EUROPEAN MARXISM AND THE QUESTION OF ANTISEMITISM

ABSTRACT

Opposition to racism and antisemitism is often assumed to be a distinguishing feature of radical left politics. Before and during the Holocaust, the most radical case of antisemitism, most Marxists were slow to recognise the threat posed to the Jews. After the event, there has been little significant rethinking. There may then be difficulties if and when antisemitism reappears. There are, however, some neglected resources within Marxism which could help shape a more effective response to a problem which continues to trouble European and other societies even after this traumatic event.

Keywords:

• antisemitism
• Holocaust
• Marxism
• left
• Frankfurt School

Notes

¹ Die Rote Fahne no. 183, 10.8.1923. cited in Fischer (1990: 60). This same speech is also cited and discussed in Winckler (1984: 584), and earlier in Angress (1963), from which this translation is taken.

²This speech was reported in the Social Democrat newspaper Vorwärts and then denied by Ruth Fischer but has been cited by several studies of the KPD in this context. See for instance Fischer (1990: 59); Winckler (1984: 583), and, for a fuller discussion of the competitive relations between the KPD and the Nazis, Daycock (1980) to whom both Fischer (1990) and Brown (2009) defer. Daycock's wry comment is that ‘as Fischer and Remmele borrowed some of the worst images from the anti-Semitic vocabulary, one has to wonder just who was influencing whom’.

³See the cartoon from Der Rote Angriff aus dem Prenzlauer Berg, February 1931, reprinted in Brown (2009: 106).

⁴Special Issue of Die Rote Fahne: Sonderausgabe gegen Hitlers Judenpogrome, November 1938, cited by Herf (1994: 263; no. 24).

⁵Lars Fischer (2007) argues that even in its heyday before the First World War, philo-Semitism was seen by Social Democrats as a more serious problem than antisemitism. Peter Pulzer (1992) also argues that opposition to antisemitism had never been unanimous or unambiguous throughout the party's history. Shulamit Volkov (2006: 118–29) is perhaps less critical, though she too notes the difficulties the Social Democrats had in arriving at or sustaining a consistently anti-antisemitic stance and how they struggled with the deeply ingrained antisemitism of many of their followers.

⁶He was, of course, writing at some distance, but the confidence with which he made these pronouncements is nevertheless striking and disconcerting.

⁷Herbert Marcuse, one of Neumann's closer colleagues at the time, also initially subscribed to this ‘spearhead’ approach, seeing it as one way of relieving the pressure created by competing social interests (Müller 2002: 146). However, he soon began to have doubts about this thesis, writing to Horkheimer in 1943 that ‘the form in which we formulated it originally seems to me inadequate’ (Horkheimer 1996: 467).

⁸In English in the original but corrected here by Wiggershaus's translator.

⁹In English in the original.

¹⁰Horkheimer wrote that ‘I don't believe in psychology as a means to solve a problem of such seriousness’. It is not entirely clear, however, what Horkheimer meant by psychology in this context. He seemed to identify it with anthropology, although he thought an anthropological dimension was vitally important. Later in the letter he announced his ‘intention to study the presence of the scheme of domination in so-called psychological life, the instincts as well as the thoughts’, which appears to run rather counter to the first comment.

¹¹The influential anti-Stalinist review La Révolution Prolétarienne, for example, set up by the founding members of the French Communist party after they had been expelled for ‘Trotskyism’, argued that Nazi antisemitism was of minor significance and due essentially to the particular role Jews played in liberal, as opposed to corporate capitalism (Dreyfus 2009: 174–9).

¹²In some cases indifference mutated into something graver. The adoption of the Palestinian cause led some on the radical left to flirt with antisemitic discourse and even on occasion to attack Jews, inverting the ‘the Jews’ from victims of genocide into perpetrators. One of the reasons why leaders of the most intellectually fecund Maoist group in France, Gauche Prolétarienne, decided to dissolve the group was the fear that they were opening the way to antisemitism (Hamon and Rotman 1988). For an interesting rethink of how and why French Marxists of the time systematically ignored antisemitism, see Milner (2009). In Germany the equation of Jews with Nazis led to the extraordinary incident on the anniversary of Kristallnacht when a bomb was planted in a Jewish community centre in Berlin. For a detailed exploration of the some of the ‘logics’ involved here see Kundnani (2009).

¹³Reflecting on Benjamin's Theses, Horkheimer proposed to Adorno that they take ‘the idea of class struggle as universal oppression’ as a theoretical axiom (Horkheimer 2007: 182).

¹⁴Jäger (2004: 120) suggests that Dialectic of Enlightenment was precisely an attempt to think through Luxemburg's question. Adorno in fact made a similar prediction to Trotsky in February 1938: ‘there can scarcely be any room for doubt that the remaining Jews in Germany will be wiped out’ (Adorno to Horkheimer 8 February 1938 in Horkheimer, 1995: 384, translated in Claussen 2008). Eerily, he referred to gassing (Adorno to Horkheimer 13 February 1938 in Horkheimer 1995: 392).

¹⁵This is one of the weaknesses of Alex Callinicos's (2001) effort to argue that Marxism can have something to say about the Holocaust.

¹⁶Some of the criticisms of the definition of antisemitism adopted in 2005 by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights might be thought about in this light.

¹⁷The most coherent effort to argue to the contrary (but only focused on the moment of 1948, which he clearly distinguishes from the events in Gaza) has been made by Shaw (2010). He does so, however, by using his own very particular definition of genocide as a form of degenerate war (see Shaw 2003) which goes substantially beyond most understandings of the concept and of the Convention. For a rebuttal of Shaw's argument and approach, see the reply by Bartov (2010).