Critical theory, the critique of Israel, and capitalism

 [This text expands of the previous blog post and was used for the "teach-in" at Gazaplatsen, the student encampment in front of the main building of the University of Gothenburg, May 22]

Critical theory, the critique of Israel, and capitalism

Carl Cassegård

 

Intro

The horror continues in Gaza. Israel has started its invasion of Rafah. It is telling inhabitants to evacuate, but where should they go? 

I think of Herbert Marcuse, who wrote in 1969, at the time of the Vietnam War: “We know […] that the situation is not a revolutionary one […]. But this same situation is so terrible, so suffocating and demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction: one can bear it no longer, one is suffocating and one has to let some air in” (Marcuse 1999: 123)

When the encampments started at Swedish universities, I felt happy. Not for the Palestinians, who are still suffering. But for the students and for everyone else participating in the action. Because whenever people choose to act in accordance with their conscience against what they’re allowed to do, they’re exercising something magnificent: their power of judgment. Seeing that makes me happy, because that ability proves that people can be more than cogwheels.

Today I want to speak of Frankfurt School critical theory and the accusation of antisemitism that is so easily hurled against anyone criticizing Israel or taking a pro Palestine stance. I will show why, from a Frankfurt School position, it is wrong to equate the criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

 

What do we criticize when we criticize Israel?

I will start with this: Protests are often seen as self-righteous. But when we criticize Israel, it is not only Israel that we criticize, but something larger in which the entire present world order is implicated. What Western powers have done through colonialism is both terribly similar to and a historical precondition for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. We know that lord Palmerston laid out the outline of the policy according to which an increased Jewish population in Palestine should be encouraged because it would be in the interests of the British empire. What we are seeing in Gaza is a result of this empire-building logic, which persists today and which explains why the US and other Western powers refuse to give up their support for Israel.

There is also another way in which the West is complicit in the genocide. When people in the West shy away from criticizing Israel, they do so in part to maintain their good conscience: they do not want to be associated with the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. That motive is honourable. But today the Palestinians are paying the price for this good conscience, which has therefore become something both immoral and shameful.

 

The categorical imperative

But what are the moral implications of the Holocaust, according to Frankfurt School thinkers?

Here is a quote. In Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno writes: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” (Adorno 1973: 365)

Similarly, in the essay “Education after Auschwitz” he states: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again…Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz” (Adorno 2005: 191).

What does this mean? It points to the centrality of Auschwitz: a historical trauma so overwhelming that nothing so far in history can compare with it. It is such a trauma not only to the victims of the holocaust, but also to the European culture and society that produced the catastrophe. Understandably, its uniqueness has been affirmed in repeated debates in Germany and elsewhere, along with a firm commitment that it should never be relativized.

Today this is leading to grotesque outcomes – especially in Germany, where writers, academics and artists (several of them Jewish and belonging to the tradition of critical theory) like Nancy Fraser, Judith Butler, Masha Gessen, Candice Breitz, Adania Shibli and Laurie Anderson have all been censored for their critique of Israel, losing guest professorships or having public events cancelled.

If Israel cannot be criticized under any circumstances, then the country is given a carte blanche to commit any atrocity whatsoever. Where are all the German moral philosophers? It is understandable that Germans feel guilt about their Nazi past, but why should the Palestinians pay the price of their bad conscience?

But we are not just talking about Germany!  In the US, the congress passed a resolution last month banning the slogan “From the river to the sea”, which originated as a slogan by leftist Palestinian nationalists calling for a democratic secular state in the territory of historic Palestine, as anti-Semitic. The White House declared the term “intifada” to be “hate speech”. These resolutions and declarations now form part of the arsenal used to repress students at US campuses (Zunes 2024).  In Sweden, recall the debate around Israel's participation in the Eurovision Song Contest.

 

Never again

It is important to point out that Adorno’s “never again” cannot be used to stress the uniqueness of Auschwitz. On the contrary, the imperative is important precisely because genocide has become a horrifying normality.

In the essay on education, Adorno stresses that the social conditions that produced Auschwitz have mostly remained unchanged. Genocide is not an exception, but rooted in structural conditions: “barbarism continues as long as the fundamental conditions that favored [it] continue largely unchanged. That is the whole horror” (Adorno 2005: 191).

This links up with major themes of his writings – above all the Dialectic of Enlightenment (the entwinement of enlightenment and myth) and the idea of permanent catastrophe rooted in class conflict and the profit motive. Catastrophe is not a future threat that can still be averted, but our present capitalist reality. This idea is inspired by Walter Benjamin: “That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given.” (Benjamin 1999: 473).

To Adorno, Auschwitz was a symbol for this permanent catastrophe, not a unique occurrence. He universalized its implications by claiming that it formed “a hellish unity” with the atom bomb, American war atrocities in Vietnam, and “torture as a permanent institution” (Adorno 2000: 104). Elsewhere, he also mentions the genocide of the Armenians, European colonialism in Africa, and Cold War anti-communism as part of this catastrophic unity.

The idea that we live in a still ongoing catastrophe is important since it shows that his “imperative” to prevent a repetition of Auschwitz is not conservative. It is not a matter of protected the status quo, which is already catastrophic. On the contrary, the only way to prevent catastrophe is to abolish the status quo, to fundamentally alter the existing state of society.

I think it’s important to point out that Adorno’s imperative cannot be used to justify a carte blanche of the kind mentioned above. On the contrary, for it to have any meaning, it should force us all - regardless of whether we are Germans, Jews or any other nationality - to constantly scrutinize the world and our actions so as to intervene against suffering and catastrophes. As he points out, the imperative not to repeat Auschwitz presupposes that a recurrence is possible. It can therefore not be based on the idea that Auschwitz is wholly, absolutely unique (for a good clarification of this point, see Catlin 2023). Indeed, the idea of such uniqueness would relegate the horror to the past and deflect criticism from our present society.

Criticizing Israel is part of the work needed to halt the permanent catastrophe engulfing capitalist society. It is neither a matter of anti-Semitism nor of self-righteously pointing the finger at another country, but aims at abolishing the system that makes genocide possible. No more Auschwitz means: no more genocide anywhere.

To return to the encampments: what we commit to do here is also something that will determine our commitments in regard to other states than Israel. I support an academic boycott, but not only against Israel. The boycott should be against any country, now or in the future, that commits atrocities or war-crimes or violates fundamental human rights. We must have the courage to demand that.

Marcuse said in 1969 that the situation was not revolutionary. The same is regrettably true today. If anything, it is counter-revolutionary, a time of reaction. But revolt and protest don’t need to rely on the idea of progress, on riding with the wave of history. John Holloway writes: “We struggle not because we think we will win, but because we cannot accept that which exists” (Holloway 2022: 17). As Benjamin said: revolution is not riding with the train of progress but pulling the emergency brake.

 

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics, London: Routledge & Kegal Paul.

Adorno, Theodor W. (2000) Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (ed. Rolf Tiedeman), Cambridge: Polity.

Adorno, Theodor W. (2005) Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, New York: Columbia University Press.

Benjamin, Walter (1999) The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Catlin, Jonathon (2023) “Antisemitism and racism ‘after Auschwitz’: Adorno on the ‘hellish unity’ of ‘permanent catastrophe’”, pp. 203-230, in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.) Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism, London: Bloomsbury. 

Holloway, John (2022) Hope in Hopeless Times, London: Pluto Press.

Marcuse, Herbert (1999) Letter to Theodor W. Adorno 5 April 1969, in Theodor W. Adorno & Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement”, New Left Review I/233 (January/February): 118-136.

Zunes, Stephen (2024) “The Chilling Effect of Equating Criticism of Israel to Antisemitism”, The Progressive Magazine, May 18.

Gaza, encampments, and capitalism

This morning, when I read the news about the encampments at Swedish universities, I felt happy. Not necessarily for the Palestinians, who are still suffering unspeakably, but for the students and for everyone else participating in the action. Because whenever people choose to act in accordance with their conscience against what they’re allowed to do, they’re exercising something magnificent: their freedom and their power of judgment. And seeing that makes me happy, because that’s an ability that proves that people can be more than cogwheels.

I also thought of Herbert Marcuse, who wrote in 1969, at the time of the Vietnam War: “We know […] that the situation is not a revolutionary one […]. But this same situation is so terrible, so suffocating and demeaning, that rebellion against it forces a biological, physiological reaction: one can bear it no longer, one is suffocating and one has to let some air in” (Marcuse 1999: 123)

I also think about the fact that it is not only Israel that should be ashamed. The stereotype of people who protest is that they are self-righteous. But when we criticize Israel, it is not only Israel that we criticize, but something much larger in which the entire Western world and the present world order are implicated. What the West has done through colonialism is both terribly similar to and a historical precondition for what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. We know that lord Palmerston laid out the outline of the policy according to which an increased Jewish population in Palestine should be encouraged because it would be in the interests of the British empire.* What we are seeing in Gaza is a result of this empire-building logic, which still exists today and which makes the United States and other Western powers refuse to give up their support for Israel.

There is also another way in which the West is complicit in the genocide. When we in the West today shy away from criticizing Israel, we do so in part to maintain our good conscience: we do not want to be associated with the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. That motive is honourable. But today the Palestinians are paying the price for this good conscience, which has therefore become something both immoral and shameful. Criticizing Israel is not the same as anti-Semitism. To claim so risks becoming a carte blanche for the country to commit any atrocity whatsoever. 

In Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno writes  that Hitler has imposed a new “categorical imperative” on mankind, namely to prevent a repetition of Auschwitz (Adorno 1973: 365). I think it's important to point out that this imperative cannot be used to justify a carte blanche of the kind mentioned above. On the contrary, for it to have any meaning, it should force us all - regardless of whether we are Germans, Jews or any other nationality - to constantly scrutinize our actions so as to prevent or stop suffering. The imperative not to repeat presuupposes that a recurrence is possible, and can therefore not be based on the idea that Auschwitz is absolutely unique.** Indeed, the idea of such uniqueness would relegate the horror to the past and deflect criticism from our present society. Precisely in order to prevent a recurrence, it is essential to view it as part of the “permanent catastrophe” fuelled by the capitalist system that has become dominant in the modern world. Criticizing Israel is therefore neither a matter of anti-Semitism nor of self-righteously pointing the finger at another country, but part of a critique that aims at abolishing the system that makes genocide possible. 

[Picture taken from ETC]

* See the historical sections of Andreas Malm's essay in Verso Blog. For a response on the conclusions Malm draws from his historical analysis, see Matan Kaminer.

** For a good clarification of this point, see Catlin (2023). 

References

Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Negative Dialectics (tr. by E. B. Ashton), London: Routledge & Kegal Paul.

Catlin, Jonathon (2023) “Antisemitism and racism ‘after Auschwitz’: Adorno on the ‘hellish unity’ of ‘permanent catastrophe’”, pp. 203-230, in Marcel Stoetzler (ed.) Critical Theory and the Critique of Antisemitism, London: Bloomsbury. 

Kaminer, Matan (2024) "After the Flood: A response to Andreas Malm", Verso Blog, 10 May 2024; https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/on-palestinian-resistance-and-global-solidarity

Malm, Andreas (2024) “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth”, Verso blog, 8 April 2024; https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth.

Marcuse, Herbert (1999) Letter to Theodor W. Adorno 5 April 1969, in Theodor W. Adorno & Herbert Marcuse, “Correspondence on the German Student Movement”, New Left Review I/233 (January/February): 118-136.

Is the Communist Manifesto a Promethean text?

The Communist Manifesto is often seen as a locus classicus of Marxist Prometheanism. Its opening sections on the bourgeoisie and its capacity to revolutionize the world – accomplishing “wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids” – are usually understood as a enthusiastic paean to the release of humanity’s productive capacities. It goes without saying that this reading of the text fits well with the customary celebration of the development of the productive forces in later, orthodox Marxism – a celebration resting on trust, central to so-called historical materialism, in the progress of technology as a motor of history. It is, however, possible to detect a certain ambiguity in the manifesto, and a case could be made for exercising some caution before equating the undeniable productivist enthusiasm that colours the section on the bourgeoisie with the trust in productive forces characteristic of orthodox Marxism. Consider, for instance, the following lines from the manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?  

Commentators like to remark that Marx and Engels here unwittingly seem to express admiration for the bourgeoisie. Yet for all their magnificence one wonders if these lines really amount to a celebration of either the bourgeoisie or the productive forces. Isn’t the bourgeoisie rather portrayed as a demoniacal, hellish force, impressive in the same way that Satan is impressive? Marshall Berman (in All That Is Solid Melts into Air) catches this demoniacal side of the manifesto’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie when he compares it to Faust, the prototypical modernist who can only remake the world with the help of Mephisto. The relentless whirl of destruction and creation that capitalism sets in motion would then not so much be a feat to be repeated and emulated by socialism, as a bewitching spectacle of an unfolding catastrophe – something akin to what happens in Goethes’ poem about the sorcerer’s apprentice who is unable to control the powers that he has unleashed (“Die ich rief, die Geister, / Werd’ ich nun nicht los”). Just a few lines below the quoted passage, Marx and Engels in fact explicitly refer to this poem when they write that bourgeois society, which “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

To be sure, there are other passages in the manifesto that counterbalance the impression that the forces of production are demonical and not to be trusted. It seems quite clear that while Marx and Engels deem the bourgeoisie unable to control these forces rationally, they are quite optimistic about the prospects of mastering these forces rationally in a socialist society. It is significant, however, that only two very brief sentences can be found in the entire manifesto that clearly celebrate the productive forces as something that the proletariat too, after its victory, should promote (they thus write that once the proletariat has become the ruling class, it will “increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible”, specifying on the next page that this involves extending factories, cultivating waste-lands, and improving soil). Furthermore, one should note that even as they make these pronouncements, they never portray the proletariat as compulsively obliged to follow such a course. While “[t]he bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production”, the proletariat may choose to do so freely but unlike the bourgeoisie it is never forced to do so by any heteronomous logic or lawlikeness in society. It is thus only in a very qualified sense that the manifesto can be read as “prometheusian”. In view of its ambiguities, a more reasonable interpretation might instead be that Marx and Engels caution against an uncontrolled release of these forces and call for a society capable of their rational mastery.

With these remarks, my aim is not to deny the enthusiasm or even fascination that colours the manifesto’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie’s transformative powers. But I do question whether this enthusiasm is really based on an embrace of the productive forces per se. Marx and Engels are in fact quite open about the existence of another, quite different source of their glee, namely the fact that the “everlasting uncertainty” and “constant disruption of all social relations” would be so destructive of religious and other traditional beliefs that people would finally be forced to “face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives”. In other words, what appears to be praise of the productive forces may very well be better understood as praise of their disruptive power, of the shock they deal to traditional culture, which awakens the mind and dispels religious and ideological haze.

It was for this reason that Walter Benjamin too would later celebrate modern technology – namely because of the shock effect of modern techniques of reproduction, of photography, and glass architecture, and its power to bring about an “awakening from the nineteenth century”. As the example of Benjamin shows, celebrating technology for its shock effect is not at all the same thing as endorsing its continuous growth or any idea of continuous “progress” resting on the development of the productive forces. On the contrary, that idea of such growth or progress was always anathema to Benjamin. Appreciating the shock effect of technology is thus quite compatible with rejecting productivism or Prometheanism.

The manifesto, then, points in two directions. Apart from the passages that anticipate the glorification of productive capacity typical of later orthodox Marxism, there are also passages that, in my reading, make more sense as a paean to the shock-effect and that emphasize the demonic rather than the beneficial side of technology. Whereas the former passages affirm the domination over nature by means of technology, the latter seem rather to stress the need for a rational mastery, or taming, of technology itself - a mastery that the bourgeoisie is incapable of but which the proletariat might accomplish. In Benjamin’s words, such rational mastery would not be over nature per se, but rather over the relation to nature. Crucially, such mastery is not necessarily productivist or Promethean, but can equally well take the form of abstaining from exploiting nature: rather than increasing our reliance on technological progress, it might try to decrease it. Rather than promoting growth, it might aim for degrowth, or, in other words, for an economy that would be free from the compulsive acceleration and accumulation typical of capitalism.

Goethe'z Zauberlehrling, by Erich Schütz

Roadside picnic and not being able to think

The Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic (Orion House, 2012) is very good. This is an early example of a sci-fi novel in the postapocalyptic mood. The scientists helplessly try to understand an alien technology, but it remains a riddle. A mood of resignation sets in. The zone around the mysterious object is shunned and quaranteened. Left as a landscape of poisonous ruins, dangers, death. Stalkers gather the stuff illegally. 

Reading the final scene I had the sensation of reading something quite new, something rarely expressed in literature. What was it? It's not about the religious language, which is commonplace. It has to do with the protagonist, Red, and the sudden inability to think which he experiences. To start with, I think its clear that he embodies an experience and a longing that is easy to recognize for anyone who's been to elementary school, in particular in a class where many have a working class background. I am reminded of the "lads" in Paul Willis' Learning to Labour, whose very rebelliousness gets them stuck in low-wage jobs or unemployment. Red is similar: stuck in unfavorable structural conditions and constantly chased by moralizers and the police. He is tough, violent and courageous but at the same time a humiliated underdog – just listen to this passage

But how do I stop being a stalker when I have a family to feed? Get a ob? And I don’t want to work for you, your work makes me want to puke, you understand? If a man has a job, then he’s always working for someone else, he’s a slave, nothing more… (p. 192).

One of his primary experiences is that of constant humiliation. He is forced to pretend, bend and bow, try to say pleasing things to people in authority, humiliated by life, by bad luck, by being "born as riffraff." His forays into the zone has thrown his family life into disarray: his daughter Monkey is a mutant and his undead father has risen from the grave to live in his apartment. He spends time in prison, drinks heavily and often uses violence (but only against other men). But he is not broken: he has his toughness, his hatred and his will to get even, and above all he has moments of generosity, compassion and courage - even though he berates himself for those moments. Despite knowing how dangerous it is to be kind in a hard, unfair and ungrateful world, he instinctively helps people around him, like Kirill and even the undeserving Gutalin. He's "good," as his friend Noonan says. 

Near the end, when he and Arthur, after hellish hardships, aching and death-weary, arrive at their goal — the golden sphere in the zone that is said to to fulfill one's innermost desires — he is confronted for the first time with the need to think, and discovers that he cannot. He cannot think in the sense of really finding the right words for what needs to be done and that need to be said. I recognized myself in it. That was well described. Before his eyes, the young Arthur has just died, after foolishly running towards the sphere while jubilantly shouting: "Happiness for everyone! Free!"

Well, that’s done, he thought unwillingly. The road is open. He could even go right now, but it’d be better, of course, to wait a little longer…. In any case, I need to think. I’m not used to thinking – that’s the thing. What does it mean – “to think”? “To think” means to outwit, dupe, pull a con, but non of these are any use here…

All right. The Monkey, Father… Let them pay for everything, may those bastards suffer, let them eat shit like I did… No, that’s all wrong, Red. That is, it’s right, of course, but what does it actually mean? What do I need? These are curses, not thoughts. He was chilled by some terrible premonition and, instantly skipping the many arguments still lying ahead, ordered himself ferociously: Look here, you redheaded asshole, you aren’t going to leave this place until you figure it out, you’ll keel over next to this ball, you’ll burn, you’ll rot, bastard, but you aren’t going anywhere.

My Lord, where are my words, where are my thoughts? He hit himself hard in the face with a half-open fist. My whole life I haven’t had a single thought! (p191)

Yet, ever the tough guy, he drags himself towards the sphere, dizzy and sweaty, as his thoughts go into overdrive.

And he was no longer trying to think. He just kept repeating to himself in despair, like a prayer, “I’m an animal, you can see that I’m an animal. I have no words, they haven’t taught me the words; I don’t know how to think, those bastards didn’t let me learn how to think. But if you really are – all powerful, all knowing, all understanding – figure it out! Look into my soul, I know – everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want – because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other thant those words of his – HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!” (p. 193)

And what exactly is thinking if not this?

So what - whose - predicament is being addressed here? The working classes? Not only them. The book is science fiction, but not of the "hard" kind. There is no trust in progress here, no naive belief in humanity's mission to conquer the stars. Humanity as such is humiliated. Hence the title, the "roadside picnic". Whatever arrived didn't even bother to try to make contact, didn't perhaps even notice human civlization. It left its refuse behind, just like picnicers leave their dirty garbage behind on the roadside, for insects and other lifeforms to explore. So in a sense, a more general audience is intended here. The mass of humlliated people? And today, in view of the dead end of our industrial civilization, maybe that is us.