Kadir Ateş
5th July 2011, 05:44
I wanted to know whether any of you read it and if so, what you thought about this work in particular, which you can find on libcom:
http://libcom.org/library/anti-semitism-national-socialism-moishe-postone
Here are two select quotes which I found to be rather chilling:
The “anticapitalist” attack, however, did not remain limited to the attack against abstraction. On the level of the capital fetish, it is not only the concrete side of the antinomy which can be naturalized and biologized. The manifest abstract dimension was also biologized—as the Jews. The fetishized opposition of the concrete material and the abstract, of the “natural” and the “artificial,” became translated as the world-historically significant racial opposition of the Aryans and the Jews. Modern anti-Semitism involves a biologization of capitalism—which itself is only understood in terms of its manifest abstract dimension—as International Jewry.
And this one:
A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced, which “unfortunately” has to take the form of the production of goods, of use-values. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract. The extermination camps were not a terrible version of such a factory but, rather, should be seen as its grotesque, Aryan, “anticapitalist” negation. Auschwitz was a factory to “destroy value,” that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to “liberate” the concrete from the abstract. The first step was to dehumanize, that is, to rip away the “mask” of humanity, of qualitative specificity, and reveal the Jews for what “they really are”—shadows, ciphers, numbered abstractions. The second step was to then eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke, trying in the process to wrest away the last remnants of the concrete material “use-value”: clothes, gold, hair, soap.
My question is: Does Postone's usage of the valorisation/devalorisation process of capital as demonstrated in his example of the extermination of the European Jewry also lend itself to other ethnic genocides? What do you think?
http://libcom.org/library/anti-semitism-national-socialism-moishe-postone
Here are two select quotes which I found to be rather chilling:
The “anticapitalist” attack, however, did not remain limited to the attack against abstraction. On the level of the capital fetish, it is not only the concrete side of the antinomy which can be naturalized and biologized. The manifest abstract dimension was also biologized—as the Jews. The fetishized opposition of the concrete material and the abstract, of the “natural” and the “artificial,” became translated as the world-historically significant racial opposition of the Aryans and the Jews. Modern anti-Semitism involves a biologization of capitalism—which itself is only understood in terms of its manifest abstract dimension—as International Jewry.
And this one:
A capitalist factory is a place where value is produced, which “unfortunately” has to take the form of the production of goods, of use-values. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier of the abstract. The extermination camps were not a terrible version of such a factory but, rather, should be seen as its grotesque, Aryan, “anticapitalist” negation. Auschwitz was a factory to “destroy value,” that is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract. Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to “liberate” the concrete from the abstract. The first step was to dehumanize, that is, to rip away the “mask” of humanity, of qualitative specificity, and reveal the Jews for what “they really are”—shadows, ciphers, numbered abstractions. The second step was to then eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke, trying in the process to wrest away the last remnants of the concrete material “use-value”: clothes, gold, hair, soap.
My question is: Does Postone's usage of the valorisation/devalorisation process of capital as demonstrated in his example of the extermination of the European Jewry also lend itself to other ethnic genocides? What do you think?