkeit) of ideology and society under the Third Reich, a regime characterised by 'thirteenth-century survivals in the middle of the twentieth century'. This vision was entirely consistent with Trotsky's approach, in which Nazism represented a form (to use Norman Geras's particularly illuminating definition) of 'undigested barbarism'.

3: Capitalism and the Holocaust

....Inscribed into the logic of reactionary modernism – a conservative revolt against modernity that used the destructive means offered by modernity itself as an attempt to incorporate Zivilisation into Kultur – the Holocaust can be analysed through Marx's categories. Moishe Postone has acutely observed that the features generally attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism – abstract-ness, intellectualism, extraterritoriality, mobility, universalism, etc. – perfectly correspond to 'the value dimension of the social forms analyzed by Marx'.

....Postone explains The Jews were not seen merely as representatives of capital (in which case anti-Semitic attacks would have been much more class-specific). They became the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful, and international domination of capital as a social form. 

....The 'anti capitalist' revolt was, consequently, also the revolt against the Jews. The overcoming of capitalism and its negative social effects became associated with the overcoming of the Jews.49

     This analysis inspired by Capital's theory of commodity fetishism is probably the most interesting and convincing attempt to elaborate a Marxist interpretation of Nazi anti-Semitism, but Mandel was probably too marked by his concrete experience of war and deportation to think of National Socialism as a form of abstract anti-capitalism. 

....Mandel grasped a fatal interconnection at the heart of the Final Solution between racism and industrial modernity, between capitalism's partial rationality and overall irrationality, but he could not admit that this genocide was determined 'in the final analysis' by ideology, despite the material interests (and military priorities) of German imperialism. For him this meant making too big a concession to the idea of the 'primacy of politics' in the history of the Third Reich (an idea for which he had already criticised the historian Tim Mason)56 and stretching the axioms of historical materialism to an excessive degree. In fact the 'counter-rationality' of the extermination of the Jews and of the Gypsies constitutes a challenge for any historical account of Nazism.

[N.B. This is Traverso's collapse into resigned incomprehension of historical events, not Mandel's. JR]

....The vision of the Holocaust as a function of the class interests of big German capital – this is the interpretive criterion 'in the final analysis' of all Marxist theories of fascism – is not defensible.58 Trapped in this dead end, East German historians – not always ideologues; sometimes genuine historians – enclosed a complex reality inside pre-established categories. This approach was bound to end up both making the Jewish genocide banal and discrediting Marxism itself by reducing it to a form of economic determinism.59 Despite his affirmed anti-dogmatism, Mandel did not avoid a certain oversimplification of reality and even arrogance. The survivors, even those as stubbornly rationalistic as Jean Améry and Primo Levi, were suspicious of this kind of reductionist analysis. In Améry's eyes, 'all the attempts at economic explanations, all the one-dimensional interpretations that claim that German industrial capital, fearing for its privileges, financed Hitler, are absolutely meaningless for an eyewitness'. Despite his desire to 'make clear' ( erklären) his experience, Auschwitz remains for him 'a dark riddle' ( ein finisteres Rätsel).

....Mandel pertinently dismissed as obscurantist a view of the Jewish genocide as by definition an incomprehensible, inexplicable and indescribable event (in the style of Elie Wiesel or Claude Lanzmann), but that does not make his own explanation any more satisfactory….