Causes of Nazi anti-Semitism (2001)

Book Review from the September 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anti-Semitism & National Socialism. By Moishe Postone (Chronos Publications.)

It may seem odd that the release of an essay on the historical material causes of Nazi anti-Semitism could be timely; but this re-issue of Moishe Postone’s 1986 essay certainly is.

Postone’s effort is to locate the material causes of Nazi anti-Semitism neither in simple irrationalism or racism, nor in functionalist terms of fascism as the ally of big capital. Instead he locates the cause through Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism: that relations between people appears as relations between things.

While the commodity hides real social relations, it also carries its own inherent contradiction between use-value and exchange-value. That is the physical objects of capitalism are also accompanied by an abstract monetary content. Postone postulates that the core of Nazi thinking lay in a Romantic favouring of the physical object over the abstracted monetary content, i.e. favouring use-value and physicality over exchange-value and ideas. This approach is flawed in as much as it still sees the concrete commodity in place of the social relationship that lies behind it, i.e. it continues to accept the basis of capitalism whilst rejecting only a part of it, the money side.

Postone contends that this can account for the fact that despite their anti-Modern tendencies, the Nazis could still favour and employ advanced technology, most horrifically in the attempted industrial destruction of a group of people. Having found the Jews as a convenient focal point for their anxieties regarding the abstraction of commodities under capitalism (Jews being themselves world-wide and seemingly apart from the communities in which they live). Thus, the Holocaust comes to be figured as an attempt to render the abstract Jew physical, firstly by slave labour, and then the stripping of their material worldly possessions, before the final annihilation of their “abstract” content through the industrial gas chambers.

This pamphlet is timely in that it relates Nazi ideology both to capitalism, and to a wider form of seeming anti-capitalism (such as the British Labour movement) which has historically counterposed industrial capital to finance capital. Indeed, this process is going on today in terms of the street anti-capitalist movement, with its opposition to the WTO and the World Bank, counterposing globalisation to a concrete localised (possibly national) capitalism.

Whilst Jews are no longer functioning as a convenient focus for this fetish, this breed of thought remains damaging and potentially dangerous. This pamphlet demonstrates the imperative for getting across a clear understanding of what capitalism is, and using that as a means to combat it, rather than attacking surfaces.

Although written in difficult and academic language, Postone has managed to get a very powerful argument across in this remarkable short essay.

Pik Smeet