Artº A-S As Fetish Anti-K - On Postone - L Rensmann

Modern Antisemitism as
Fetishized Anti-Capitalism
Moishe Postone’s Theory and its Historical

and Contemporary Relevance
Lars Rensmann and Samuel

Salzborn
The enduring legacy of Moishe Postone’s work in the fields of intellectual

history, sociology, and social theory also finds expression in his influential the-
ory of modern antisemitism and its role in the Holocaust. Grounded in criti-
cal reflections on Marxian thought yet unconvinced by Marxist functionalism,
Postone theorizes antisemitism primarily from the perspective of (a critique of)
political economy. He conceptualizes modern antisemitism as a fetishized form
of anti-capitalism that reifies and personifies the abstract features of modern
capitalist society. In so doing, Postone founded a new, revised critical theory
framework for the study of modern antisemitism and the origins of the Shoah.
For Postone, the Holocaust ought to be understood as the violent attempt to
destroy “the abstract”—all actual and perceived evils of modern society associ-
ated with it—by way of annihilating the Jews. This article critically reconstructs
Postone’s theory of antisemitism and situates it in its multi-faceted intellectual
context. Moreover, the historical and contemporary meaning of Postone’s anal-
ysis is discussed against the backdrop of its broader reception and critique. It is
argued that Postone, limits of his theory notwithstanding, contributes to under-
standing the relevance and attraction of antisemitic views across various mod-
ern political, spatial, and societal contexts—on the Right, the Left, and beyond.
Antisemitism Studies Vol. 5, No. 1 • DOI 10.2979/antistud.5.1.03

Copyright © Canadian Institute for the Study of Antisemitism
44
Modern Antisemitism as Fetishized Anti-Capitalism
Introduction
Moishe Postone’s small but highly focused oeuvre has made a

broad and lasting impact in multiple fields: from intellectual history,
philosophy, political economy, to sociology and social theory, as
well as antisemitism research. Postone’s ground-breaking magnum
opus Time, Labor, and Social Domination, for instance, offers a pro-
found reinterpretation of Karl Marx’s critical theory and critique of
political economy that has resonated in multiple disciplinary and
inter-disciplinary contexts.1 In this study, and in previous and sub-
sequent research, Postone argues that Marx’s Grundrisse provide
a key lens to read and understand his later work, including Marx’s
most important work Capital. Among other things, Postone recon-
structed the concept of “commodity fetishism” in societal relations.
His work offers a “deepened interpretation” of Marx’s theory of
value2 as a social-mediational critical theory, which made him one
of the world’s pre-eminent thinkers on Marx and on post-Marxian
critical theory and critical historiography in general.3 One of the
most significant and far-reaching legacies of Postone’s work may
ultimately be found elsewhere however. He has developed an influ-
ential explanatory social theory of modern antisemitism and its role
in the Holocaust—a theoretical framework that has in part shaped
the scholarship of generations of antisemitism researchers.4
Related to his key theoretical ambitions, unique reinterpreta-
tions, and critical reflections on Marxian thought, Postone theo-
rizes antisemitism primarily from the perspective of (a critique of)
political economy. In fact, Postone’s theory of antisemitism can be
considered particularly innovative for having been the first to sys-
tematically integrate the critique of political economy into theory-
guided antisemitism research. Postone understands modern
antisemitism first and foremost as a fetishized form of anti-
capitalism that is itself grounded in objectified social relations and
the prevalence of the commodity fetish in modern capitalist soci-
ety. In conceiving antisemitism as a fetishized form of modern anti-
capitalism that seeks to negate and destroy Jews as the personifica-
tion of capitalism’s abstractions, Postone lays the groundwork for a
45
Lars Rensmann and Samuel Salzborn
new, revised critical-theoretical framework for the study of modern

antisemitism and the origins of the Holocaust.
This article critically reconstructs Postone’s theory of antisem-
itism and situates it in its intellectual context. Furthermore, we dis-
cuss the historical and contemporary meaning of Postone’s original
analysis against the backdrop of its broader reception and critique.
Notwithstanding his theory’s limitations if understood as a compre-
hensive explanation of antisemitism, it is argued here that Postone’s
work helps understand the relevance and appeal of antisemitic views
in various politico-cultural and societal contexts under conditions
of “political modernity”5—and also its recurring political attrac-
tion on the Right, the Left, and in various other modern politico-
cultural movements and contexts.
Marx and Beyond: The Intellectual Context of Postone’s

Critique of Antisemitism
Before we examine Postone’s theory and its key set of assumptions

and arguments more closely, we first situate his sociological theo-
rizing about antisemitism within the conceptual space from which
it emerged by relating Postone’s claims to the major social theorists
to which his work refers. In so doing, Postone’s theory is posi-
tioned between his intellectual sources and environment in order to
understand what makes it distinct.
This environment includes, first and foremost, the complex
relationship of Postone’s antisemitism theory to Marx’s theoriz-
ing, to which it is undoubtedly indebted. No other theorist or
thinker had the same degree of influence on Postone’s work than
Marx, whose work he processed, reconstructed, and criticized. But
Postone’s highly original and unique approach to social theory is
far removed from any type of dogma that can be linked to Marxist-
Leninist orthodoxy and its stale set of interpretations of the social
world. This also applies to Postone’s theory of antisemitism. While
Marx’s social theory serves as an indispensable critical set of con-
ceptual tools for Postone, he also moves his work beyond Marx and
46 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

certainly beyond Marxism, both of which failed to grasp the nature,

scope, destructive power, and potential endless violence of modern
antisemitism, in Postone’s view.6
For Postone, antisemitism would be misunderstood if
conceived—as it often is in Marxist interpretations, but also in
many other socio-theoretical approaches—as merely being mis-
guided or involuntarily prejudiced, that is as biased thinking or
false collective generalizations about the individual behavior of
members of a discriminated group. Likewise, Postone criticizes
the simplistic scapegoat theory according to which the ruling class
or the bourgeoisie blame exchangeable others for individual or
group problems as well as social injustices in order to “cheat” the
working class or the “little people”—an approach often and prom-
inently employed in Marxist writings on antisemitism.7 Indebted
to Marx’s epistemology and conceptual framework, he develops
an approach focused on materialized forms of reified social rela-
tions, an approach that “is very different from the mainstream
Marxist tradition in which the categories are understood in terms
of an ‘economic base,’ and thought is considered super-structural,
to be derived from class interest and needs. This form of function-
alism cannot . . . adequately explain the non-functionality of the
extermination of the Jews.”8 Such “functionalist” thinking ulti-
mately views antisemitism (as well as racism) as a mere instrument
of the ruling class used to politically deflect and re-direct oppo-
sition to capitalist exploitation or other modern forms of social
domination.
Moreover, Postone’s work opposes Marxist approaches that
equate antisemitism with racism or classify the former as simply
another form of racism. He suggests that this approach, indebted
to conventional prejudice studies, misses a key part of the prob-
lem alongside the failure to understand the specificity of antisemi-
tism, its mechanisms, and functions. The Left concentrated on “the
function of National Socialism for capitalism,” while antisemitism
and the extermination of the European Jews were, when addressed
at all, quickly subsumed under the general categories of preju-
dice, discrimination, and persecution.9 These positions “share an
47
understanding of modern anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish prejudice, as

a particular example of racism.”10
Needless to say, Postone opposes Marxists who downplay,
sympathize with, or reproduce, antisemitism themselves, for exam-
ple, those who are unable to recognize antisemitism in laments
against “the Zionists” and “Jewish bankers” but view such attacks as
instantiations or expressions of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism
respectively, allegedly aimed at human emancipation. Hence,
Postone’s work stands in sharp contrast to several strands of Marxism
(especially of the orthodox kind) that took a decidedly nationalist
turn and helped erode leftist opposition to antisemitism by down-
playing antisemitism even after the Holocaust or by equating all
kinds of injustices, including Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,
with the Nazi atrocities against the Jews—and thus made “its own
contribution to the antisemitic canon.”11
In particular, Postone criticizes uncritical, reified Marxist
political ideology and reductionism that fails to recognize antisemi-
tism and to seriously engage with the challenge of modern antisem-
itism as a threat and problem in its own right. Postone moves
beyond Marx’s own misconceptions, marginalizations, and ambi-
guities in relation to the challenge of antisemitism, which may share
responsibility for some of the problematic Marxist approaches to
“the Jewish Question” (Marxists have often “espoused teleological
visions” of history that “sacrifice the Jews to progress”).12 Marx’s
essay On the Jewish Question, for instance, confronted antisemitic
currents running through the Left as exemplified by his opposi-
tion to the young Hegelian Bruno Bauer who “believed that
the Jewish religion was inherently incompatible with emancipa-
tion.”13 Ultimately, by expressing a negation of the Jews as partic-
ular, Bauer equated human emancipation with the emancipation
from Judaism—a leftist version of centuries-old antisemitism. As
Robert Fine and Philip Spencer persuasively argue, Marx, by con-
trast, supported “Jewish emancipation unequivocally and without
conditions” rather than interpreting human emancipation as an
emancipation from Judaism.14 Still, some of Marx’s writings on the
“Jewish Question” could be misappropriated due to ambiguities,

for instance, in the association of Jews with money.15 There are

several problematic comments about “the Jews” in Marx’s work
that “allowed the Jewish question to be smuggled back in.”16 At
any rate, Marx was ultimately more concerned with other questions
of his time—most prominently the social question, which partly
pushed his early critique of anti-Jewish exclusion to the side.
Postone looks beyond this shortcoming in his theoretical per-
spective, however. His work is ultimately “unconcerned,” as Viren
Murthy concludes, with the potential “anti-Judaism of the early
Marx.”17 Postone critically employs Marx’s social theory and cri-
tique of political economy yet transforms Marx beyond Marxism.
He reconstructs his work as a central conceptual anchor for reflec-
tion on what Postone simultaneously recognizes as a major threat of
the twentieth century: the “antisemitism question” and the geno-
cidal persecution of Jews it motivates. Most importantly, Postone
insists with Marx that modern antisemitism, especially in its exter-
minationist form, is profoundly affected by the nature of modern
capitalist society.18 To understand this nexus, Postone employs
Marx’s epistemological understanding of commodity, capital, labor,
and money as social forms (and not merely as economic concepts)19
and reconstructs Marx’s “concept of the fetish, the strategic intent
of which was to provide a social and historical theory of knowledge
grounded in the difference between the essence of capitalist social
relations and their manifest forms.”
Grasping the pressing need for all social theorizing—following
thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno20—to address
the subject of antisemitism after the Holocaust, and to process the
unspeakable crimes against humanity committed against the Jews
of Europe, Postone attributes central significance in social theory
to both an unorthodox reading of Marx and, in departure from
all previous Marxism, to the antisemitism question. In so doing,
Postone’s work has also helped reinvigorate a critical tradition of
thinking after Marx that is sensitive to both the general and the
particular (the fate of Jews and Jewish identity) and the relationship
between the two, especially when addressing modern hatred against
Jews.21
49
In addition to Marx as a key theorist providing historical and

conceptual tools for a critical re-examination of modern antisem-
itism’s historically conditioned “logic,” Postone’s analysis draws
insights and elements from the social, political, and cultural theories
of a variety of thinkers. They include most prominently Jean-Paul
Sartre, Shulamit Volkov, and especially the Frankfurt School the-
orists Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, but also unfold
in critical reflections on others including Hannah Arendt, Jürgen
Habermas, and Jacques Derrida.
From Sartre, Postone adopts, among other things, reflections
about the difference between general and concrete ways of think-
ing, and the idea of a radical detachment of the antisemitic idea of
“the Jew” from actual Jews.22 In Sartre’s work we can detect with
Postone the illumination of a particular inversion that is significant
for the latter’s analysis of antisemitism. With Sartre, Postone grasps
the failure to think in abstract terms, that is, to address concrete
societal issues in abstract ways rather than reducing abstractions to
something concrete. The most striking expression of this is the per-
sonification of freedom, democracy, and capitalism in “the Jew.”
Along with Sartre, Postone separates the real existence of Jews
from the antisemitic idea of “the Jew.” In this context we can also
locate the most famous sentence from Sartre’s 1945–1946 essay
Anti-Semite and Jew: “[i]f the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite
would invent him.”23 Far from “experience producing his idea of
the Jew,” Sartre suggests, “it was the latter which explained [the
antisemite’s] experience.” But not only that. For Sartre, an antisem-
ite is a person who is afraid of his own consciousness, abstract think-
ing, desires, responsibility, society, the world, and freedom, but this
has nothing to do with actual, particular Jews (Sartre). Rather, “the
Jew” serves as a concretization of the abstract and the antisemite’s
inner self.24 The antisemite, argues Sartre, desires and prepares the
death of the Jews even though actual Jews have no bearing on the
antisemite’s life. Sartre is, like Postone, however, well aware that
Jews also exist without antisemites. Yet “the Jew,” as an idea and
a product of the antisemite’s imagination, provides concrete ori-
entation in this world.25 The historical existence of actual Jews is

independent from the antisemitic idea of the Jew26: “[i]t is therefore

the idea of the Jew that one forms for himself which would seem to
determine history, not the ‘historical fact’ that produces the idea . . .
Thus wherever we turn it is the idea of the Jew which seems to be
the essential thing.”27 Postone, however, does not stop there and
moves beyond Sartre in his search for historical and societal expla-
nations for this antisemitic projection and ultimately for the Shoah.
In particular, Postone wants to clarify “the relation between the
Holocaust and larger historical developments,” which Sartre leaves
largely unaddressed.28 For Postone, Sartre ultimately describes the
problem of antisemitism accurately but does not offer a satisfying
theoretical explanation—let alone a historical one—for the rise of
antisemitism and the total annihilation of the European Jews.
Horkheimer and Adorno are another main influence on
Postone’s theorizing of modern antisemitism and, thus, he should
also be read against the backdrop of their work. Theoretically,
Postone is indisputably closest to these post-Marxist thinkers of
Frankfurt School Critical Theory, who also ground their analysis of
antisemitism in a theory of reification and objectification originally
indebted to Marx and Georg Lukács. Horkheimer and Adorno, to
be sure, offer a multi-faceted theoretical approach to understand-
ing antisemitism in view of the atrocities of the Holocaust. For
them, the reification paradigm is just one (important) element of
an envisioned (but arguably unrealized) “comprehensive” theory of
antisemitism. It entails a reformulated ideology critique according
to which the promise of universal freedom and human rights has
remained a lie in the reality of modern capitalist society.
For Horkheimer and Adorno, the reasons why the “cheated
masses” direct their scorn toward the Jews and project their inner
misery, desires, and hopes as well as their social malaise onto them in
a leveling crusade are multiple.29 In addition to positively sanction-
ing one’s repressed rage and fantasies, serving as a luxury immune
to the charge of economic futility,30 one of several causes that
Horkheimer and Adorno identify is what they call the “objective
roots of antisemitism.” Antisemitism, they argue, conceals domina-
tion in capitalist production and attributes to Jews the “economic
51
injustice of the whole class.”31 Modern antisemitism effectively

separates allegedly “productive capital”—in the growth of which
and the products it sells on the market workers feel they take part
in through their work—from “rapacious,” “greedy,” “abstract,”
“parasitic,” “non-productive” “Jewish” (global) finance capital,
which seemingly cheats and exploits workers and society. Through
this division reification and Jew-blaming is particularly effective
because, Horkheimer and Adorno suggest, Jews were historically
forced and locked into the sphere of circulation, commerce, and
brokerage.32 This reified division is a key point of departure for
Postone’s theory, as we shall see, though there are also differences
and additions in understanding the murderous logic of modern as
well as totalitarian Nazi antisemitism geared toward the total exter-
mination of the Jews.
Following the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory, Postone
decisively situates modern antisemitism’s eliminationist force and
the Nazi genocide in historical context, and specifically in relation
to material changes that accompany “the transition from liberal to
bureaucratic capitalism.”33 He also employs, and lauds, their adop-
tion of the Marxian concept of reification as a social form in con-
trast to the mainstream Marxist tradition.34 Yet, Postone argues,
Horkheimer and Adorno fall short in fully grasping the specificity
of antisemitism and the Holocaust in their generalizing conception
of modern authoritarianism as a key explanatory link.35 And those
elements in their work that do account for such specificity, especially
Horkheimer’s early writings on the The Jews and Europe, concen-
trate “on the identification of the Jews with money and the sphere
of circulation.”36 However, such theories, says Postone, “cannot
account for the notion that the Jews constitute the power behind
social democracy and communism.”37
Finally, Postone suggests that Frankfurt School Critical
Theory fails to fully understand the complex historical dynamic and
contradictory character of capitalism, which did not end with the
emergence of state or monopoly capitalism in the twentieth century.
Instead of truly overcoming the “limits of traditional Marxism,”
Postone claims, Critical Theory did not grasp “the form of labor in

capitalism as historically determinate” but treated labor “transhis-

torically” and thereby lost “critical reflexivity . . . in the late 1930s
and early 1940s.”38 Critical Theory’s understanding of a “one-
dimensional” post-liberal society assumes incorrectly that the earlier
transition from liberal to state or monopoly capitalism “involved the
supersession of the abstract dynamic of capital by political power
and direct domination.”39 For Postone, this retrospectively shows
that Critical Theory’s failure to recognize the continued existence
of what Postone calls capitalism’s “two-dimensional” historical
dynamic has problematic consequences for understanding both the
historical configurations of capitalist society and the specificity of
modern antisemitism. We shall return below to Postone’s “elective
affinities” with the Frankfurt School in approaching the study of
antisemitism as well as their differences and Postone’s critique.
“At first glance,” Postone argues, theories like that of George
L. Mosse appear “more satisfying.” Mosse interprets antisemitism
as a “revolt against modernity.”40 But here Postone takes issue with
the concept of modernity (as opposed to understanding distinc-
tions between the essence and appearance of modern capitalism): the
“modern” would “certainly include industrial capital which, as is
well known, was precisely not an object of anti-Semitic attacks, even
in a period of rapid industrialization. What is required, then, is an
approach which allows for a distinction between what modern capi-
talism is and the way it appears, between its essence and appearance.
The concept ‘modern’ does not allow for such a distinction.”41
Postone’s reflections on the antisemitism question concur with
some of the insights made by his contemporary Shulamit Volkov.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Volkov developed a historical
account of antisemitism as a “cultural code.”42 According to Volkov,
such a cultural code emerging in the nineteenth century functioned
as a broader semantic vessel or container for a variety of reactionary
ideas and urges, featuring prominently anti-democratic, nationalist,
anti-socialist, and anti-emancipatory ideas. Especially in late nine-
teenth century Germany, political and cultural agents were able to
create “associative mergers” establishing links between all kinds of
alleged or actual modern social ills and “the Jewish Question” on
53
an unprecedented level—claiming, among other things, that “the

social question is the Jewish question” (in the words of the initially
“liberal” journalist Otto Glagau).43 This is epitomized by historian
Heinrich von Treitschke’s infamous manifesto, which claims that
“the Jews are our misfortune” and realizes the “associate merger”
necessary for creating “the link between antisemitism and his spe-
cial brand of nationalism.”44 In Treitschke’s iterations, which played
an important role in making antisemitism fully salonfähig, that is
respectable,45 and elsewhere, Volkov observes that the “Jewish
Question” was transformed from “one problem among others” to
being equated with an entire “syndrome of evils,” turning Jews
into the alleged “essence of all evil. A quick turn of the pen made
a single problem stand for all others. The Jews were equated with
every negative aspect of German life” and an “unsatisfactory situ-
ation,” including problems produced by and experienced in mod-
ern industrial capitalism, was made “comprehensible.”46 A “strong
opposition to government policies could now be coupled with an
idolizing of the state.”47
Moreover, Volkov employs a conception of culture (rather
than for instance ideology) that points to antisemitism as part of
broader, reinforced, interlinked, and perpetuated resentments or
“codes” in society and among individuals, operating “both on the
intellectual-rational level and that of implicit values, norms, lifestyle
and thought, common ambitions, and emotions.”48 This “cluster of
ideas” and “sentiments” express, Volkov suggests, “the total inter-
connected set of ways of thinking, feeling and acting” that became
part of a gradually strengthened culture of antisemitism encroach-
ing on all aspects of social life and government.49 Absorbing deep-
seated traditions and clichés, antisemitism wandered from a specific
conservative or reactionary camp to society as a whole (and also
met with left-wing trajectories of antisemitism mentioned above).50
Rather than being the product of particularly effective agents or
pieces of political propaganda, a culture of antisemitism was relent-
lessly nurtured in all societal spheres. Antisemitism also assumed
a “central role . . . in the new German nation-state,” the Second
Empire, and constituted “daily practice” far beyond the “ideological

sphere.”51 Only this broad spread and continuous reinforcement of

“the antisemitic ticket” as a cultural code allows us, Volkov sug-
gests, to grasp the social and political impact of antisemitism in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Volkov also developed the idea of an ideological reversal of
appearance and essence, which is also reflected in Postone’s theory
of antisemitism. She describes the historical process of endowing
antisemitism with comprehensive social meaning, on a semantic
level and from a symbolic perspective, as the formation of a broader
cultural code. On the one hand, such a code, in Volkov’s view,
evokes, reproduces, and reinforces particular associations and con-
texts of an anti-Jewish cultural imaginary. On the other hand, the
code itself functions as a communicative innuendo that can explic-
itly articulate antisemitic resentments, fostering anti-Jewish sym-
bolic communication as part of a broader set of cultural discourses
against socio-cultural change: “[a]t the very least antisemitism did
not mean only hatred of Jews. It was not Jewbaiting made respect-
able, but hatred of Jews made symbolical.”52
The cultural code turned into a comprehensive ideology that
deformed reality and transformed it into a pathological worldview so
that reality could appear as an ideological worldview. Volkov’s reflec-
tions on such an inversion of essence and appearance can be under-
stood as a cultural analysis of what Postone seeks to reconstruct in
his antisemitism theory by means of the concept of the commodity
fetish in the horizon of political economy and social theory. What
is lacking in Volkov’s account, from Postone’s perspective, is once
again a thorough historical-sociological explanation. Volkov does
not try to theorize the historical and societal origins of the reversal
of essence and appearance she observes or the antisemitic cultural
code or antisemitic culture in modern society. Consequently, she
also does not adequately theorize what led to the “planned pro-
gram” of the Holocaust, which Postone wants to better understand.
Looking at the evolution of Postone’s theory over the years,
it is important to take note of the way he addresses alternative
approaches that help him sharpen the contours of his critical theory
of antisemitism. For instance, he contends that Jacques Derrida’s
55
deconstructivism is ahistorical and methodologically old-fashioned

in relation to “the Jewish Question” in two major ways, despite
its other virtues and claims to novelty. First, Postone accuses
Derrida of generally ontologizing the opposition between Jews
and Christians in his writings. Second, in Postone’s view, Derrida
fails to historicize these two identities in the context of the his-
torical development of capitalism. Postone asserts that in the end,
“Derrida is too wedded to a Hegelian reading of Marx and there-
fore needs to rely on an outside ontological source.”53 For Postone,
part of the problem with Derrida’s approach is that he “assimi-
lates Marx to Hegel,” that is he falsely claims that “any notion of
a directional historical dynamic must be linear . . . Consequently,
Derrida opposes history as the linear stringing together of units
of abstract homogenous time to eventness—an opposition that
reproduces the classical antinomy of necessity and freedom.”54 In
so doing, in Postone’s view, Derrida reproduces the classical antin-
omy between linear teleology, representing necessity, and a rupture
of the “event,” representing freedom. The historical dialectic of
modern antisemitism and the Holocaust—a massive rupture and
civilizational breakdown—exposes, especially, that this antinomy is
profoundly misguided.55
Habermas is another relevant point of reference for Postone’s
approach in general and implicitly for his study of antisemitism in
particular. Postone dedicated various articles, review essays, and
chapters (including a prominent one in Time, Labor, and Social
Domination criticizing Habermas’s critique of Marx) to Habermas’s
work and thought, mostly in critical terms. In his elaborate review
essay on volume two of Habermas’s Theory of Communicative
Action, which Postone calls a “magnificent work” and which he
lauds for reformulating a social theory as a critical theory against the
irrationalism of postmodern and postructuralist positions, Postone
criticizes Habermas for not recognizing the contradictory histor-
ical character of capitalism but rather treating the system itself as
“one-dimensional”: as “a unitary, negative hole that does not give
rise immanently to the possibility of a social critique.”56 It is a the-
oretical critique that Postone, as indicated earlier, had also leveled

against Frankfurt School Critical Theory. In his later work, Postone

reiterates this by arguing that by “retaining the political–economic
presuppositions of earlier Critical Theory . . . Habermas essentially
decoupled his version of Critical Theory from a theory of capital-
ism,”57 keeping the sources external to the historical dynamic of
capitalist society and thus failed “to critically illuminate the nature
of the contemporary world.”58
However, even though Habermas is criticized on general
theoretical grounds and he has little to say about antisemitism,
we argue that an implicit historical and theoretical influence can
be detected elsewhere on Postone. Although hardly cited by
Postone, Habermas’s early groundbreaking work on The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) relates economic and
cultural structural configurations and their transitions to those of
public discourse patterns. This is very much in line with, and was
likely an inspiration to, one of Postone’s major theoretical endeav-
ors: to link configurations of capitalist societal developments to the
evolution of modern antisemitism, and later to the shifting public
responses to the legacy of the Holocaust.59
Finally, Postone’s analysis of antisemitism and the Nazi geno-
cide against the Jews evolves in a critical relationship to Hannah
Arendt, whose work on antisemitism and totalitarianism Postone
addresses in several essays. In contrast to a variety of interpreta-
tions (Sartre and Derrida), Postone lauds Arendt, like the Frankfurt
School thinkers, for her historical approach. Whatever the “prob-
lems with their specific approaches, Arendt and Adorno and
Horkheimer correctly understood that antisemitism is the only cat-
egory that directly addresses the issue of extermination and does so
historically . . . They did understand that the Holocaust must be
understood with reference to modern antisemitism, and sought to
deal with that ideology as a symptom of large-scale historical trans-
formations of European society.”60 Despite the differences in their
approaches, they share the “common theme” that “antisemitism
grew as the Jews, in their old social roles, became historically super-
fluous.”61 Alongside Raul Hilberg’s work, Arendt’s understanding
of the role played by bureaucratic authority in the Holocaust helps,
57
Postone argues, “illuminate how [the Nazi program of extermina-

tion] was and could have been executed,” but ultimately does “not
explain the program itself.”62 Neither modern bureaucracy and
modern organization nor superfluousness, however, provide a basis
for “the fundamental characteristic feature of the Holocaust—that
it was a planned program for the total extermination of a people.”63
Postone’s historically and sociologically informed macro-
theoretical model of explanation thus draws (and separates itself)
from a variety of important intellectual (re)sources and contexts—
they are absorbed and partly criticized in a distinct approach to the
study of antisemitism and the origins of the unprecedented crimes
of the Holocaust.
On the Societal Origins of the Holocaust—How Postone

Theorizes Modern Antisemitism as Fetishized Anti-capitalism
and the Personification of the Abstract
While Marx may have underestimated the power and significance

of antisemitism as a societal problem, in Postone’s view, he also
stopped short from using his own conceptual potential to fully
theorize Jew-hatred under conditions of modern capitalism. Marx,
of course, could not anticipate the course of antisemitism and its
future relationship to Nazism. But even in post-Holocaust societies,
Postone argues, most historiography and social theory has viewed
antisemitism as a “peripheral” rather than a “central moment of
National Socialism,” and the Left has also “obscured the intrinsic
relationship between the two.”64
Like many scholars of antisemitism, Postone recognizes the
centrality of antisemitism to Nazism and the Holocaust and the
need to understand antisemitism in order to understand the Nazi
regime and the atrocities it committed. Most other authors to
whom Postone’s work is indebted, however, in his view: 1) either
failed to look for a comprehensive explanation situating the rise
of modern antisemitism and the Holocaust in greater historical-
societal transformations (such as Arendt, Sartre or Volkov); 2)

underestimated the historical specificity of both antisemitism and

capitalist configurations in general theories about modern author-
itarianism and modernity (as in the cases of Mosse, Horkheimer
and Adorno); or, 3) do not account for the modern antisemitic
identification of Jews with communism and social democracy (the
early Horkheimer). Postone seeks to fill this gap with a compre-
hensive theory, or explanatory account, that attempts to recognize
the specific character of modern antisemitism as a distorted or fore-
shortened anti-capitalist movement: a powerful social force, the
significance of which is intimately tied to the evolution of modern
capitalism and the distinctions between its essence and appearance
in its industrial stage.65
Against this intellectual backdrop and presumed theoretical
gap, then, Postone provides a set of key theoretical arguments and
analytical observations investigating the societal origins of mod-
ern antisemitism. Illuminating part of modern antisemitism’s spe-
cial appeal, Postone puts a distinct spotlight on the ways in which
antisemitism operates and could be mobilized in modern capitalist
societies. He critically analyzes why antisemitism, an obscure pro-
foundly irrational dynamic or “logic without reason,” may seem to
appear utterly plausible and indeed make perfect sense to many of
its believers despite its outright logical dissonances. In Postone’s
view, antisemitism points to a widespread failure to think in
abstract terms and to reflect on the abstractions and contradictions
that are constitutive of modern life. Modern antisemitism, then, is
seen as a way to fetishize, concretize, and personify the intangible,
complex, destructive, seemingly incomprehensible, abstract global
processes of social integration and forms of modern capitalist social
domination. These forms of social domination are shaped, argues
Postone, by modern capitalism as an alienated socially mediated
societal form. Antisemitism targets Jews for destruction because
they negatively personify the “abstract” features of capitalism and
modern society at large, whereas the idealized fetishization of the
concrete finds its expression in allegedly “productive capital” and
“organic labor.” The Holocaust, in Postone’s view, can then in
part be understood as the violent attempt to destroy industrial
59
capitalism’s constitutive abstraction (abstract or exchange value),

and the “abstract” in general—all actual and perceived evils of
modern society associated with it—by way of destroying the Jews
who seemingly embody it. Let us unpack this dense theoretical
argument.
In his influential essay on “Anti-Semitism and National
Socialism,” originally published in 1979 as a “theoretical attempt”
and then re-published, re-framed, and re-developed several times,66
Postone lays the groundwork of his novel theory. As pointed out,
Postone interprets antisemitism primarily from a political economy
perspective inspired by Marx. Yet his analysis stands in contrast to
Marxist orthodoxy, which for the most part considers antisemitism
as an ephemeral superstructure phenomenon largely external to the
material fabric of society, class antagonisms, and capitalist organiza-
tion of society. Postone’s approach, developed explicitly in relation
to the history of Nazi extermination policies, goes beyond simply
suggesting that there is some abstract causal relationship between
bourgeois society and antisemitism. Instead, his critical analysis of
the political economy underlying modern society points to a sys-
tematic link between the “mystifications arising from the construc-
tion of a value society” and the emergence of antisemitism within
the everyday practices of commodity exchange—and the “misper-
ceptions” associated with these social practices.67 Employing Marx’s
concept of the “fetish character” of commodities, he seeks to under-
stand this link and explores it in light of historical developments,
both structural and empirical. In so doing, Postone theorizes that
in modern capitalist society there is an intimate relationship, or
deep-seated affinity, between antisemitism and the way the struc-
tural modes of social organization appear in a reified and fetishized
form. The Nazi project of the destruction of the Jews of Europe, or
German revolution, can partly be understood against the backdrop
of this affinity.
Postone begins his analysis of modern antisemitism by stating
that certain aspects of the Nazi anti-Jewish extermination program
will remain inexplicable as long as antisemitism is treated as just
another instantiation of prejudice, xenophobia, or racism (let alone

merely a functional tool to protect class interests). By this he means

that treating antisemitism merely as an exchangeable prejudice, one
of many discriminations or enmities against minorities in the his-
tory of humankind,68 misses its social nature and meaning. Viewing
antisemitism as a mere prejudice fails to explain why it would lead
to the Holocaust, a quantitatively and qualitatively unprecedented
genocide—antisemitism is not just a variant of racism. Yet, until this
day the belief persists that antisemitism is simply one more presum-
ably exchangeable example of a scapegoat strategy, one whose vic-
tims could have just as easily been members of some other group.
According to Postone, in comparison to racism and other
forms of prejudice antisemitism stands out because of the scale
of its impact: the magnitude of the Shoah as an enormous geno-
cidal project to eradicate Jews and Jewish life. This considerable
quantitative historical difference, or distinct historical feature, is
accompanied by a qualitative difference: colonial racial prejudices,
discriminations against religious and ethnic minorities, and other
forms of racism tend to denigrate “concrete others” primarily as
inferior. They are associated with sexual drives, low instincts, crime,
dirt, etc. While these resentments are, in the antisemitic lens, also
associated with Jews, they do not constitute the core of antisemi-
tism. Rather, modern antisemitism first and foremost imagines and
portrays Jews as concretizations of an abstract omnipresent power.
It is “not only the degree, but also the quality of power attributed
to the Jews which distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms
of racism.”69 In contrast to racism, antisemitism views the Jews as
the embodiment of a distinct yet invisible, powerful, and intangi-
ble international—indeed global—conspiracy; they are identified
as “mysteriously intangible, abstract, and universal.”70 Thus, as
Postone eloquently explains, although as essentializing discourses
both share an understanding of social and historical phenomena in
innate biological or cultural terms, antisemitism and racism differ in
important qualitative ways:
Whereas most forms of racism attribute concrete physical and

sexual power to an Other that is considered inferior, modern
61
antisemitism does not treat Jews as inferior but as dangerous

purveyors of evil. It attributes great power to Jews, but that
power is not concrete and physical. Rather, it is abstract,
universal, intangible, and global. The Jews within this framework
constitute an immensely powerful international conspiracy.
Modern antisemitism is not simply a form of prejudice
directed against a minority group but provides a framework for
understanding an extremely complex and historically dynamic
world. Modern antisemitism then, is a worldview that, building
on earlier forms of antisemitism, purports to explain critically the
modern capitalist world. It is distinguished by its populist anti-
hegemonic, and antiglobal character . . . Against the abstract
domination of capital, reified in concretistic terms as the Jews,
it posits concrete particularity as that which is authentically
human. Antisemitism then, does not treat the Jews as members
of a racially inferior group who should be kept in their place
(violently if necessary) but as constituting an evil destructive
power—an antirace opposed to humanity.71
What further distinguishes modern antisemitism, then, from

older forms of Jew-hatred, Postone argues, is not only its secular
nature, but also—and above all—its systematic character. Modern
antisemitism claims to explain how the world really works. In
its totalizing explanatory paradigm, the Jews are associated with
an immensely powerful intangible international conspiracy that
encompasses the entire world system.72 Drawing on the previous
insights of Critical Theory, Postone analyzes that modern antisem-
itism perceives “‘[i]nternational Jewry . . . to be centered in the
‘asphalt jungles’ of the newly emergent urban megalopoli, to be
behind ‘vulgar, materialist, modern culture’ and, in general, all
forces contributing to the decline of traditional social groupings,
values, and institutions.”73
In the antisemitic lens, Jews are thus perceived as rootless,
immense, omnipresent, and uncontrollable, and they are not always
easily identifiable by their visual appearance. Indeed, Jews are largely
an invisible minority and the modern antisemite believes that only
he is capable of detecting and identifying them.74 It is Jews and only
Jews who were perceived to allegedly stand behind abstract social

processes and phenomena and thus viewed as distinctly conspira-

torial and intangible. First and foremost, as part of a fundamental
dualism they appear as the reified embodiment of abstract modern
capitalism in contrast to concrete authentic human life.
Moreover, modern antisemitism is not, Postone points out,
simply about a mere perception of Jews as carriers of money, which
has been part of the arsenal of antisemitism all along. Rather, Jews
are now blamed in general for all socio-economic crises, as well as
all profound societal changes and political upheavals, from indus-
trialization to social value changes and modern revolutions (in this
respect, Postone agrees with Mosse). In the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Postone observes, “the abstract domination
of capital, which—particularly with rapid industrialization—caught
people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand,
became perceived as the domination of International Jewry.”75
Postone argues that in late capitalist modernity “the Jew” came
to personify abstract social domination: the universal and global
abstract laws of exchange and “parasitic” finance capital. Meanwhile,
concrete labor practices and “productive capital” were fetishized as
natural parts of the volkish community. In Postone’s analysis, mod-
ern antisemitism, and Nazi antisemitism in a particularly totalized
way, personifies and concretizes this abstraction in “the Jews.”
The Holocaust, he suggests, had no functional purpose and the
extermination of the Jews served no goal but the destruction of
this concretized abstraction by way of destroying the Jews: “[t]he
extermination of the Jews was not only to have been total, but was
its own goal—extermination for the sake of extermination—a goal
that acquired absolute priority.”76
But how, and especially, why could the Nazis so easily unleash
what Postone calls a foreshortened anti-capitalist antisemitic furor
that led to the total extermination of the European Jews? Due
to modern antisemitism’s systematic nature and its novel distinc-
tiveness in comparison to prejudice, xenophobia, and racism (as
well as older forms of Jew-hatred), a theoretical explanation of
modern antisemitism requires, says Postone, a materialistic epis-
temology. Such an epistemology needs to distinguish between
63
what modern capitalism is and the way it manifests itself. It is

this distinction “between its essence and its appearance” to which
antisemitic ideology responds.77 Postone’s explanatory model is
an attempt to understand antisemitism in the historical context of
social forms and transformations of the modern political economy,
which he sees as key to analyzing antisemitism and its elimination-
ist potential.
In view of the total terror executed through Nazi antisemi-
tism, Postone takes his persuasive descriptive analysis of modern
antisemitism78 as a distinct social force seemingly capable of
explaining the world and connects it to a critical materialis-
tic value-form analysis. This analysis is primarily grounded in
Marxian theory and in Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish.
As indicated above, Marx’s concept of the (commodity) fetish
is anchored in an analysis of commodity, money, and capital as
forms of social relations and not only as economic phenomena.
According to Marx, the commodity possesses a double character:
(exchange-)value and use-value (Tauschwert and Gebrauchswert).
As an object, the commodity expresses social relations while also
shrouding them. In capitalist society, labor-power, other com-
modities, and social relations in general always have concrete as
well as abstract dimensions: for example, concrete use-value and
abstract exchange-value. Under conditions of capitalism labor is
also abstract labor: for example, it has a use-value character (as
the objectification of concrete labor capable of producing goods
and satisfying needs) and serves as an embodiment of objecti-
fied abstract capitalist social relations.79 Postone says that through
these kinds of objectifications the social relations of capitalism
acquire a life of their own that appears natural. While living, con-
crete labor also becomes abstract labor under conditions of mod-
ern capitalism (labor that is measured and objectified). Objectified
social relations, shaped by the exchange value of commodities
(including the commodity of labor-power), seem to invisibly,
anonymously, and impersonally move the world like a natural liv-
ing process guided by universal laws. They “constitute a ‘second
nature,’ a system of abstract domination and compulsion which,

although social, is impersonal and objective,” thus seeming to be

natural.80 In other words, the commodity form as a social relation
in modern capitalism inevitably produces commodity fetishism,
and this also profoundly affects how labor, labor relations, com-
modities, and capital are represented in social consciousness.
The structure of alienated social relations characterizing
modern capitalism thus takes the form of a quasi-natural antin-
omy in which social and historical dimensions are not immedi-
ately apparent.81 The capitalist form of social relations, Postone
suggests, following Marx, “has a blind, processual, quasi-organic
character.”82 In industrial capitalism, citizens no longer under-
stand the fact that concrete living labor—that is, labor that pro-
duces products, creates use-value, and appears to be useful—itself
embodies and incorporates capitalist social relations, and is mate-
rially formed by them.83 In the development of modern industrial
capitalism, social and historical processes were then increasingly
biologized by (antisemitic and nationalist) actors, but this quasi-
natural fetishization, argues Postone, was also engendered by the
logic of universal commodity production itself, leading to specific
perceptions of capital.
With regard to modern antisemitism, Postone thinks that it is
particularly important to further examine the double character of
the commodity, which combines both (exchange-)value and use-
value in a reified, objectified, and fetishized fashion. In discussing
the commodity form, Postone emphasizes the dialectical tension
between value and use-value within the commodity. On the level
of social consciousness and fetishized appearances, this materialized
social form leads, argues Postone, to an externalization of this dou-
ble character. The tension could then appear antinomically, that is
doubled and separated into commodity and money, which are the
manifest forms of use-value and exchange-value respectively:
Although the commodity is a social form expressing both

value and use-value, the effect of this externalization is that
the commodity appears only as its use-value dimension, as
purely material and “thingly.” Money, on the other hand, then
65
appears as the sole repository of value, as the manifestation of

the purely abstract, rather than as the externalized manifest
form of the value dimension of the commodity itself. The
form of materialized social relations specific to capitalism
appears on this level of the analysis as the opposition between
money, as abstract, and “thingly” nature. One aspect of the
fetish, then, is that capitalist social relations do not appear as
such and, moreover, present themselves antinomically, as the
opposition of the abstract and concrete. Because, additionally,
both sides of the antinomy are objectified, each appears to
be quasi-natural. The abstract dimension appears in the form
of abstract, universal, “objective,” natural laws; the concrete
dimension appears as pure “thingly” nature.84
On the logical level of the analysis of the commodity, its dou-

ble character allows labor to appear as an ontological confirmation
of a productive life form, rather than an activity materially shaped
by (capitalist) social relations. The commodity is presented as a
purely material entity, and not as “the objectification of mediated
social relations.”85 On the logical level of capital, the double charac-
ter of the labor process and the societal valorization process “allows
industrial production to appear as a purely material, creative pro-
cess, separable from capital. The manifest form of the concrete is
now organic. Industrial capital then can appear as the linear descen-
dent of ‘natural’ artisanal labor, as ‘organically rooted,’ in opposi-
tion to ‘rootless,’ ‘parasitic’ finance capital.”86
Emboldened by racial and antisemitic theories that emerged
in the late nineteenth century, then, the commodity-producing
society became associated with the imagined naturalness and root-
edness of an organic process. This process gave rise to the notion
that the concrete is natural, while society and historical processes
are increasingly understood in biological terms.87 Yet such reified
biologized or racialized notions themselves and fetishizations of
the concrete and the abstract, Postone suggests, can also be the-
orized in terms of an antinomic fetish that separates use-value
from abstract exchange value in the prevailing social conscious-
ness of modern capitalist society. The concrete and the abstract are
thereby not understood as intertwined elements of social relations

and social processes but objectified as an antinomy of a seemingly

organic concrete and abstract dimension of the world.
In industrial capitalist society, the concrete and the abstract
are thus both reified. This entails the splitting and polarization of
the two modes in social consciousness. Thus, capitalism is perceived
“only in terms of the manifestations of the abstract dimension of
the antinomy” as the “root of all evil,” while the “existent concrete
dimension,” such as “concrete labor,” is “positively opposed to it
as the ‘natural’ or ontologically human, which presumably stands
outside of the specificity of capitalist society.”88
On the level of social consciousness, the linkage of the two in
the commodity-form, which would reflect the internal coherence of
capitalist production, is blocked. Alienated social relations, as Marx
explained, appear only in the abstract but both sides—the concrete
and the abstract, use value, and exchange value—are fetishized,
de-historicized, and ultimately in modern antisemitic ideology
biologized as well.89 Modern antisemitic ideology reinforces the
antinomical disjunction of the commodity’s double character. The
concrete product, concrete labor, indeed the concrete per se are
associated with use value. They appear reified as tangible and nat-
ural, devoid of social mediation. Exchange value, by contrast, is
also reified and seems natural, but appears as abstract, capitalist,
senselessly pernicious—and can be biologized in the image of “the
Jews.” If one considers the specific characteristics of the power that
modern antisemitism attributes to Jews, namely abstractness, intan-
gibility, universality, and mobility, it becomes apparent that these
are all characteristics of the value dimension of the social forms ana-
lyzed by Marx.90 The antinomy inscribed in the social appearance
of modern capitalist commodity-producing societies—the opposi-
tion between the concrete material and the abstract—could thus be
expressed ideologically, Postone argues, as a “racial opposition of
Aryans and Jews.”91
In this interpretation, Jews were ultimately equated not
only with money or the sphere of circulation but with capitalism
itself. For Postone, the radical type of antisemitism expressed in
the interwar period and by the Nazis “is specific to the industrial
67
phase of capitalism.”92 Especially during the interwar period, Jews

were increasingly portrayed as hypermodern, abstract, and iden-
tified with capitalism. Antisemitism was by then part of a roman-
tic anti-capitalist narrative that sought to affirm concrete identity
against the abstraction of modern international capital and mod-
ern capitalist society—in contrast to earlier forms of antisemitism,
which saw Jews as backward and premodern.93
Nazi ideology, to be sure, presented only the abstract dimen-
sion of capitalism as capitalism (rapacious capital, as opposed to
allegedly productive capital), and identified it with the Jews: the
Jews personified the abstract, complex, global dimensions of capi-
talism as an international, indeed global and universal force, which
also gave rise to abstract internationalist, socialist, communist,
and other hypermodern ideas (while neither the concrete nor the
abstract are understood as socially mediated but are fetishized and
naturalized). The Jews, writes Postone, “were not seen merely as
representatives of capital (in which case anti-Semitic attacks would
have been much more class-specific). They became the objectified
personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely power-
ful, and international domination of capital as an alienated social
form.”94 Postone thus presents modern racial Nazi antisemitism as
a “particularly pernicious fetish form” that is a distorted or fore-
shortened form of anti-capitalism benefiting from the materialized
social forms dominating advanced industrial capitalism. This is how
Postone summarizes his analysis:
Modern anti-Semitism, then, is a particularly pernicious fetish

form. Its power and danger result from its comprehensive
worldview which explains and gives form to certain modes
of anticapitalist discontent in a manner that leaves capitalism
intact, by attacking the personifications of that social form.
Anti-Semitism so understood allows one to grasp an essential
moment of Nazism as a foreshortened anticapitalist movement,
one characterized by a hatred of the abstract, a hypostatization
of the existing concrete and by a single-minded, ruthless—but
not necessarily hate-filled—mission: to rid the world of the
source of all evil.95

In view of Nazism as a foreshortened anti-capitalist move-

ment, Postone sees Auschwitz “as a factory to ‘destroy value,’ that
is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract.”96 The terror of
Auschwitz, not the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, was thus the
true German Revolution: this revolution intended to save the world
from the alleged tyranny of the abstract, projected onto the Jews.
To be sure, by killing what antisemites viewed as the personification
of the abstract, the Jews, writes Postone, the Nazis actually “‘liber-
ated’ themselves from humanity.”97
The theoretical argument, according to which Auschwitz
represents a site where value and the abstract are destroyed paves
the way to psychological theories of antisemitism. Postone him-
self recognizes such theories as a much-needed addition to his
approach. He presents his considerations as an epistemological
frame of reference within which sociopsychological or psycho-
analytical explanations can further illuminate the specific ways
antisemitism operates.98
His interpretation of antisemitism therefore provides a the-
oretical horizon, rather than a comprehensive explanation, that
focuses on the dialectic of fetishization of both the concrete
and the abstract. This fetishization can be viewed as a theoret-
ical element helping to explain the force of modern and Nazi
antisemitism. Postone understands antisemitism as a deep-seated
ideological enmity against the objectified abstract principle of
domination—a historically-produced affect against abstraction
and its societal form and appearance, with which Jews have been
identified in modern global capitalist society. Combined with
dominant racial discourses distinguishing between “Aryans” and
“Jews,” modern antisemitism thus amounts, in part, to a biolo-
gization of international capitalism.99 Rather than a product of
modern alienation, antisemitism functions as a fetishized and dis-
torted critique-turned-conspiracy-theory in which the pathologies
of late capitalist society are personified by the image of the Jew,
which enables the individual to isolate the cause of discontent out-
side the self and social processes.100
69
Antisemitism and Social Complexity—The Reception and

Critical Appraisal of Postone’s Theory of Antisemitism
Postone’s socio-historical and socio-theoretical work illuminates

specific elements of modern and totalitarian antisemitism and high-
lights their distinction from other forms of racism. He also provides
thoughtful reflections on how the appeal of antisemitism may be
engendered under conditions of industrial capitalism and its mate-
rialized social (value) forms. His historical analysis of the distinctive
features of modern antisemitism—pointing to a personification of
the abstract and of the Nazi project of systematically murdering the
Jews—as well as his intriguing ideas for a social theory of modern
antisemitism has undoubtedly provided a meaningful contribution
to the analysis of modern antisemitism. Postone assumes that the
value-form of modern capitalist society and the concurrent com-
modity fetishization share responsibility for the enormous appeal of
modern antisemitism as a powerful social force that culminated in
the Nazi genocidal persecution of Jews.101
However, there are also critical questions that can be raised
about the validity and scope of his approach. In Postone’s cri-
tique of Mosse’s understanding of modern antisemitism as a revolt
against modernity, he laments that such a conceptualization fails
to grasp and explain why industrial capital is not the object of
antisemitic attacks. Yet, in turn, we may also ask if a theory that
understands antisemitism as a foreshortened and distorted anti-
capitalism sufficiently addresses the anti-communist, anti-liberal,
and anti-intellectual features or codes of modern and especially Nazi
antisemitism captured by Volkov’s work, among others. Volkov
emphasizes how Jews were increasingly identified with any type of
social change, which includes modern capitalist social change (from
the Right and the Left) but also progressive and universalistic value
change eroding tradition, individualism, liberalism, and parliamen-
tary democracy (especially, but not exclusively, from the Right).
Notwithstanding Postone’s insights about the Nazi genocide as
an attempted destruction of the abstract—which may include the
objectified embodiment of abstract and hypermodern features

of modern capitalism but also abstract or universal thinking and

human rights claims—the notion of a foreshortened anti-capitalism
in itself does not satisfactorily capture or explain the multi-faceted
nature of modern antisemitism. It does not address all the contra-
dictory dimensions, flourishing projections, and global conspiracy
myths that are encapsulated in antisemitism.
Antisemitism serves as a comprehensive reified explanation
of global events but also serves as an empty vessel for all kinds of
logically dissonant projections. Today, for instance, this is on dis-
play in conspiracies about COVID-19. Antisemites often stylize
themselves as victims of a Jewish global conspiracy orchestrated by
Jews like George Soros, but in some cases also wear yellow badges,
offending the memory of the Holocaust by portraying themselves
as victims. After 9/11, antisemites across the globe simultane-
ously blamed Jews or Zionists for being behind the Islamist terror
attacks, while celebrating the death of American Jews in the Twin
Towers. And even today, antisemitic myths often portray Jews as
hypermodern rapacious capitalists, cunning socialists using gov-
ernments to destroy (market) freedom, and as all too backward,
driven by low instincts. Indeed, the cultural concept or imaginary
of “the Jew” is an abstract image and the result of endless projective
processes—too complex to be sufficiently addressed by one the-
ory.102 Significant parts of antisemitism’s ideological arsenal and
cultural reservoir point beyond the context of industrial capital-
ism both in historical as well as synchronic comparative perspec-
tive. Moreover, we may ask just how close and inevitable the link is
between historical antisemitic narratives, tropes, and images, on the
one hand, and commodified, objectified, and fetishized forms of
social consciousness, understood as socially necessary illusions that
tend towards separating and deifying the concrete while seeking to
destroy the abstract, on the other hand.
Postone’s criticism of the generalizing explanatory models of
the Frankfurt School has some validity. In particular, the second
thesis of Horkheimer and Adorno’s “Elements of Antisemitism”
emphasizes the complete exchangeability of the victims of terror.
While rightly suggesting that antisemitism’s life is independent
71
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

belief that the “circulation sphere is responsible for exploitation

is a socially necessary illusion.”104 And for the Critical Theorists,
the objectified identification of Jews with the circulation sphere is
partly due to the fact that historically Jews were “locked up in it,”
and with professions associated with that sphere like those of law-
yer, physician, intellectual, and banker, due to anti-Jewish exclu-
sions and the prohibition to acquire land, real estate, and means
of production. The Critical Theorists ultimately recognized that
several different elements of antisemitism do not add up to the
comprehensive general theory they initially aspired to develop. Yet,
Horkheimer and Adorno do seem to suggest, like Postone, that
the image of the Jews also serves as a reified “personalization of
the abstract.” Despite the fact that only Postone has spelled this
out so clearly in a novel theory-guided formulation, Horkheimer
and Adorno understand that in the antisemitic worldview Jews are
embodiments of abstract power, and of abstract rationality per se,
including abstract concepts of the individual, universal freedom,
and law: “[t]hey who propagated individualism, abstract law, the
concept of the person, have been debased to a species. They who
were never allowed untroubled ownership of the civic right which
should have granted them human dignity are again called ‘the Jews’
without distinction.”105
On the one hand, Postone’s theorizing may simply push
Critical Theory further, following their observations and theoretical
argument more systematically about the reified appearance of capi-
talism’s essence as a commodity-producing system that is structur-
ally identified with finance capital, and personified in the image of
Jews. On the other hand, Critical Theory arguably takes the actual
appearance or manifestation of ideology more seriously than does
the work of Postone. Nazi ideology and antisemitism divided good
productive capitalism from bad finance capitalism, i.e., productive
and rapacious capital (schaffendes Kapital versus raffendes Kapital),
and only the latter, as the Frankfurt School already observed, was
identified with Jews. Despite his desire to explain why modern
antisemitism and Nazism were “conspicuously silent” with regard
to industrial capital and modern technology, Postone’s concept of
73
a foreshortened anti-capitalism risks glossing over their positive

ideological view of capitalism as a system of production, and their
celebration of productive capital on the ideological level (notwith-
standing the more anti-capitalist Strasser wing, which played little
role in the Nazi system). In view of the Nazi identification with
industrial capital, it may be a bit of a conceptual stretch to conceive
of an attack that is restricted to the Jews and Jewish financial capital
as an anti-capitalist revolt,106 even if a distorted or foreshortened
one. The antisemite’s anti-capitalist rebellion may alternatively be
understood as a conformist rebellion using Critical Theory: the work
of an authoritarian “reformer” who wants to see capitalism “freed”
of its “unfortunate excesses,” which antisemites blame on “unpro-
ductive” or “parasitic” capital and, historically, on a “Jewish world
conspiracy.”
To be sure, Postone’s work helps integrate Critical Theory’s
perspective into other approaches toward antisemitism research.
Postone’s theory draws upon the work of Horkheimer and Adorno
and several other aforementioned scholars but also points to the
structural elements of modern capitalist society and its political
economy that were arguably insufficiently examined in analyses
of antisemitism on a macro-theoretical level.107 With impressive
depth, Postone offers a comprehensive analysis of the ambivalent
delusions that antisemitism projects upon the Jews, thereby offer-
ing a socio-theoretical reflection on the question of how antisem-
itism relates to Jews, as previously discussed by, among others,
Talcott Parsons,108 Sartre, and Horkheimer and Adorno. Through
his analysis, Postone helps elucidate an epistemological foundation
for Nazi barbarism’s relationship to modern industrial capitalism
and its anti-emancipatory destructive negation. While Sartre argues
from a rather functionalist point of view—how does antisemitism
serve the fantasies of the antisemite?—Horkheimer and Adorno
also recognize modern antisemitism’s economic foundations and
reified appearance, which presumably fostered the identification of
capitalist exploitation with the sphere of circulation and Jews as its
objectified personification. However, they primarily emphasize the
projective dehumanization and arbitrary character of totalitarian

antisemitism executed by the Nazis. Horkheimer and Adorno

relate its rise to the totalization of instrumental reason as well as
the delusions, or blindness, linked to a universalized commodifi-
cation and exchange or valorization principle, which has presum-
ably conquered all spheres of life. The totality of this principle and
the reification of the world that it produces, they suggest, allegedly
also helps foster the widespread wish to break out of civilizational
pressures among weakened subjects in acts of destruction and self-
destruction—in particular the Nazi atrocities—directed against the
Jews, onto which all of society’s contradictions, problems, hopes
and wishes are projected. Postone, however, digs deeper into the
epistemological origins of this act of barbarism analyzed by the
Critical Theorists by critically recognizing the telos of modern
capitalist society as its cancellation (Aufhebung) in an act of total
destruction and mass murder.
Seen in this context, Postone’s work adds to the framework first
established by Critical Theory. This includes the role the Frankfurt
School attributes to forms of objectification and social domination
that contribute to a (self-)destructive conformist rebellion against
the personification of abstract elements of modern capitalist society.
By further revealing the connection between antisemitism, objecti-
fication, and the value form, thus illuminating theoretically the anti-
nomic fetishization of both the concrete and the abstract as driving
forces of antisemitism, Postone makes his own contribution to our
theoretical understanding of antisemitism. In this light, Postone’s
work can be regarded as an important addition to, and elaboration
of, Critical Theory’s work on antisemitism.
What makes psychological theories of antisemitism especially
important for Postone, following the thread established by Critical
Theory, is that the antisemitic act of destruction, understood as a
destruction of value, is impossible to achieve structurally within
the capitalist economy due to the indissoluble union of value and
use-value within the commodity. Given the futility of this endeavor
(to “liberate” the world from abstract social domination by kill-
ing Jews), such destruction must be pursued endlessly from the
viewpoint of the antisemite. Jews must be continually identified
75
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.
Right, Left, and Beyond—The Historical and Contemporary

Relevance of Postone’s Analysis of Modern and Post-
Holocaust Antisemitism
In his last essay on the subject of antisemitism, published in 2017,

Postone offers perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of public
responses to the Holocaust and antisemitism up to the present
day.112 In so doing, he also intriguingly demonstrates his lasting
contribution to a critical understanding of antisemitism. Illuminated
by his social theory, Postone reconstructs public responses to the
Holocaust and antisemitism—their shifts and deeply problematic
trajectories from abstract universalistic to fetishized particularistic
positions—in relation to their structural causes and the changing
configurations of capitalist modernity since 1945, from the stat-
ist Fordist–Keynesian configuration of the 1950s and 1960s to a
neoliberal one beginning in the 1980s.113 Focusing especially on
left-wing reactions, he also applies this analysis and critique to the
contemporary global age.

Being neither ontologically given nor historically contin-

gent, Postone suggests that public responses to the Holocaust
and antisemitism after 1945 “have tended to be structured by an
opposition between abstract modes of universalism and concrete
particularism—an opposition that also is constitutive of modern
antisemitism.”114 His analysis understands both sides of the opposi-
tion, abstract universality and concrete particularity, as “remaining
bound within the framework of capitalist modernity, however much
positions based on each of them have understood themselves to
be fundamentally ‘critical’ or ‘radical.’”115 Because antisemitism, he
argues, can “appear to be antihegemonic and hence emancipatory,
it can blur the differences between reactionary and progressive cri-
tiques of capitalism and lead to conceptual and political confusion,
especially on the left.”116 According to Postone, this confusion has
reached a new level in the present age of globalization.
In his reconstruction of responses to antisemitism and the
Holocaust, the most extreme expression of modern antisemi-
tism, Postone draws particular attention to a historical shift from
the predominance of early postwar critiques informed by abstract
universalism, “characteristic of both classical liberal thought and
working-class movements,” to the ascendancy of positions focused
on concrete particularity such as those initially expressed by anti-
colonial struggles and anti-imperialist affirmations of national lib-
eration.117 In the first two postwar decades, Postone observes, the
problem of antisemitism and the attempted extermination of Jews
as Jews was almost universally ignored.118 The dominant interpreta-
tion, also featuring prominently on the Left, viewed Nazi atrocities
as a revolt against modernity—a regression from, or aberration of,
historical progress. This interpretation was grounded in a certain
form of universalism, says Postone, that “understood itself as the
opposite of Nazism and regarded any mention of the Jews as Jews
to be unacceptably particularistic. Ironically it served to eradicate
the Jews from history again.”119 The pattern, Postone claims, cor-
responded to the “Golden Age” of Fordism “that seemed to have
overcome the crisis of liberal capitalism” by means of state-cen-
tered management, that is an apparently successful “state-centered
77
synthesis” in both Western capitalist democracies and the Communist

Eastern bloc.120 The denial of specificity of both the Holocaust and
antisemitism within abstract-universalistic notions of progress and
production was certainly not limited to the Communist East and
the Left. In the postwar world, Postone suggests, the space for crit-
ical reflections on the subject was largely suffocated by the antag-
onistic “campism” between Eastern and Western blocs. However,
such campism and otherwise stark ideological differences notwith-
standing, both camps—“Fordist–Keynesianism” and “post-Stalin-
ism”—were anchored in “linear conceptions of progress associated
with productivist visions of development in which large-scale
bureaucratic organizations mediated production and distribution”
and forms of social organization seemingly “rationally organized
according to universal general principles.”121 Until the 1970s, refer-
ences to fetishized abstract universal values—liberty in the West and
equality in the East and on the communist Left in general—gave
little space to confronting and processing the particularity of the
Holocaust. If at all recognized as a specific phenomenon, antisem-
itism was seen as “a secondary problem, a diversionary tactic.”122
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, then, the Fordist-
Keynesianist and post-Stalinist syntheses began to unravel and with
them their primacy of the political within nation-state organiza-
tions, their conceptions of progress, and their abstract-universal
claims. This great transformation, argues Postone, saw the emer-
gence of new discourses and horizons that “rendered imaginable
the overcoming of the antinomy of abstract universalism and con-
crete particularism and its supersession by a form of universality that
could encompass difference” in relation to both the social order
and the public response to antisemitism. And yet, “the structural
logic of the existing order tended to perpetuate the antinomy of
abstract universalism and particularism.”123
Hence, according to Postone an intellectual shift occurred
towards a “postmodern” understanding of Nazism as “fundamen-
tally modern,” which could be viewed in the context of a new cri-
tique of “master narratives” of modernity.124 On the Left, this turn
was accompanied by “a more general historical shift entailing the

rise of the politics of identity and recognition.”125 This turn increas-

ingly implied a critique of abstract universal conceptions and an
affirmative turn to reified particularism, which increasingly situated
itself in a broader movement for universal progressive social change.
Thus at a time when modern capitalism became less statecentric
and “in a sense even more abstract” and reified within a regime that
ultimately emerged as “neoliberal global capitalism,” many leftist
oppositional movements started to break with abstract universal-
ity entirely. Instead of moving beyond the opposition of abstract
generality and concrete particularity, “a strong tendency existed to
grasp the world in concretistic terms” and to advance “a concep-
tion of oppositional politics that was itself concrete and frequently
particularistic.”126
Left-wing views thus often took “a turn to the conceptually
familiar and focused on concrete expressions of domination” in its
most immediate concrete forms.127 In Postone’s view, from the anti-
colonial struggles and anti-imperialism of the Communist Left and
the New Left in the late 1960s onwards, relevant parts of the Left
departed increasingly from their universalist origins.128 They sup-
ported the seemingly anti-hegemonic camp of nationalist or reli-
gious fundamentalist uprisings, and all too often blindly endorsed a
reified “revolt of authentic concrete particularity”129 against abstract
domination and Western universalism. The latter became embod-
ied in reified notions of “the West,” “America,” and “Zionism,”
whereby especially anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism evolved into
“a displaced way of expressing a radical critique of Western cap-
italist society translated into nationalist and culturalist terms.”130
Consequently, the fading conceptual horizon of possible emancipa-
tory universal transformation, Postone suggests, developed in step
with the “concretistic anti-imperialism of the New Left (fused with
a concretistic form of antiglobalization)” and sought “to locate the
possibility of anticapitalism in non-Western nationalist movements”
while it increasingly “recapitulate[d] earlier antisemitic motifs.”131
Communism’s collapse brought fully to the fore the dangers that
were always inherent in “concretistic understandings of capitalism
and of anticapitalist movements.”132
79
The concretistic turn affirms a reified dualistic worldview that

tends to side with nationalist or religious-fundamentalist camps and
struggles that are construed as a critique of capitalism. In Postone’s
view, this turn has fed into the long-term evolution of a left-wing
anti-globalization ideology that adopted a century-old discourse of
the European right. By today, the “similarity between what had
been a rightist critique of hegemony and what regards itself as a
critique from the left reveals similar fetishized understandings of the
world.”133 In what Postone calls “an expression of conceptual help-
lessness and despair,” he argues that much of the Left has, in the
age of full-fledged globalization, “succumbed to forms of reification
that have long characterized reactionary anticapitalism” and falsely
views emancipation as “the eradication of the sources of global
evil—‘Zionism’ and the United States.”134 Indeed, on the Left and
beyond, Zionism is now often treated “as a malevolent global force
so immensely powerful that it can even determine the policies of the
American superpower.”135 In the Middle East, around the globe,
and among relevant parts of the Left, Postone observes the “emer-
gence of a classically antisemitic version of anti-Zionism, of Israel
and the Jews as constituting a powerful global demonic power,” a
Jewish world conspiracy myth that can be related to a differential
effect of the newest universal configuration of capitalism: neoliberal
globalization.136
For Postone, the very absence of a critical theory of society
that points beyond “the antinomy of abstract universalism and
concrete particularism” and the fading of an ideational horizon of
genuine human emancipation today have increasingly opened the
door to such “fetishized concretistic forms of anticapitalism and
populism, many of which are essentially antisemitic.”137 While one
may question Postone’s periodization and particular links between
(for instance, Fordist and post-Stalinist) economic formations and
specific discourses on antisemitism and capitalism (arguably, various
abstract-universalist and concrete-particularistic discourses miscon-
struing the Holocaust after 1945, downplaying antisemitism, and
excluding or blaming “the Jews” for all kinds of dangers to human-
ity intermingled throughout the post-Holocaust era on the Left

and beyond), his historically informed as well as social-theoretical

reconstruction of Leftist reactions to the Holocaust and antisemi-
tism may be more relevant, meaningful, and topical today than ever
before.
Regardless of whether or not one fully agrees with his argu-
ments, Postone’s reflections on the historical and socio-theoretical
links between antisemitism and distorted anti-capitalism offer an
important approach to explain the drive behind the Nazi crimes
against the Jews and to analyze the power of modern antisemitism.
His work has also paved the way for a critical understanding of
“structural antisemitism”—a matrix of reified antinomies and con-
spiratorial thinking implicitly directed against Jews—that continu-
ously resonates in various “modernized” configurations after the
Holocaust as part of “post-Holocaust antisemitism.”138 Partly by
adopting different semantic articulations or codes, modernized
forms of antisemitism have shown their tenacious appeal among
radical and populist right-wing parties and movements, but also to
a significant extent among left-wing social movements and parties.
They also continue to resonate in other types of social movements,
like the Mouvement des gilets jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France or in
segments of populist parties like the Movimento Cinque Stelle (Five
Star) in Italy, neither of which can be easily located in an ideological
camp on a left-right spectrum. Postone’s analysis contributes to our
understanding of why this may be the case.
Postone reconstructs the historical and systematic fetishiza-
tion of industrial capitalism and its splitting off from finance capi-
tal in Western consciousness to arrive at the intriguing conclusion
that the Jews were persecuted as the personification not only of the
circulation sphere, but of capitalism itself. This follows, according
to Postone, because capitalism was perceived in “fetishized form”
and thus “did not appear to include industry and technology”
(emphasis added).139 For Postone, as demonstrated in this article,
the Holocaust ought to be first and foremost understood as the vio-
lent attempt to destroy industrial capitalism’s constitutive abstrac-
tion and the abstract in general (that is, all actual and perceived
features of modernity) by way of annihilating the Jews. Yet this
81
reified ideological anti-capitalism directed against Jews as a collec-

tive human object that is both elevated as immensely powerful and
denigrated as evil did not end with the Shoah.
Postone’s understanding of antisemitism as a particular per-
sonification of the abstract and a foreshortened anti-capitalism are
insightful, but have not been fully appreciated by scholars of mod-
ern antisemitism for their conceptual and theoretical value. His
work reveals the distorted anti-capitalist aspect of antisemitic ideol-
ogy, and sheds light on why antisemitism is nurtured by a lingering
civilizational discontent in—and reified rebellion against—complex
modern capitalist societies, and how modern (and murderous Nazi)
antisemitism could have such appeal in broader society, including
the anti-capitalist Left.
While emphasizing the potential origins of antisemitism in
modern capitalist society, Postone addresses the Left, in particu-
lar, to rethink antisemitism and its relationship to anti-capitalism.
Repeatedly, he concludes his theoretical reflections with a politi-
cal warning: “[t]he Left once made the mistake of thinking that it
had the monopoly on anticapitalism or, conversely, that all forms
of anticapitalism are, at least potentially, progressive. That mistake
was fatal, not least of all for the Left.”140 Postone fully exposes
reactionary forms of anti-capitalism and the mythical resilient illu-
sion that anti-capitalism on the Left is by definition progressive.
Parts of the Left have underestimated the power and significance
of antisemitism as it surfaces as part of anti-capitalism. Moreover,
the very structural nexus Postone emphasizes has repeatedly led the
Left itself, often unreflectively, to traffic in an antisemitic cultural
code. Nothing illustrates this better than, for instance, an internet
search for left-wing cartoons about “class struggle,” “capitalism,”
or “class conflict.” In the attempt to personify capitalist class divi-
sions in order to reduce complexity and illustrate abstract processes,
left-wing cartoonists frequently rely on popular antisemitic cultural
registers and images. They prominently include (Jewish) caricatures
of hook-nosed, obese bankers with big lips and ears conspiring
against the working class. Similar to this personification mechanism,
there is a significant attraction to the ideologies of anti-imperialism

and anti-Zionism, which turn Jews into the personified enemies of

humanity or enemies of peace oppressing good peoples. These rei-
fied ideological antinomies can also serve as foreshortened forms
of explaining complex conflicts and the attempt to solve them by
eliminating the Jews.
While Postone recognized the radical Right’s threat and pres-
ence as an antisemitic force, he called for lessons from history on
the Left with regard to the antisemitism question. He observed
that the Left in Germany, but also elsewhere, often self-immunized
itself from reflecting on the past and thus was doomed to repeat
its mistakes and reproduce antisemitism. Since the 1970s, Postone
criticized the New Left, especially the German New Left, for
neglecting the Holocaust and failing to understand the relevance
of antisemitism. By avoiding a real confrontation with the Nazi past
in the 1960s and 1970s, the New Left “devoted far more atten-
tion to the history of the working-class movement,” says Postone,
“and to resistance against the Nazis, than to the history of National
Socialism itself . . . The need for identification led to an emphasis on
resistance to Hitler which avoided coming to terms with the popu-
larity of the Nazi regime. It also served to block an understanding
of the situation of the Jews in Europe.”141 In fact, he adds, “both
the non-dogmatic Left and orthodox Marxists tended to treat
antisemitism as an epiphenomenon of National Socialism. Hence,
Nazi crimes again humanity were isolated from a socio-historical
examination of National Socialism.”142 Postone’s critical analysis
problematizes the Left’s resilient tendency to identify Nazism with
capitalism, patriarchy, bureaucracy, and, authoritarian structures,
and thus to examine Nazism in “historically non-specific terms”
as “an empty abstraction.” Such general explanations, Postone
observes, fail to address the crucial importance of antisemitism and
“qualitative specificity” of the Holocaust. Those explanations also
ignored Nazism’s “anti-bourgeois aspects: the revolt, the hatred of
the Establishment and of the greyness of capitalist everyday life.”143
Indeed, those abstract concepts could even serve as a tool for “psy-
chic repression” blocking an “unmediated perception of Nazism”
and its particularly antisemitic crimes.144 Similarly, on the Left a
83
process of “psychological reversal took place in which the Jews as

victors became identified with the Nazi past.” This was most strik-
ingly manifest in, but hardly limited to, members of the German
New Left. What was termed anti-Zionism was “in fact so emotion-
ally and psychically charged that it went far beyond the bounds of
a political and social critique of Zionism. The very word became as
negatively informed as Nazism.”145
These obfuscations, inversions, abstractions, and at times
striking forms of ignorance toward antisemitism and the Holocaust,
have had dire consequences for left-wing thinking and practice.
There is to be sure no inherent link between the global radical
Left and antisemitism, but it would be equally misguided to think
antisemitism and the Left are intrinsically at odds with one another
and that there can be no such thing as Left antisemitism. Yet this
view is rather frequently articulated by self-identified leftists who
believe that socialist, communist, progressive, liberal, or anarchist
worldviews are egalitarian by nature and thus incompatible with
antisemitism. From this moral position, what is empirically a fre-
quent phenomenon is denied. Such a denial of antisemitism as a
problem of the Left also turns Marx on his head because (moral)
consciousness negates empirical reality and (antisemitic) being. In
this case, the traditional materialistic approach is abandoned and
replaced with an idealistic moralism and friend-enemy type of
thinking.
Left-wing forms of antisemitism tend to go along with such a
sense of moral superiority. The perception that one is shielded from
racist or antisemitic resentment by virtue of one’s leftism or leftist
identity seems to allow for definitive judgments on what is true
antisemitism and what is a spurious charge of antisemitism made
in bad faith, no matter what its victims say. Too often, the role
of prosecutor and judge become one. Significant parts of the con-
temporary post-Holocaust and post-colonial cultural Left, which is
less interested in questions about class oppression, capitalism, and
the political economy, seem to have inherited identity patterns and
antinomic moralism and righteousness on the antisemitism ques-
tion from the traditional Left. Like for example, when the Jewish

state’s treatment of Palestinians is singled out as the biggest moral

scandal of our time or anti-capitalist sentiment is foreshortened
and turned into opposition against overt anti-Jewish personifica-
tions and imagery. Postone’s theory of antisemitism could provide
the starting point for a critical revision of such identity politics and
self-righteous moralism. It could also help address central theoret-
ical shortcomings in the dominant left-wing canon of interpreta-
tions of Marx.
Part of the precondition for the reproduction of left-wing
antisemitism is arguably the lack of acknowledgement of wide-
spread leftist antisemitism during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, as
analyzed by Postone. Antisemitism was part and parcel of militant
anti-imperialist groups and governments and their supporters, as
well as of European left-wing terrorism. They paved the way for
the current globalization of political antisemitism.146 Those left-
wing organizations currently spreading antisemitism and hatred
against the Jewish state of Israel often continue to reproduce the
volkish worldview of an “anti-imperialism of fools” that divides
the world into good peoples and imperialists and is grounded in
reified notions of collective homogeneity—now frequently in a
post-Stalinist, ethno-culturalist configuration that defends the idea
of an autochthonous people. Such binary left-wing anti-imperialism
is directed exclusively against the West and especially against the
United States and Israel—leaving war-seeking and war-sponsoring
autocratic regimes such as those of Russian, Turkey, Iran, North
Korea, and China consistently unaddressed. Anti-imperialism as a
worldview that reduces social complexity is closely linked to anti-
Zionist antisemitism. It functions as the central ideological glue in
the simplified anti-modern and distortedly anti-capitalist worldview
aptly analyzed by Postone. Reminiscent of the antisemitic cultural
code Volkov described, which combines a whole set of reactionary
and authoritarian ideas, the anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist worl-
dview opposes Israel’s existence, not only its government policies.
Moreover, this worldview denigrates all sorts of features with which
the small Middle Eastern country is associated: enlightenment
and liberalism, modernity and individuality, the rule of law and
85
individual rights entitlements, liberty and democracy, if not gener-

ally the promise of freedom and subjective happiness that offers an
escape from rigid cultural norms and oppressive forms of traditional
or religious rule anti-Zionists seem to idolize.
In contrast to an emancipatory understanding of the universal
and the particular and critical self-reflection, the anti-imperialism
of fools mobilizes the reified image of a concretized, idealized,
homogenous community, rooted in a territory or soul, in which
individual lives are insignificant or rigorously subordinated to the
collective. Intervening or complicating factors undermining this
narrative are, accordingly, also often attributed to Israel, America,
or the West as fetishized embodiments of universalism, the abstract,
and the global today. Postone was not surprised that the legacies of
these reifications—both anchored in the structural forms of capi-
talist modernity and mirrored within the horizon of allegedly rad-
ical thinking among left-wing movements—were actualized under
conditions of global capitalism and were especially appealing in
times of neoliberal globalization. According to Postone, the dual-
istic perception of abstract universality and concrete particularity,
or the false antinomy dividing the world into the bad abstract and
the good concrete, can be observed in national populist responses
to globalization. These responses have also gained traction on the
Left, in anti-imperialist glorifications of the oppressed fighting peo-
ples and even in configurations of a dualistic internationalism that
crudely reduces the complexity of the world and its social conflicts
while being oblivious to its anti-emancipatory implications.147
In developing new foundations for a critical social theory of
antisemitism, Moishe Postone was a thought-provoking pioneer. He
sought to grasp and understand the societal underpinnings of mod-
ern antisemitic resentment. Few other theorists have recognized
the epistemologically and politically misguided paths of person-
ification, concretization, blind collectivism, and moralization—
and their antisemitic potential—as sharply as Postone, who never
assumed such anti-emancipatory patterns would be limited to
the Right. Yet the social theorist Postone also offers ways to fos-
ter self-reflective debates and theoretical tools pointing beyond

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.
1. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Rein-

terpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1993).
2. See Russell Rockwell, Hegel, Marx, and the Necessity and Freedom
Dialectic: Marxist-Humanism and Critical Theory in the United States
(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), in particular chapters seven and
eight (145–194) on Postone’s interpretation of Marx’s value theory in
Grundrisse and Capital respectively.
3. The journal Critical Historical Studies, of which Postone was a
founding co-editor, has dedicated an entire issue of 13 articles to Moishe
Postone’s work and legacy. See Critical Historical Studies 7.1 (2020).
4. See, among others, John Abromeit, “Anti-Semitism and Critical
Social Theory: The Frankfurt School in American Exile,” Theory, Culture
and Society 30.1 (2013): 140–151; Werner Bonefeld, “Antisemitism and
the Power of Abstraction: From Political Economy to Critical Theory,”
in Marcel Stoetzler, ed., Antisemitism and the Constitution of Sociology
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 314–332; Christine
87
Achinger, “Threats to Modernity, Threats of Modernity: Racism and

Antisemitism through the Lens of Literature,” in Christine Achinger
and Robert Fine, Antisemitism and Racism: Current Connections and
Disconnections (New York: Routledge, 2015), 50–68; Samuel Salzborn,
Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne. Sozialwissenschaftliche
Theorien im Vergleich (Frankfurt: Campus 2010); Karin Stögner,
“Intersectionality and Antisemitism: A New Approach,” Fathom 5 (2020),
https://fathomjournal.org/intersectionality-and-antisemitism-a-new
-approach/.
5. See Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, “Understanding Political
Modernity: Rereading Arendt and Adorno in Comparative Perspective,”
in Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, eds., Arendt and Adorno: Political
and Philosophical Investigations (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,
2012), 1–27.
6. Marx’s insensitivities and neglect of the antisemitism question should
not be overlooked. It helped enable the subsequent Marxist downplaying
of antisemitism vis-a-vis what would be construed as the main contradiction
between antagonistic social classes. However, Marx could not foresee the
full scope of political antisemitism in the late nineteenth century, let alone
the brutal exterminationist force directed against the European Jews by the
Nazis in the twentieth century. For those variants of Marxism that failed to
respond to the antisemitism question during and after the Shoah, and which
continued to downplay the socio-political force and violence of antisemitism,
there can be no such mitigating circumstances. Some Marxists, especially
those entangled in Marxist orthodoxy or those tied to dogmatic Marxist
Leninism serving as communist ruling ideology, have even been complicit
in reified forms of anti-capitalism or have reproduced anti-Zionist attacks on
the Jewish state as well as reproduced open antisemitism.
7. See, for instance, Georgi Verbeeck, “Marxism, Anti-Semitism, and
the Holocaust,” German History 7.3 (1989): 319–331.
8. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on
the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” New German Critique 19, Special
Issue 1 (1980): 97–115, 108.
9. Ibid., 98.
10. Ibid.
11. Robert Fine and Philip Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left: On the
Return of the Jewish Question (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2017), 47.

12. Viren Murthy, “Beyond Particularity and Universality: Moishe

Postone and the Possibilities of Jewish Marxism,” Jewish Social Studies:
History, Culture, Society 25.2 (2020): 127–167, 137.
13. Ibid., 139.
14. Fine and Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left, 35.
15. Murthy, “Beyond Particularity and Universality,” 127.
16. Fine and Spencer, Antisemitism and the Left, 41.
17. Murthy, “Beyond Particularity and Universality,” 137. As Murthy
points out, Chad Alan Goldberg offers critical insights into the treatment
of Jews as a signifier of a pre-modernity/modernity binary, including
its reproduction in the “ideological formations” of anti-Zionism and
anti-capitalism, and also critically analyzes Marx’s view of “the Jews” in
Capital. See Chad Alan Goldberg, Modernity and the Jews in Western
Social Thought (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 43–75,
186.
19. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the
German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” 108: “As expressions of alienation,
these materialized forms of social relations acquire a life of their own and
reflexively form social action as well as social thought. The commodity as
a form, for example, represents a duality of social dimensions (value and
use-value) which interact such that the category simultaneously expresses
particular ‘reified’ social relations and forms of thought.”
20. See Lars Rensmann and Julia Schulze Wessel, “The Paralysis
of Judgment: Arendt and Adorno on Antisemitism and the Modern
Condition,” in Lars Rensmann and Samir Gandesha, eds., Arendt and
Adorno: Political and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2012), 197–225.
21. Such reflexivity is arguably lost in the iron cage of Marxist
orthodoxy’s rigidly and universally applied categories and telos that is
oblivious to particular conditions, the Holocaust, individual suffering, and
ultimately denigrates Judaism and Zionism as “particularistic.” It may also
be neglected in various post-structuralist, post-Marxist responses to such
exclusionary universality that ontologizes both Jewish identity and universal
emancipation, as well as their historical conditions (see Murthy, “Beyond
Particularity and Universality”). According to Viren Murthy, Postone
presumably points to a new “Jewish Marxism.” We suggest, however, that
Postone would have probably refuted this label, as he consistently opposed
89
any “Marxist” approach (Marx as dogma) but was in favor of “Marxian”

thinking (taking Marx as an intellectual resource or inspiration).
22. On Sartre and critical antisemitism research, see Ingo Elbe, “The
Anguish of Freedom: Is Sartre’s Existentialism an Appropriate Foundation
for a Theory of Antisemitism?” Antisemitism Studies 4.1 (2020), 48–81;
Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne.
23. Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew (New York: Schocken Books,
1948), 13.
24. Ibid., 17.
25. See Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee der Moderne,
74–75; Lars Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and
the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2017), 391.
26. Ingo Elbe, “The Anguish of Freedom.”
27. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 16–17.
28. Moishe Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twen-
tieth Century” in Moishe Postone and Eric Santner, eds., Catastrophe and
Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), 81–116, 85.
29. See Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie über den Antisemitismus
(Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 1998); and Rensmann, The Politics of
Unreason, chapter 6 (275–319).
30. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment: Philosophical Fragments (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002
[1947]), 139, 141.
31. Ibid., 142.
32. Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 292–295.
33. Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism” in Anson
Rabinbach and Jack Zipes, eds., Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust. The
Changing Situation in West Germany (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986),
302–314, 311.
34. The “Marxian approach,” argues Postone, “further developed by
Lukács, the Frankfurt School and Sohn-Rethel, stands opposed to those
one-sided reactions to traditional Marxism which have given up any serious
attempt to ground forms of thought historically.” Postone, “Anti-Semitism
and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” 108.
35. See Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 495.
German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” 108.

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.
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.
91
57. Moishe Postone, “Critical Theory and the Historical Transformations

of Capitalism,” 139.
58. Ibid., 139. Moreover, for Postone Habermas’s claim that Marx’s
categories have “become anachronistic as a result of successful state
intervention” in economic processes that established a primacy of the
political over the economic system, may have had some validity until the
early 1970s but were rendered entirely “questionable by the subsequent
global crisis of state-interventionist economies and the emergence of
neoliberal global capitalism.” (Ibid, 144).
59. In the most elaborated fashion, Postone did so in his last piece on
antisemitism in 2017, an essay which he modestly called a “preliminary
sketch” (and which will be addressed thoroughly in the final section of
this article). See Moishe Postone, “The Dualisms of Capitalist Modernity:
Reflections on History, the Holocaust, and Antisemitism” in Jack Jacobs,
ed., Jews and Leftist Politics (New York: Cambridge Univerity Press, 2017),
43–66, 44.
60. Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth
Century,” 86.
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid. This critique is leveled at both Arendt and the historian Raul
Hilberg.
63. Ibid.
64. Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 302.
65. Ibid., 313.
66. The first full version of this key theoretical piece was published
in German in the journal Merkur in 1982 with the title Die Logik des
Antisemitismus (“The Logic of Antisemitism”). An earlier essay by
Postone, also cited in this article, was published in New German Critique
and was titled Anti-Semitism and National Socialism, similar to other
publications that Postone published later. However, while laying some
theoretical foundations, this essay from 1980 primarily focused on German
and especially German left-wing responses to the television miniseries
“Holocaust” (1979). Even though this 1982 essay provided the apt title
and served as a starting point for Postone’s theory of antisemitism, there
is only rudimentary overlap with the latter in the final sections of the 1979
essay. Thus, despite these title adaptations these essays are to be viewed as
largely distinct (though many took them as identical). In 1986, Postone
eventually published another essay, largely representing the Merkur essay,

with the title “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism” in a collected volume

edited by Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes. See Moishe Postone, “Anti-
Semitism and National Socialism” in Anson Rabinbach and Jack Zipes,
eds., Germans and Jews Since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West
Germany (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986), 302–314.
67. Barbara Fried, “Überlegungen zu einer Ideologiekritik des An-
tisemitismus” in Christina Kaindl, ed., Kritische Wissenschaften im Neolib-
eralismus (Marburg: BdWi-Verlag, 2005), 201–217, 203.
68. This is something the Critical Theorists Horkheimer and Adorno
seem to suggest, against the main thread of their argument, in the second
thesis of their “Elements of Antisemitism.” They do so to support their
claims, similar to Sartre’s, that antisemitism is a “blindness” directed
against those who are “unprotected” and has, as such, nothing to do
with the actual behavior of Jews but is a social problem. Horkheimer and
Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 140: “And just as, depending on the
constellation, the victims are interchangeable: vagrants, Jews, Protestants,
Catholics, so each of them can replace the murderer . . . there is no
authentic anti-Semitism, and certainly no born anti-Semite.” For a critical
analysis, see Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 290.
71. Postone, “The Dualisms of Capitalist Modernity,” 47.
73. Ibid.
74. Rensmann, The Politics of Unreason, 158–171.
76. Ibid., 304.
77. Ibid., 307.
78. Ibid., 307ff.
79. In capitalist society, the commodity contains abstract and concrete
dimensions, and so do labor and labor-power. Concrete labor “refers to
specific forms of labor used to make particular objects, which can be used in
different ways. Abstract labor refers not only to labor that is abstracted from
concrete instantiations but also the historically specific type of mediation
that pervades capitalist society and takes on the form of an objectified social
relation. As Postone explains, in capitalist society, abstract mediation by
labor replaces overt forms of domination that we find in earlier societies.”
93
See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 125; Murthy, “Beyond
Particularity and Universality,” 148.
81. Ibid., 308.
82. Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the Twentieth
Century,” 92.
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.
90. See Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism,” 308.
91. Ibid., 311.
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/
104. Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 143.
105. Ibid., 143–144.


107. Moishe Postone, “The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the
Twentieth Century,” 81–116.
108. Talcott Parsons, “The Sociology of Modern Anti-Semitism” in
Isacque Graeber and Steuart Henderson Britt, eds., Jews in a Gentile World:
The Problem of Anti-Semitism (New York: Macmillan, 1942), 101–122.
109. Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew.
110. Béla Grunberger, “Der Antisemit und der Ödipuskomplex,”
Psyche 16.5 (1962), 255–272.
111. Béla Grunberger and Pierre Dessuant, Narcissisme, Christianisme,
Antisémitisme. Étude psychanalytique (Arles: Actes Sud, 1997), 299.
112. Moishe Postone, “The Dualisms of Capitalist Modernity: Reflec-
tions on History, the Holocaust, and Antisemitism” in Jack Jacobs, ed.,
Jews and Leftist Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press), 43–66.
Postone’s last article on antisemitism is largely based on his German-
language essay: Moishe Postone, “Die Antinomien der kapitalistischen
Moderne: Reflexionen über Geschichte, den Holocaust und die Linke” in
Nicolas Berg, ed., Kapitalismusdebatten um 1900: Über antisemitisierende
Semantiken des Jüdischen (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag), 435–453.
113. Postone, “The Dualisms of Capitalist Modernity,” 43. Postone
explicitly notes, to be sure, that the “pattern of changing responses to the
Holocaust was not unique to the left.” Rather, he wants to demonstrate
that this pattern “indicates the degree to which left conceptions were very
much part of their larger historical contexts” (49).
114. Ibid., 44.
115. Ibid.
116. Ibid., 48.
117. Ibid., 44, 48–49.
118. Ibid., 51.
119. Ibid., 54. Postone notes that this type of “universalism” was not
immediately hegemonic in the first postwar years. In fact, both the Soviet
Union and, to a lesser degree, the American public proved susceptible to
more or less overtly antisemitic conspiracy myths right after the Holocaust.
Think of the Communist Party show trials that invented “purportedly
international Zionist plots” against communism, like the trial against
Rudolf Slánsky in Prague in 1952. Unable “for ideological reasons to refer
explicitly to ‘international Jewry,’” Communist regimes used “Zionism” to
“fulfill the same function. Such antisemitic, anticosmopolitan accusations
95
became widespread in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union between

1948 and 1953.” Jews were portrayed in classical antisemitic fashion as
“agents of an abstract universal conspiracy that would undermine the
people’s community”—Communist authorities now simply termed
them “Zionists.” Less overtly violent and “with less openly antisemitic
language . . . McCarthyism in the United States signaled a similar turn
against cosmopolitanism . . . against ‘international Communism,’ which
frequently was associated with Jews.” Postone, “The Dualisms of Capitalist
Modernity,” 54–55.
120. Ibid., 45, 50.
121. Ibid., 55–56.
122. Ibid., 52.
123. Ibid., 56–57.
124. Ibid., 50.
125. Ibid., 56.
126. Ibid., 59–60.
127. Ibid.
128. By 1967, Soviet propaganda had declared Zionism to be a “world
threat,” while large parts of the European Left also turned against the
Jewish state, expressing “solidarity” for the “armed struggle” against, and
the desire to destroy, the “construct Israel.” By the 1980s, some demanded
“boycotts of Israel’s beaches and Kibbuzim.”
130. Ibid., 60. For Postone, these new discourses on the Left absorbed
the ‘campist’ legacy of the dualistic worldview associated with the Cold War,
whereby “anti-Americanism per se became coded as progressive”: “The
Cold War category of ‘camp’ substituted a spatial category for historical
ones . . . This spatial, essentially dualistic framework helped eradicate from
memory the experience of the first half of the twentieth century, which
showed that opposition to an imperial power is not necessarily progressive;
there were fascist ‘anti-imperialisms’ as well.” See Postone, “The Dualisms
of Capitalist Modernity,” 61.
131. Ibid., 62, 65.
132. Ibid., 65.
133. Ibid., 62.
134. Ibid., 65, 66.
135. Ibid., 62. Postone notes “the degree to which much contemporary
discourse on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict exceeds the bounds of political

and critical analysis,” and just how enormously “emotionally invested”

such “anti-Zionism” has become.
136. Ibid., 63–64. Moreover, Postone attributes an “anti-hegemonic”
reversal to this anti-Jewish global conspiracy myth: a reversal away from
abstract-universalist conceptions in response to the emerging rise of
Holocaust memory and consciousness in societies during the 1960s
and 1970s, which started to pay attention to the particular persecution
of the European Jews. The reversal, however, turned Jews once again
into perpetrators and, in so doing, also served psychological purposes of
alleviating European (and Leftist) guilt, and morally elevating the desire
to “settle the score” with the victims for reminding society of the Nazi
atrocities, their perpetrators, and their collaborators: “[t]he displacements
and reversals involved whereby an identity was posited between Israeli
Jews and the Nazis, and the Palestinians became the “true Jews,”
victims of “genocide,” helps explain why the conflict between Israel and
the Palestinians has been so cathected by the left.” Ibid., 62. The anti-
hegemonic reversal and inversion hereby also points to the dynamics of
a “secondary antisemitism” flourishing not despite but because of (the
memory of) the Shoah: the denigration of Jews and the Jewish state that is
motivated by the urge to relativize the Nazi crimes and to blame the victims
for the unspeakable atrocities committed against them. On the subject of
“secondary antisemitism,” see Lars Rensmann, “Guilt, Resentment, and
Post-Holocaust Democracy: The Frankfurt School’s Analysis of ‘Secondary
Antisemitism’ in the Group Experiment and Beyond,” Antisemitism Studies
1.1 (2017): 4–37.
138. Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie über den Antisemitismus; The
Politics of Unreason, 21, 314; on “modernized antisemitism,” see The
Politics of Unreason, 355.
141. Ibid., 101.
142. Ibid.
143. Ibid., 102. Let us not forgot that Nazism was not a movement
driven by Prussian national conservatives seeking to restore an old system;
rather, it was a revolutionary movement driven primarily by young men,
from the rank and file to its leadership.
97
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.
Lars Rensmann is Professor of European Politics and Society

and the Director of the Research Centre for the Study of
Democratic Cultures and Politics at the University of Groningen
in the Netherlands. Rensmann has previously worked and taught
at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, John Cabot University
(Rome), Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley,
Haifa University, the University of Vienna, the Free University
of Berlin, and the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. His
books include The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and
Antisemitism (SUNY Press, 2017); Arendt and Adorno: Political
and Philosophical Investigations (Stanford University Press,
co-edited with Samir Gandesha, 2012); Politics and Resentment:
Antisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union
(Brill, co-edited with Julius H. Schoeps, 2011); and, Gaming
the World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture
(Princeton University Press, co-authored with Andrei S. Markovits,
2010).

Samuel Salzborn is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science

at the Institute for Political Science at the University of Giessen
in Germany. His main research areas are political theory, politi-
cal sociology, and democracy, with a special focus on right-wing
extremism and antisemitism research. His latest book is The Modern
State and Its Enemies: Democracy, Nationalism and Antisemitism
(London: Anthem Press, 2020).
99
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Modern Antisemitism as

Moishe Postone’s Theory and its Historical

Lars Rensmann and Samuel

The enduring legacy of Moishe Postone’s work in the fields of intellectual

Antisemitism Studies Vol. 5, No. 1 • DOI 10.2979/antistud.5.1.03

Moishe Postone’s small but highly focused oeuvre has made a

new, revised critical-theoretical framework for the study of modern

Marx and Beyond: The Intellectual Context of Postone’s

Before we examine Postone’s theory and its key set of assumptions

46 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

certainly beyond Marxism, both of which failed to grasp the nature,

understanding of modern anti-Semitism as anti-Jewish prejudice, as

48 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

for instance, in the association of Jews with money.15 There are

In addition to Marx as a key theorist providing historical and

50 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

independent from the antisemitic idea of the Jew26: “[i]t is therefore

injustice of the whole class.”31 Modern antisemitism effectively

52 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

capitalism as historically determinate” but treated labor “transhis-

an unprecedented level—claiming, among other things, that “the

54 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

sphere.”51 Only this broad spread and continuous reinforcement of

deconstructivism is ahistorical and methodologically old-fashioned

56 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

against Frankfurt School Critical Theory. In his later work, Postone

Postone argues, “illuminate how [the Nazi program of extermina-

On the Societal Origins of the Holocaust—How Postone

While Marx may have underestimated the power and significance

58 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

underestimated the historical specificity of both antisemitism and

capitalism’s constitutive abstraction (abstract or exchange value),

60 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

merely a functional tool to protect class interests). By this he means

Whereas most forms of racism attribute concrete physical and

antisemitism does not treat Jews as inferior but as dangerous

What further distinguishes modern antisemitism, then, from

62 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

processes and phenomena and thus viewed as distinctly conspira-

what modern capitalism is and the way it manifests itself. It is

64 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

although social, is impersonal and objective,” thus seeming to be

Although the commodity is a social form expressing both

appears as the sole repository of value, as the manifestation of

On the logical level of the analysis of the commodity, its dou-

66 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

and social processes but objectified as an antinomy of a seemingly

phase of capitalism.”92 Especially during the interwar period, Jews

Modern anti-Semitism, then, is a particularly pernicious fetish

68 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

In view of Nazism as a foreshortened anti-capitalist move-

Antisemitism and Social Complexity—The Reception and

Postone’s socio-historical and socio-theoretical work illuminates

70 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

of modern capitalism but also abstract or universal thinking and

72 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

belief that the “circulation sphere is responsible for exploitation

a foreshortened anti-capitalism risks glossing over their positive

74 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

antisemitism executed by the Nazis. Horkheimer and Adorno

Right, Left, and Beyond—The Historical and Contemporary

In his last essay on the subject of antisemitism, published in 2017,

76 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

46 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

48 Antisemitism Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2021)

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