The orthodox marxist swamp is hesitant in giving too much support for the Iranian peoples’ struggle for democracy. Richard Seymour, popular ‘Lenins Tomb’ SWP blogger and author of the Goebbel-de-gook The Liberal Defence of Murder has just published a ‘guest post’ from ‘a comrade’ defending Iran as a bastion of democracy and liberty; ‘over all, the Iranian Revolution has done more good than bad for a majority of Iranians, making Iran the best country — the most democratic! — in the Middle East today.(…) a nation ruled by unworthy rulers must still be defended from it’s many enemies’ says Seymour’s chum ‘Yoshie.’

This snide sideways swipe at the democracy movement could be tactically timed to undermine it; we remain charitable and put it down to sheer stupidity. The Leninists and their friends at the ‘Monthly Review’ foundation see Israel as the enemy, hence defence of Iran at all costs, as the most able strategic player in the fight against what they regard as the region’s lapdog for the eternal ‘Great Satan.’ MR zine’s coverage on the Iran affair  is about playing the neutral card. In reality, this ‘position’ can only end in the ‘logical’ support for a clampdown against an Iranian democratic movement that seeks a thawing of relations with the US and Israel. The Leninists act as if Iran going nuclear would be some kind of parallel to good old Uncle Joe Stalin procaiming the existence of ‘the workers’ bomb’ in 1948! By supporting the status quo, by giving credit to the Amadinijad regime as the most resolute expression of ‘anti-Zionism’, the Leninist politbureau and MR zine fail to realise that conservative forces in Israel and Iran strengthen each other - in fact each rely upon a terrible dichotomy that must be broken.

Why anti-semitism is more than just another ‘category’ of oppression

With the breakdown of the state building projects, East and West (replicated in the demise of the anti-colonial state building exercises that had previously blossomed across huge swathes of the Southern hemisphere between 1945 and the mid 1970s), the rolling back of welfare provision evereywhere, the demise of full employment and the final eclipse of Fordism, came the advent of neoliberalism in the early 1970s. The defining features of this neoliberal ‘project’ (’project’ in abbreviations - this was an advance much less dependent upon an elite cabal so favoured by leftist mythology) can be listed as a) a fully mobile capital/labour axis; b) the rise of new centres of capital accumulation; and underpinning this all was c) the changing relationship between state and economy.

In parallel with this crisis of accumulation, we can now fully glimpse the contours of what was a dominant but one-sided critique also becoming submerged at the same time as the eclipse of state-interventionist capitalism - a critique of abstract universality. A significant manifestation of this critique was the role ascribed to Nazism across pretty much the whole of the political spectrum after 1945: it was viewed as a particularly repugnant form of anti-modernism. In short, Nazism was viewed East and West, Left and Right,  as an historical regression. This can be illuminated by the way that the national socialist emphasis placed upon the wholesale destruction of Jewish people was significantly diminished in terms of mainstream historiography in the post-war years, as the central ideology of the regime. Post-war commentators agreed that the Final Solution was a barbaric act, but it was merely placed alongside the many other acts of fascist bestiality, it rated - at most - as worthy of ‘equal’ mention.  As Mira Vogel says:

‘This constituted a submergence of specificity of the Holocaust. It was a form of universalist colour blindness which viewed any mention of Jews-as-Jews as unacceptably particularistic (…) In the USSR there were show trials; the Jewish Doctors’ Plot; in the US, McCarthyism. Each configuration viewed its foe as abstract and intangible. In each, Jewish identity was not treated as contingent, but central. Soviet show trials described Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ and ‘Zionists’. The Doctors’ Plot led to preparations in ‘53 to round up Soviet Jews, abandoned on Stalin’s death that year. The turn against ‘cosmopolitanism’ was also seen in McCarthyism, a move against “international communism”. After 53, Cold War ‘regularised’, with blocs presenting fetishised values of alternatively liberty or equality, actualised according to universalised principles.’ (1)

‘As the economic ‘linear triumphalism’ of the post-war years grounds to a halt in the 1970s, this dominant discourse of abstract universality also begins to break down. It is apparent that control is no longer seen to reside within national state structures, and alongside this the rise of postmodernity  sees the return of the repressed. In short, the fundamental forms of society themselves that are eroding (state, economy) are mirrored by the advent of  a concrete particularism: this is a form of thinking that comes to dominate the whole of society, not least the Left.

The ideological terrain shifts. Nazism goes from being viewed as particularly ‘anti-modern’ to instead being seen as an exemplar of modernism.  An example of this frame of thinking is illuminated by Andrei Codrescu:

‘Ezra Pound, T S Eliot,  James Joyce and William Carlos Williams are the daddies of modernism, the chief claim of which is that is a non-Jewish avantgarde (…) Modernism was a (mostly) antisemitic avantgarde and anticommunist to boot (…) both Marinetti and Tzara aspired to the same revolution.’(2)

Jews now become singled out, once again, as an example of a concrete particular, held up to blame for the failure of an eternal capitalism which has gone into terminal decline. The nation state, East, West, North and South has turned against a previously impregnable universalism. Particularities are sought out as a scapegoat for a fetishistic economic form-in-crisis but which is persuasive, intangible - and psychically abstract from human control. A return to the form of anti-semitism that brought Hitler to power is now back, with all the dire consequences that entails - not least, the real threat of nuclear war by Ahmadinijad’s Iran.

Left give covering fire to anti-semitism

In failing to comprehend the real nature of an abstract domination in the economic sphere, an anti-colonial struggle is applauded, regardless of the right-wing, nationalist or anti-semitic leadership at the helm. Instead, these negative aspects are bracketed. Any political group which proclaims anti-Americanism as a core defining feature is seen by the European and North American Left as a socially emancipatory vanguard, no matter how rabid they are in terms of socially destructive policies for their own people. Women’s rights are ignored; support is given to demands for the veil. Rights for gays are disparaged as - an abstract universalism! Tangible and much closer barriers to change are disregarded in favour of aligning with ideologies that support the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy.

The whole of the Middle East has suffered a rapid erosion in living standards since the economic crisis of the early 1970s. The real reason for this has not been explained by the Left - instead, we have seen a peculiar strain of Orientalism take hold - and one that is tragically far from fully understanding the implications of anti-semitism.  Whilst the Left now is insignificant in real terms, they hinder a resolution of the stalemate between Israel and Palestine all the while we allow the problem to be conflated into a manichean frame of thinking, with Israel to blame for every problem in the region. To create an atmosphere where localised, social solutions can be projected is hindered by those that seeks to give support to so-called anti-imperialist allies, but tragically, in so doing the European/North American Left hide their own real helplessness - and are unable to admit it so.

Sal Paradise

Notes

The conceptual antinomies of thought, located within social structures themselves, and which give rise to ‘abstract universality’ and ‘concrete particularisms’ has been interpreted here, but is an original idea presented by Moishe Postone at the talk he gave at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, on Monday 14 June. The paper was entitled ‘History, the Holocaust and the anti-capitalist Left.’

(1)  Moishe Postone on history, the Holocaust and the anti-capitalist Left’ - notes from a talk By M Vogel

http://greensengage.wordpress.com/

(2) The Posthuman Dada Guide by Andrei Codrescu (Princetown Press, 2009) p79

               

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