Marxism beyond Manichaeanism? On left-wing anti-semitism and some related problems

A few years back, an editor with a prominent left-wing book and magazine publisher invited me to translate some writings from French to English.  I accepted, but later regretted it.  This is why: All of the pieces he was trying to get published were about Israel/Palestine, and it seems like they were all meant as salvos in a kind of Cold War being carried out by means of literature and journalism.  When I took a step back and examined the role I had been asked to play, it occurred to me that in light of my own philosophical training and interests, there is not only something a bit boring about pieces of journalism whose “thinking” is only meant to be useful in that conflict for one side combating the other, when I prefer to write about political issues in order to think about them, and hopefully contribute to the effort to solve them partly by thinking about them more clearly, but also that there is something I should find problematical about the idea that there are political questions that can be reduced to mere conflicts between us and them, the good guys and bad guys.    Politics can become painful when it gets reduced to war.  I think it evidences a Manichaeanism of thinking which in turn is rooted in an attitude of resentment.  The difficult thing for me on this issue is simply that I cannot quite agree with either side, at least when the lines are drawn in the ways they typically are.  

About the role of the right-wing Israeli government in this conflict, there can be little doubt that there are things worthy of criticizing.  The right-wing in this debate is always claiming that criticism is attack, and the only question is that of war: do our people have a right to exist and live in peace or not?  But liberals of course do the same thing about most issues: there is supposed to be a social justice war, people are personally attacked, and “politics” is waged in this way, without honest discussion and argument.  (Which, by the way, is traditionally a very important feature of Jewish life including in the religion, though certainly, at least since the ancient Greeks discovered philosophy, and democracy as we know it, along with tragedy, not only them.).  When the left does this, it seems to me a mistake.  To be sure, the intellectual world today, especially in places like France where it is much more widely valued, is one of all kinds of thoughtful inquiries and arguments, and among “friends.”  But the world of journalism apparently is not.  The publications with which this editor is associated are of that kind, but his journalistic project was not.  This happened before the blow-up over antisemitism on the British left that played a role (partly of course because it could be used against them by the British right) in the defeat of the UK’s socialist Jeremy Corbyn (who may seem like a much more hard-core version of Bernie Sanders, though, alas, he is not Jewish; I mean, someone who is fearlessly intellectually combative, a style that exits a bit more in Britain than the US, with their parliament regularly serving as a forum for lively debates).  I think much of the international left is infected with antisemitism and I wish it wasn’t.  I also think that there are better, and properly left-wing, including Marxist, reasons for opposing it.  The way the left and right together fight is not always as fruitful for those on the left, who historically have cared about thinking carefully, while the right is much more apt to put forth rhetorical semblances of arguments in the form of mere scorn.  One thing that also occurred to me is this:     

That part of the "left" that now claims, as a price (or benefit) of opposing "colonialism," to favor the (property rights of that) "indigenous,"  this “left” hardly need to complain that the Jews living in what used to be called Palestine (before 1948, it was often called “Jewish Palestine”) are "settler colonists"; they could just as well go further and claim that it is improper and immoral for anyone to live anywhere and not be indigenous to the place.  And then the Jews who were already hated for that and for many long centuries (they sometimes still are) could be objects of their militant opposition even without having to become colonists, or, before that (gasp) capitalists.  No reason to need to go so far as hating only those Jews who are pro-Israel, on the grounds that they are a nation of thieves of indigenous propriety, since the land they inhabit belongs properly to another people whom they displaced.  It is true that many Jews have been capitalists, that some were usurious, and that the state of Israel has, like most governments, done both good and bad things.   (Imagine a world in which someone could be wrong without being an object of hatred….)  But before and more than some of them being capitalists, they were as being "not belonging here."  One way to put that is to say that they were not "indigenous."  But indigeneity is a myth.  It is a myth of people who want to be innocent partly by attacking those they think guilty.  This is the logic of moralizing resentment.  Indigeneity is a myth because no one really has a natural property right to a territory, and that is what the concept implies and assumes.  

The position that I am here criticizing is not that of Marxism, itself in some conservative deformations of it.  It is that of what I think is most precisely called a left-wing fascism.  This in turn is a feature of a global civil war that is being fought between capital and states representing it and its various local factions on the one hand and a number of forces that consider themselves its opponents on the other.  That civil war may well functionally serve the interests of the status quo, even when it seems not to.  This may also be a consequence of the fact that the history of such opposition has included many failed efforts, some of them miserably abject and horrible in their destructiveness.  

The global condition today is a post-colonial one.  It is hardly non-Western; it is almost everywhere a hybrid of diverse sorts of European and other influences.  The post-colonial condition abandons the historicist developmental ideology that was part of colonialism, orthodox Marxism (from the Second International and Revisionism to Marxist-Leninism in most of its forms), and the national liberation movements of  decolonization.  It considers so-called “primitive” societies and civilizations other than the European one that until recently dominated the world to be also sources of meaning, in ways that may be more or less trivial (as tourism renders them) or truly interesting and consequential.  (This was an achievement of anthropology and European cultural modernism, among other things).  

The modern history of world civilization was one of a barbarism that can be regretted, and there is an ethical obligation here of remembrance, but it cannot now be called a crime exactly.  Indeed, in a way it is much worse than crime, because crimes can be stopped or punished, while historical wrongs cannot so easily be.  The discourse of crime in politics destroys the political, and that its principal function.  The discourse of crime is part of the governmentality of bourgeois society and capital; crime is above all the other side of property.  Theft, improper behavior, lack of industriousness… crimes of property and propriety come to the forefront in bourgeois society, and post-bourgeois capitalism adds an ethos of individualism raised to the immediacy of implacable certitudes and self-assertions, and so perhaps universal militancy of a kind that can easily be fitted to the framework of a global civil war.  That generalized state of war will have insurgents and opponents of “the system” whose opposition is very destructive without creating anything other than profits for weapons makers.  The most problematic tendency today may be that of a widening class of the essentially exploited who are also expendable.  In this framework, a general cynicism reigns as all motives are thought vicious, and all projects risibly worthless.  If most of the world’s people are reduced to objects of state terror in conditions of impoverishment, one could suspect that such a condition cannot endure.  It has been the case for some time that Lenin’s prediction that the twentieth century would be one of wars and revolutions has proven something of an understatement, and not only because of some of his own followers.  Clearly, in this context, a moralizing hatred of a class of “oppressors” leads nowhere.  It would make things worse; it would articulate, unwittingly, the functional collaboration of many who resist or are in opposition with the very system they oppose.  The capitalist system has managed to absorb and render internal to its logic most forms of negativity.  The “left” tends to under-estimate this logic.

The opposition to the status quo of those whose experience of being victims leads them to hate their “oppressors” is a politics of resentment.  Resentment is the victim feeling victimized and impotently angry.  Hatred of oppressors is a result.  Hatred of “oppressors” is left-wing fascism.  There were left-wing Nazis.  Some anti-semites hated Jews for being exploiters; some for being subversives; some for being foreign and not normal.  The Jews were a foreign people everywhere not because their true homeland is in what is now called Israel but because their history and religion made them a people with a commitment to things deeper than belonging to a place and its people.  (Indeed, in their own understanding, their desire for their own territory, never abandoned, was considered contingent upon this commitment to those deeper things, articulated classically in their religion, and including some very rigorous ideas of justice, as well as the hope not or not only for their own land and government, but also for a future world free of much of the injustice that today is so clearly recognizable to so many of the world’s people, without a clear image of what to do to change this.) 

Everyone is a stranger to himself.  Modernity has made us all exiles, and our time is making most of us not only responsible for our own self-management but this in conditions of precarity.  The best responses to this may require some intellectual, moral, and political courage, including work of imagination and thought. 

The Cold War has been over for some time.  The world today sucks in many ways, and this is a sentiment that is widely shared, a reality widely recognized.  Capitalism can still be criticized, perhaps opposed in some ways, though there no longer is a competing world empire of sorts promoting the presumed alternative.  This fact, moreover, can be and is as much celebrated as mourned.  One can honor the many people who worked hard and struggled to develop some alternative, while recognizing how much their cause failed and in some ways both defeated and betrayed.   I do not quite understand why more of the international left is not more imaginative, why some people are still stick in old patterns of thinking.  And the global civil war mentality and its Manichaean logic I find especially frustrating.   

To be continued.