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.