About two years ago I posted about how to spot “left-wing antisemitism.” I have now, after quite a lot of consideration, decided that my previous analysis was theoretically weak. So here is a reconsideration – in which I make an argument for adopting an account of populist and elitist antisemitism instead.
I dislike the phrase “left-wing antisemitism”. Or at least the conjunction of “left-wing” and “antisemitism” comes too easily. Certainly one can identify the difference between a populist antisemitism and an elitist one: on the one side social theory that asserts the inherent unfreedom of society, due in most part a sort of conspiracy theory antisemitism that imagines the world, capital, and the media run by Jews keeping the rest of the population in check; on the other a social theory that asserts the inherent freedom of society, a commitment to the laissez-faire, which nonetheless is perpetually worried about the alien influence of Jews and the capacity of Jews to abuse their privileged status as Jews to undermine that freedom, whether by fomenting revolution or through undermining the principles of free and fair exchange. But the differentiation that we normally make between left-wing and right-wing does not so easily map on to populist and elitist antisemitism. Rather, the difference in bourgeois society between “right-wing” and “left-wing” centres essentially on the “Jewish question”: that is, the question of how a Jew can live in a bourgeois society; what protections and privileges a supposedly universal society should afford Jews; whether the preservation and protection of the particularity of Jewry necessarily undermines the state’s universal character. This is to say that the “Jewish question” (and this is where Marx’s analysis is quite correct) occurs only in a society that is fundamentally unreconciled in regard to the relationship between universal and particular. To be either “left-wing” or “right-wing” as positions in bourgeois politics is to presuppose what is unreconciled: it is to push either for the universal or the particular while recognising the other.
That might sound a bit abstract but it can be fleshed out a little. Normally we talk about “right-wing” or “left-wing” as being an argument about whether we have a small or a big state. The right wing thinks that the state should make minimal incursions into people’s lives, and thinks that freedom is best preserved where that freedom is asocial in character, where it asserts “freedom to stand against the state” as an element of precisely what the state is; while the left wing thinks that they state should be big in order to guarantee, for everyone, a certain type of social freedom: a “freedom in the state” in which the citizen must nonetheless participate fully. So the traditional right-wing position on the “Jewish Question” is to assert the Jew’s right to practice Judaism in private, to be Jewish in private, so long as this private Jewishness does not threaten to overturn the state as such; while the left-wing position on the “Jewish Question” tends to assert that the Jew, just like everyone else, is free to do as everyone else is, but at the same time must at certain times give up his or her Jewish character in order to participate in that freedom: for the Jew to separate himself off from society is for him to condemn himself to a state of unfreedom, or to sanction state punishment for his a- or anti-sociality.
There are some quite extraordinary moves that are made in considering this problem in Marx, but perhaps most significant is a type of analysis that rests on having understood bourgeois society to be unreconciled, and which recognises the strange asocial sociality of bourgeois society which guarantees the right of the citizen to act freely as an individual only insofar as he produces himself socially (or in early Marx submits to free exchange), and which guarantees the rights of the collective to produce itself socially only insofar as that production is alienated and prepares an inescapable ideology – and in a sense reality – of individuality. Out of this dialectical schema, in which each element is fully mediated in the other, Marx is able to make some quite extraordinary claims: perhaps most importantly the self-emancipation of the particular is able to transform the universal – that is, for the Jew to emancipate himself from his own Jewishness has the capacity to illuminate and concretise the emancipation of the universal; while the emancipation of the universal must mean accounting for the Jew in his particularity.
What is significant is that neither of these positions are much like either of the anti-semitic positions that on the one hand describe an already emancipated society or on the other describe a society paralysed by fear in which no emancipation is possible. The question of the production of antisemitic views has to do with how the Jew can become the scapegoat for the lack of reconciliation in society – each antisemitic view is a fixation on a society different from the bourgeois one that blames the Jew for that fact that he remains a constant reminder of the lack of reconciliation between universal and particular. And in truth, both the left and the right can adopt aspects of either elitist or populist antisemitism in order to achieve this.
These are sorts of classical dialectical arguments one can make and rehearse about bourgeois society in the abstract. They remain interesting as problems of dialectical logic, and can also offer some useful reflections on what should be accentuated in truly emancipatory politics (the self-emancipation of the particular, and the elevation of the universal from its mere formal character into its concrete particularity). But they remain abstractions, which are not particularly useful for describing the inner shape of the history of the bourgeois state. Today society is both much more inclusive in one sense and much more exclusive in another – it is certainly more strained, in part because these are not merely constitutional arguments about the form of the law as applied to bourgeois citizens. When people “on the right” talk about wanting a “small state” they generally mean that they want to pay less tax, and that they want less of their profits to be redistributed to those who are forced to labour for them. Meanwhile, those “on the left” who talk about wanting a “big state” normally mean that they want better healthcare, education, housing, and perhaps even the state ownership of infrastructure and some other capital. Very rarely do these arguments occur in their constitutional form: neither the compulsive social character of the big state nor the asocial freedoms afforded by a small state are taken particularly seriously – and yet the failure of both is blamed on Jews. It is this secondary characteristic of antisemitism that has come to predominate.
As is now well known, in 1941 Hermann Göring ordered the orchestration of the “final solution to the Jewish question” through the total annihilation of the Jews of Europe: a plan for the state to violently emancipate itself from its Jewish citizens. Such a final solution was never achieved in full, although millions were murdered in the attempt. But while in one sense the Nazis were not victorious, perhaps they were in another: the final solution to the Jewish question was supplanted by the final and eternal deferral of the Jewish question. After the Nazis the so-called “Jewish Question” can simply never be asked. The question of the size of the state is therefore left as a matter of mere contingency, allowed to crash around on the stormy sea of history. Big states occur in times of growth and smaller ones in times of decline. And forever this contingency, the cycles of boom and bust, are blamed on the spectre of a Jew, who remains the proof that society has not freely brought itself under its own control. At the same time, in moments when there is a big state those elitist antisemitisms are more often operative, while in times of economic decline the populist versions come to the fore – in each case regardless of whether those who espouse these views are “left-wing” or “right-wing”. Meanwhile, such a notion is strengthened by the fact that, increasingly, there is little to differentiate the left and the right in politics proper. In the post-Göring world the accusation against one’s enemy transforms too: it is no longer enough to blame the Jew, but one has to blame the antisemite for conjuring the Jew into existence, as though without the antisemite society would already be free of dwelling on the Jew. And so another page is written in the book of history. Having lost the Jewish question amidst the total unconscious of eternal deferral; having ceded politics to a world in which history is nothing but the terrible and terrifying play of natural forces of boom and bust, the Jew and the anti-semite are forced to perform an endless dance with one another. Neither is capable of emancipation. The cool annihilation of any possibility of a truly political state means that the Jew can only be recognised by the antisemite, and the antisemite can only ever recognise social force as in some way Jewish. And those who are committed to ending antisemitism so quickly morph into those who are committed to ending the Jews. Meanwhile the only means by which the left and the right can behave as truly left or right would be to inaugurate a politics of an utterly provisional, unfinished, and unreconciled state, which today is refused on all sides.