Reading notes on Chapter 7 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 7: From Weimar to Auschwitz: Anti-Semitism and the German Left

....Just as the German left in the nineteenth century had ignored the anti-Semitic propaganda of Richard Wagner, Heinrich von Treitschke and Hous-ton Stewart Chamberlain, under the Weimar Republic it did not pay attention to Mein Kampf.

....Nazi anti-Semitism, on the contrary, was charged with a new apocalyptic strength that took an almost religious dimension, thus becoming a sort of emancipating fight, carried on with the ardour of faith. 

1: The KPD: from the 'Schlageter Line' to the 'Third Period'

....'For us, there are in the world only two peoples, two classes: the workers and the parasites, the owners and those who possess nothing … For us, there are neither Christians nor Jews, neither Germans nor Russians, neither French nor British! For we Communists, there are only the Capitalists and the exploited. The Christian usurer seems to us as odious as the Jew, Stinnes as much so as Rothschild'.

....summed up in Brecht's play 'The Round Heads and The Pointed Heads' ( Die Rundköpfe und die Spitzköpfe), where the Nazis and the Jewish bourgeoisie both found themselves allied.

....'National-Bolshevism', born in 1920 out of the attempt to unify the revolutionary left and pan-Germanist reaction in the struggle against the Treaty of Versailles, was not radically rejected by the KPD. Some isolated attempts to integrate racism with Marxist theory were quickly denounced and their authors expelled, but the party leadership showed an ambiguous attitude towards völkisch  nationalism.11 The response of the German communists to the French occupation of the Ruhr was the 'Schlageter line', theorised by Karl Radek in 1923. 

     In a famous speech, he celebrated the memory of Leo Schlageter, a Nazi who had been shot after carrying out a sabotage action in the occupied Ruhr, with the following words: 'The fate of this martyr of German nationalism should not be passed over in silence nor treated with contempt … Schlageter, this courageous soldier of the counter-revolution, deserves to be honored by us, soldiers of the revolution'.12 Radek identified Germany, a great power under military occupation, with a semi-colonial country and came close to equating pan-Germanism with the political movement of an oppressed nation.13 In short, instead of opposing the nationalist wave sweeping the country, the KPD adopted a nationalist rhetoric focused on national liberation. On this basis, it did not reject a 'dialogue' with the Nazis: Radek debated with Möller van der Bruk, one of the most popular representatives of the 'Conservative Revolution', and the communist newspaper, Rote Fahne, published the interventions of Count von Reventlow. The frontier between Marxism and the völkisch  ideology was becoming more and more blurred. 

     In the framework of the 'Schlageter line', the KPD also adopted several very ambiguous positions on anti-Semitism. The most notorious example was a speech by Ruth Fischer, the secretary of the KPD, to the nationalist students of Berlin in 1923, whose anti-Semitic demagogical tone was explicit: 'The German Reich can only be saved if you recognize, gentlemen of the populist side, that you must struggle in collaboration with the masses organized by the KPD. 

     Whoever struggles against Jewish capital … is already a class fighter, even if he does not know it … Shoot down the Jew-capitalists, hang them from the lampposts, crush them!'

....Schlageter line was put aside but not completely abandoned and, in 1930, the KPD took a new nationalist turn. 

....leader, Ernst Thälmann, launched the slogan of the 'popular revolution', which was an obvious appeal to the völkisch  ideology of the Nazis. Nationalist slogans went hand in hand with the theory of 'social fascism', which designated social democracy as the principal enemy of the proletariat. The KPD rejected any political alliance against the Nazis and, on several occasions, allied itself with the Nazis against the social democrats: for example, in 1931, when it supported the referendum proposed by the Nazis against the social democratic government in Prussia, calling it the 'red referendum', and in November 1932, when it organised a transport strike in Berlin with the NSDAP. 

....ambiguities of the Schlageter line were not only repeated but even accentuated. In 1931, the Rote Fahne  denounced Hitler as the saviour of the Jewish bourgeoisie: 'Hitler wishes to be the friend of everyone who owns a cashbox. 

....KPD excluded any real conflict between Nazism and Jewish capital: Hitler must necessarily defend the interests of the big Jewish bourgeoisie

....Nuremburg Laws of 1935 were explained as the inevitable product of the process of concentration of German capital. According to Hans Behrend, 'anti-Semitism leads in a straight line to a new concentration of capital'.28 It was unequivocally proved, in his opinion, by the fact that certain companies whose proprietors were Jewish had been absorbed by trusts such as Siemens and Krupp. The pogroms of the notorious Kristallnacht  in 1938 were explained once again by the Nazi regime's need to find a scapegoat for the economic crisis....

After 1935, the new strategic orientation of the Comintern, the Popular Front....

....1937, the international communist movement organised a World Congress Against Racial Fanaticism and Anti-Semitism in Paris, which concluded with this slogan: 'Men of all nations of the world, unite for peace, justice and fraternity!'30 Communists had become the most ardent defenders of the Enlightenment, which had been betrayed by the bourgeoisie with its complicity with fascism. 

....some heretic Marxists produced more nuanced and sometimes insightful interpretations, but did not abandon this analytical framework. This was true of August Thalheimer, who tended to reduce fascism to a form of Bonapartism,31 but it was also true of the writings of Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse devoted to Nazi ideology. In 1934, Marcuse published an essay in the journal of the Frankfurt School in which he saw the most characteristic traits of totalitarian ideology in the conception of the charismatic leader, irrational naturalism (the romantic idealisation of a mythical prehistoric nature) and the organicism of the Volk.32 Ernst Bloch's Heritage of Our Times (1934), rather than simply an analysis of the Nazi doctrine, was a collection of essays on the mass psychology of fascism.

....For Arthur Rosenberg, anti-Semitism was essentially a sublimated form of anti-capitalism, like other forms of racism and xenopho-bia. 'Demagogic nationalism' needed to focus on a target: in the American South, the 'poor white' hated the black; in the Ottoman Empire, the Turk hated the Armenian; in Central and Eastern Europe, the scapegoat of nationalism had always been the Jews.

....Fascism and Big Business (1936): Anti-Semitism exists in a latent state in the subconscious of the middle classes; throughout the nineteenth century, the petty bourgeoisie, the victim of capitalist evolution, had a tendency to render responsible for its evils the usurer and the banker, indeed the small Jewish trader. 

....How can 650,000 Jews deprive 65 million Germans of work? But when things go badly, a scapegoat is needed and, to preserve from popular anger those who are truly responsible, the capitalists, Israel has been charged with every sin … It is necessary to have understood these men of the people who are not racial theorists, who have not donned the brown shirt, to understand the profound sources of their hatred. Hitler has invented nothing; he has only listened, formulated, guessed what an outlet anti-Semitism offered to the anti-capitalism of the masses.

....Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (1942).... under the Nazi regime, racism and the anti-Jewish persecutions were only 'substitutes for the class struggle'.39 Otto Bauer compared Nazi anti-Semitism to the social demagogy of Carl Lueger and Georg von Schönerer, which followed from the economic position occupied by the Jews within society. Hatred of the Jews, Bauer thought, was an ephemeral expedient, insofar as the eviction of the Jews from economic life would, sooner or later, lead the impoverished masses to oppose fascism itself.40 Even Max Horkheimer, the director of the Frankfurt School exiled in New York, repeated the same arguments in a famous article titled 'The Jews and Europe' (1939). In his eyes, the Jews were only a commercial caste who, in the epoch of imperialism, became the victims of state capitalism. 

....According to the historian Martin Jay, the source of such a persistent and widespread incomprehension of the nature of Nazi anti-Semitism should be sought essentially in the Jewish origins of a great number of the German left political leaders and Marxist intellectuals.45 Faced with the Nazis, who accused the left of being a Jewish creation, they were put in a real dilemma: if they acknowledged their Jewishness, this would have been understood as an implicit legitimation of the vision of communism as a Jewish plot; if they denied their origins, they could be accused of cowardice and treason (not only by the Zionists) or even of 'Jewish self-hatred'. How was this contradiction to be resolved? Repression of the problem was an easy way out: both to consider anti-Semitism as a simple demagogic tool, without trying to understand its deeper roots, and to ignore its developments and its consequences. 

3: Trotsky's Warnings

....Trotsky's writings oscillate between the vision of anti-Semitism as a form of obscurantism and irrationalism opposed to modernity and the Enlightenment, on the one hand, and the definition of Nazism as totalitarianism, the expression of modern decaying capitalism on the other. 

....To evolution, materialist thought, and rationalism – of the twentieth, nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries – is opposed in his mind national idealism as the source of heroic inspiration. Hitler's nation is the myth-ological shadow of the petty bourgeoisie itself, a pathetic delirium of a thousand-year Reich. In order to raise it above history, the nation is given the support of the race. History is viewed as the emanation of the race. 

....Trotsky viewed as a simple juxtaposition what in reality was a fusion of feudalism and totalitarianism into a dialectic of 'reactionary modernism', the core of Nazi ideology: a peculiar amalgamation of the Counter-Enlightenment (authoritarianism, conservatism and the rejection of human rights) with scientism and a cult of technical modernity. Nazism was not a simple coexistence, but rather a dialectical interpenetration between reaction and modernity that resulted in a form of 'steel romanticism'.50 In this article, however, Trotsky still interpreted anti-Semitism exclusively as the product of an economic conflict inside the bourgeoisie....

....end of the 1930s, Trotsky began to consider anti-Semitism from a different perspective. Now, he depicted the Jews as the first victims of a rotting capitalism that the ruling class was trying to preserve by plunging humanity into a bloodbath. Scientific, technical and industrial development, until then considered criteria of progress, was henceforth perceived in its dual nature: both as possible instrument of human liberation and as possible bearer of a modern barbarism. Thus, the fate of the Jews tended to be identified with the alternative socialism or barbarism. This theme was evoked in the Transitional Program (1938), the founding manifesto of the Fourth International, with the following words: 'Before exhausting or drowning mankind in blood, capitalism befouls the world atmosphere with the poisonous vapors of national and race hatred. Anti-Semitism today is one of the more malignant convulsions of capitalism's death agony'.52 In May 1940, just after the outbreak of the Second World War, he reaffirmed the same idea in a more imaginative form: In an era of aviation, telegraph, telephone, radio, and television, travel from country to country is paralyzed by passports and visas. The period of the wasting away of foreign trade and the decline of domestic trade is at the same time the period of the monstrous intensification of chauvinism and especially of anti-Semitism. In the epoch of its rise, capitalism took the Jewish people out of the ghetto and utilized them as an instrument in its commercial expansion. Today decaying capitalist society is striving to squeeze the Jewish people from all its pores: seventeen million individuals out of the two billion populating the globe, that is, less than one percent, can no longer find a place on our planet! Amid the vast expanses of land and the marvels of technology, which has also conquered the skies for man as well as the earth, the bourgeoisie has managed to convert our planet into a foul prison....

....change of view on anti-Semitism between 1933 and 1938 reveals a dichotomy inherent in Trotsky's thought. It amounts to a contradiction between his 'spontaneous philosophy', formed from a superficial adhesion to classical Marxism (a tradition dominated by the figures of Plekhanov and Kautsky), and his practical, that is to say non-systematised, break with any form of evolutionistic and positivistic Marxism.

[N.B. Like the supposed break between young and old Marx, or between radical Marx and dogmatic Engels, the break between 1933 Trotsky and 1938 Trotsky is an opportunist academic's fantasy to justify their own abstention and quietism.  Traverso has no interest in looking through the thousands of pages Trotsky wrote in the period 1933-1938; he is more comfortable with aesthetic generalization and coffee-house paradoxes. JR]