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Fetishized Anti-Capitalism
Introduction
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from the actual life of Jews, in so doing the thesis seems to level
all differences between various forms of hate and persecution.
Likewise, the seventh thesis fails to grasp the specificity of antisem-
itism, let alone explain the enormous non-functional energy specif-
ically dedicated to the genocide against the Jews of Europe. Here,
Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that “there are no antisemites”
anymore. The psychological energy of Jew-hatred has seemingly
been absorbed into a general “ticket mentality,” a type of standard-
ized consciousness affecting modern society at large. The Frankfurt
School scholars seem to view this general stereopathic “ticket men-
tality” as an expression of a totalization of commodification trends
in post-liberal bourgeois society, pointing to an interchangeability
of all life. This overgeneralizing claim is also reflected in the chapter
on the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which fails to
convincingly distinguish Hitler’s speeches from Hollywood mov-
ies while viewing both as similar expressions of the patterns of the
culture industry. Finally, Critical Theory’s grounding of modern
antisemitism in modern authoritarianism—which they see anchored
in reified, increasingly abstract forms of social domination and forms
of universal dependency weakening the self—does not, despite its
theoretical power, account for the specificity of antisemitism as
an ideology paving the way to the Shoah. Postone rightly indicts
Critical Theory for at times eliding the particularity of antisemitism
in its conception of authoritarianism.103
Yet Horkheimer and Adorno’s rich reflections in the
“Elements of Antisemitism” and elsewhere have much to offer in
theorizing modern antisemitism, and thus are partly misrepresented
by Postone. This includes their understanding of the relationship
of antisemitism to liberalism and fascism, of antisemitism and fas-
cism as reified anti-civilizational rebellions, of the religious origins
of modern antisemitism, the theory of pathic projection, or their
reflections on antisemitism as “social paranoia.” Postone is off the
mark by suggesting that the Frankfurt theorists reduce antisemitism
to hatred of the Jews as representatives of the circulation sphere
(the focus of the third thesis of the “Elements of Antisemitism”
from Dialectic of Enlightenment). To be sure, they argue that the
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and persecuted even if actual Jews have all been murdered. After
all, according to Postone antisemitism has no goal apart from
utter destruction and annihilation (of value, of the abstract, and
of Jews) while at the same time its practitioners strive toward
preservation and deification (of use-value, of the concrete, and of
non-Jews). This is why “the Jew” is indispensable for the antise-
mitic mindset, as noted by Sartre109 and Béla Grunberger.110 For
the antisemite, the antisemitic conspiracy myth is a deep-seated
yet appearance-based ideology necessary to psychologically sustain
a “hygiène personelle.”111 In the logic of antisemitism, the per-
secution of Jews as existential enemies can never end, but it can
lead to total annihilation and destruction. Within its own reified
logic, antisemitism’s obsession serves as a necessary social illusion
or ideological construct that preserves one’s psychological, bio-
logical, and economic purity as productive forces of the ethnic
nation—until society as a whole has vanished.
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repressive and regressive political ideas on the Left and the Right,
epitomized in forms of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism personi-
fying the abstract. Such ideas are still reproduced in popular antino-
mies between value-producing workers and capitalists as opposed to
alleged parasites, and good and bad peoples. It is part of Postone’s
intellectual legacy to have discovered and substantiated a critical
understanding of antisemitism as objectified personification of the
abstract. His theoretical model points to the underlying structural
causes of conspiracy myths and their great appeal, still all too pres-
ent in our contemporary societies. It also points to the widespread
inability to come to terms with social complexity in what are increas-
ingly complex, modern, globalized capitalist societies.
Notes
We greatly appreciate and are indebted to the peer reviewers of our paper
for their immensely knowledgeable scholarly reflections on our work and
for their helpful literature suggestions.
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37. Ibid.
38. Moishe Postone, “Critical Theory and the Historical Transformations
of Capitalism” in Michael J. Thompson, ed., The Palgrave Handbook of
Critical Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 137–163, 161.
39. Ibid., 161.
40. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the
German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” 108.
41. Ibid.
42. For a first account, see Shulamit Volkov, The Rise of Popular Anti-
Modernism in Germany. The Urban Master Artisans, 1873–1896 (Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
43. Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Eman-
cipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 86. For a good
summary of this quotation, see T. S. Kord, Loveable Crooks and Loath-
some Jews: Antisemitism in German and Austrian Crime Writing Before the
World Wars (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co), 7–9.
44. Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 99.
45. Ibid., 98.
46. Ibid., 99.
47. Ibid., 99–100.
48. Ibid., 110.
49. Ibid.
50. Treitschke, who was previously not known for “blatant intolerance
towards Jews,” epitomized that as well with his antisemitic turn toward the
Right in 1878–1879; see Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites, 100.
51. Ibid., 100; and Shulamit Volkov, “Readjusting Cultural Codes:
Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism,” Journal of Israeli History
25.1 (2006): 51–62. See also Kord, Loveable Crooks and Loathsome Jews, 8.
52. Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code. Reflections on
the History and Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,”
Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute XXIII (1978): 25–46, 39.
53. See Murthy, “Beyond Particularity and Universality,” 135.
54. Moishe Postone, “Deconstruction as Social Critique: Derrida on
Marx and the New World Order,” History and Theory 37.3 (1998): 383.
55. Ibid., 372.
56. Moishe Postone, “History and Critical Social Theory,” Contempo-
rary Sociology 19.2 (1990): 170–176, 176. The same argument is more
fully developed in chapter six of Time, Labor, and Social Domination.
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See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 125; Murthy, “Beyond
Particularity and Universality,” 148.
80. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 307.
81. Ibid., 308.
82. Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth
Century,” 92.
83. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 309.
84. Ibid., 308.
85. Ibid., 310.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid., 311.
88. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 309; see also
Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 254.
89. See Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 254.
90. See Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 308.
91. Ibid., 311.
92. Murthy, “Beyond Particularity and Universality,” 149.
93. Ibid.
94. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 311–312.
95. Ibid., 313.
96. Ibid.
97. Ibid., 314.
98. Ibid., 305–306.
99. Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 255.
100. Ibid., 197–198, 248. See Jonathon Catlin, “The Frankfurt
School on Antisemitism, Authoritarianism, and Right-Wing Radicalism,”
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 7.2 (2020), 1–15.
101. Murthy, for instance, praises Postone for being “one of the
few Marxists . . . who has shown how the Holocaust and other violence
against Jews is inextricably connected to capitalism and how various forms
of fascism and antisemitism will continue to exist as long as society remains
capitalist.” Murthy, “Beyond Particularity and Universality,” 159.
102. See Monika Schwarz-Friesel, “‘Verbesserungsvorschläge’ für
Juden? Eine gefährliche Hybris,” Hagalil.com, 19 May 2020, https://
www.hagalil.com/2020/05/mbembe-2/
103. See Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 495.
104. Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 143.
105. Ibid., 143–144.
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144. Ibid.
145. Ibid., 103. This cycle of psychic reversal, Postone adds on page
104, “was most grotesquely manifested in Entebbe in 1976. An Air France
plane had been highjacked and all non-Jewish passengers had been released.
The hostages held were the Jewish passengers. (Not simply all the Israelis—
which would have been bad enough.) This process of ‘selection’ was
undertaken, among others, by two young German leftists, less than four
decades after Auschwitz! There was no public negative response—not to
speak of a general outcry—within the German New Left.” See also Moishe
Postone, “After the Holocaust: History and Identity in West Germany,” in
K. Harms, L.R. Reuter, and V. Dürr, eds., Coping with the Past: Germany
and Austria after 1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
146. See Samuel Salzborn, The Modern State and Its Enemies: Democ-
racy, Nationalism and Antisemitism (New York: Anthem Press, 2020); Lars
Rensmann, “The Contemporary Globalization of Political Antisemitism:
Three Political Spaces and the Global Mainstreaming of the ‘Jewish Ques-
tion’ in the Twenty-First Century,” Journal of Contemporary Antisemitism
3.1 (2020), 83–107.
147. See Raphael Schlembach, Against Old Europe: Critical Theory
and Alter-Globalization Movements (New York: Routledge, 2016), 91.
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