How to make Jews Count: Moishe Postone & the consequences of modern antisemitism

I read David Baddiel’s short polemic Jews Don’t Count last night, and have been mulling, so here are some few thoughts that started as a tweet thread, but got too long.

For that reason this may look like a tweet thread in places. I hope to be excused.

First, to situate myself, I’m roughly the same age as David Baddiel, so when he talks about the 19 years between Nazis murdering Jews and him being born as not now feeling like a long time, and how that makes him feel, I get it.

Well, of course I don’t “get it”, if “it” means the gnawing sense of anxiety that goes with the idea that attempts to kill all the members of your ethnic group were happening a lot closer to when you were born than you are now, and how passing time may actually increase that anxiety because of that shifting subjective of temporal experience, but I get the temporal experience of getting old.

Anyway, the book’s an enjoyable enough romp through recent social media in search of evidence that progressives have let down Jews, though there is the obvious flaw that, having started out with a stated focus on “progressives”, the search goes a fair bit wider.

I’m not sure, for example, it’s reasonable to quote someone saying they’re an Indonesian Muslim but whom Baddiel thinks may be from a Russian “troll-factory”, as evidence of what progressives are or are not up to (and I also note that a slip towards an anti-Slav trope in personification of a devious “Sergei” is well-judged, given the theme of the book).

And nor do I think the search for online omission of Jews from the “sacred circle” of respect for minority experience goes too far with the criticism of a Muslim saying an AI mock-up of Jesus looks like them; to suggest this is an active “trampling” on Jewishness is out of kilter with the stated intention of pointing out the way progressives omit Jews from the circle, and comes across as imputing a kind of Jew-trampling gene in Muslims, which is I’m sure is not the intention.

But, in spite of all these bits to query about the way the polemic strays into modes of thought that the polemic seeks to confront, two main arguments in the book are coherent and useful for white progressives like me to be confronted with.

These two arguments are, in brief:

a) white progressives do not show the same respect as they do to other minorities in accepting accounts of lived experience as a valid truth-telling;

and related

b) antisemitism has been downgraded in the “hierarchy of racisms” because to accord it a higher place interferes with the argument that it has been ‘weaponized’ for use against the Corbyn left by people who don’t actually care about antisemitism except in respect of its usefulness as weapon.

These two threads of argument contribute to Baddiel’s broader point that progressives/the left have not stood in solidarity with Jews in the same way they have at least claimed to do with other minorities, that this is hypocritical, and that (in the case of Corbyn Labour) the loss of 7 in 10 Jewish votes in election is actually justified comeuppance.

A bit more self-situating: I voted twice for Corbyn as leader, and have worn down some shoes trying to get a Corbyn government elected. And yes, I do think there’s been a level of ‘weaponization’ of antisemitism by people who don’t give a shit about the lived experience of Jews, but who did give a shit about getting rid of Corbyn because they did not like the progressive direction of the party under his leadership.

But, I also know that there has been real, active antisemitism in the Labour party, with a false and harmful conflation of Jewishness with the excesses of financialized capitalism, ,sometimes adherence to conspiracy theories about secret cabals that rule the world, and sometimes conpiracy theories about those cabals being behind the ‘weaponization’ of antisemitism for use against Corby Labour.

And two wrongs do not make a right.

Weaponization does not excuse the fact that Labour, both before and then under Corbyn, did witness the development of these Jewishness/evil capitalist tropes to be left unchallenged in the party, and 7 out of 10 Jewish people deciding to change their voted away from Labour between election is — as Baddiel points out — a better indicator of where we stand than the fact that some Jews in Labour defended it on the basis of weaponization, even though they did so with some reason and with integrity.

So as a sort-of-Corbynite with an interest in making it right by the UK’s Jewish community, I’d sort of wanted Baddiel to give me more pointers at the end of book about what progressives should actually be doing in order to ensure that Jews are invited into the sacred circle of those with whom we stand in solidarity.

And on reflection, that’s not very reasonable of me. If, as I do, I accept the Reni Eddo-Lodge view that it’s a waste of time her talking to white people about race, because it’s not her job to pander to my feelings of guilt, then the same needs to apply here.

That is, it’s for white people to seek out a course of redemptive action, and get on with it, while knowing that judgment on whether it’s any good or not remains the prerogative of those who are the original offence for which we now seek redemption.

So here goes with that.

Well, first off, it seems to me that the challenge is to convince others on the left that offering explicit solidarity to Jews is justified, in a way that does outweigh any lingering thoughts that Jews are in some way in league with those who have done the recent antisemitism weaponizing.

And the way to do this, I suggest is to offer a retelling of antisemitism in the context of what the left generally agrees it should be concerned about — capitalism.

Fortunately for us, someone’s already done that. His name’s Moishe Postone (1942–2018) and here’s what he wrote about the relationship between capitalist production and antisemitism in the time of the Nazis

As simply as I can render a relatively complex argument about commodity fetishism in Marxist doctrine, Postone argues that because under capitalism people are “ruled by abstractions, whereas earlier they depended on each other” (Grundrisse)

This creates an opportunity, seized by National Socialism, to exploit an apparent but false distinction in social relations between a (virtuous) concrete and an (evil) abstract, and to personify this in the distinction between Aryan and Jew, playing on but deepening hostility to the constructed “abstractness, intangibility, universality, mobility” of European Jewry.

Thus, argues Postone, modern antisemitism is a phenomenon quite distinct from older forms, in that it dependent on the way capitalism works for its driving force, and allows fascist forces to develop a sham “anticapitalist” narrative as driver of antisemitism, while all the while adhering to “concrete” forms of capitalist production.

At the same time, this equating of the abstract evil and the rootless Jew became so embedded in Nazism that the sham became the cause for which they fought, says Postone, and explains, for example, the wholesale diversion of military resources from the frontline vs Russia towards the completion of the ‘historic mission’ of extermination.

And, my own argument followson thus.

Just as Nazism “biologized capitalism” in the 1930s as part of its “anticapitalist revolt”, the right populism emerging in the last decades self-identifies as a ‘Romantic’ revolt against the ‘abstractions’ of international capitalism which are seen as obstacles to freedom and ‘sovereignty’, while failing to grasp that economic nationalism a la Trump is actually a process of capital accumulation by dispossession (in David Harvey’s term (pdf)).

This post-modern, post-truth populism therefore has within it the ingredients for the triggering of a brand new attack on Jewry as substitute for an abstracted enemy, in a way which may now seem unthinkable, but is written on the sweat shirt of an invader of the Capitol, himself a fastfood-fed ‘Romantic’ of the American Frontier Dream sort who equates with the early 20th century proto-Nazi who dreams of return to a Teutonic past while also embracing the new technologies of the century.

The core argument is then (or can be) that the latest spatial fix of capitalism creates at least the risk of a new surge of modern antisemitism from the right, and creates the rationale for a new level of solidarity with a minority under very specific capitalist threat.

This argument in turn undercuts the quoted Ash Sarkar argument ( criticized by Baddiel but challenged for accuracy by Ash Sarkar since publication) that antisemitism is less of an issue than other forms of racism because it is not associated with ‘structural’ discrimination.

The argument also undercuts the sadly lingering ‘active’ antisemitism on the left, which does still, through the tropes some spot and some don’t, connect up Jewishness and the ‘perpetration’ of exploitative international capitalism; quite simply, it is harder to argue that Jewishness leads to backing capitalism, when there’s a coherent counterargument that capitalism has led and can lead to Jews being murdered.

(An aside here, but what Postone doesn’t mention in this work is Stalinist antisemitism, which I suggest has the same ‘modern’ characteristics in that it’s associated with the false material-abstract construction [1].

You just have to read the Jewish physicist bits of Vassily Grossman’s Life & Fate bits to get that.

And I don’t think it’s too ideological horseshoe theory to argue that the stunted, materialist interpretations of orthodox Soviet Marxism might lead an actually anticapitalist state (at least in origin) to the same ideological perversions as those reached by the sham ‘”anticapitalism” that Postone sees in Nazism.)

But that aside aside, the key main point is that the retelling of the story of modern antisemitism as a specific feature of capitalism when it is embraced by fascistic romance creates a new route to a solidarity with Jews which is different to but no less valid than the solidarity it espouses (or at least claims) with other minorities.

And importantly, the retelling of this story allows at least some scope for the divorcing of solidarity with Jews from consideration of acts and behaviours of the State of Israel, a pretty reasonable aspiration that Baddiel sets out in his book.

Is that story easy to tell? Well, maybe not, given the convolutions of this post (and the tweet thread from which it came), though I am no storyteller.

Is it worth working out to tell properly? Some may feel, I fear it would be a cynical way of seeking to reclaim the 7 in 10 votes lost, and it’s only worth telling if we believe it, because without such believe the solidarity will be sham. But yes, I think it’s worth at least talking about.

And if we thought about it and wanted to start to put together a political programme around it, then this is what I wrote earlier about how that programme might be delivered organizationally, though at the time it lack suggestions for the kind of innovative content I suggest back in 2018.

It was ignored back then, by the way, just as this post is likely to be ignored.

But you have to try.

So, Baddiel’s book? Yeah, it’s got issues. But it’s well worth reading, even if it makes you uncomfortable. Indeed, especially if it does.

Note

[1] Postone does address the specifics of leftwing antisemitism elsewhere. He talks of three converging strands: 1) the type of open Stalinist antisemitism I refer to above, though he does not root that in the same concrete-abstract distinction as I do; 2) a strand of anti-Zionism, not necessarily antisemitic, which has its origins in earlier Communists’ opposition to expressions of Jewish identity in the Bund; and 3) postwar anti-Americanism and aa “reified notion of resitance” which ends up in support for non-progressive movements which are both right wing and antisemitic.

The key theme of Baddiel’s book is, of course, antisemitism by omission but there is, as I suggest above, a convergence with some of these strands that the left needs to be strong enough to acknowledge. MY main point is that the best way to initiate that process is to establish modern antisemitism as, at base, a product of capitalism.

Thanks to Dave Timoney (@fromarsetoelbow on twitter) for the link here.