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Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Salvage #6: Evidence of Things Not Seen
by
multiple authors
by
multiple authors
Like that of Vico, Jewish history-telling is cyclically tragic. From Biblical Egypt to Weimar Germany, in our own narratives times of comfort and joy for Jews were always the augurs of misery to come – the higher the summit, the further the fall. In most of the world, we live now in good times. Anti-Semitism in the twenty-first-century Jewish imaginary is therefore located in the past and in the future, as spectral. Worries about anti-Semitism are almost universally anxieties about what happened long ago read as a warning about what might happen next. [...]
Such an approach licenses paranoia. [...] if fears are future-oriented – as in the case of anti-Semitism – no amount of material comfort and social respect for Jews can allay them. The better things get, the worse they might get. Clearly this is a route to madness, so its kernel of truth is troubling and frustrating. The narrative is not easily dismissed. It is true that times of Jewish security and prosperity have often summoned anti-Semitism, which tells us something important about the anti-Semitic worldview.
Like the Left, [...] the anti-Semite sees politics as a contest between oppressors and oppressed and claims to side resolutely with the latter. [...] anti-Semitism from slaves and the colonised reads Jews as the apex of whiteness, the highest kings of a European elite. It is, in the Nietzschean frame and in its deluded self-image, the lambs' revolt against birds of prey. [...] Such is the 'socialism of fools', but these examples are also designed to illustrate that there is nothing necessarily left-wing about purported anti-elitism. Today's tabloid attacks on 'union barons' ordering strikes to hurt 'ordinary people' ought to dispel that illusion. [...]
[...] Though Jewish embourgeoisement has been one story of the last century, anti-Semitism treats oppression as culturally explicable, which is to say it roots injustice in the ethnic deformity and personal villainy of a minority rather than in the structurally ingrained logic of social relations motoring hierarchical societies. Its construction of fantasy Jews reads political interests as intractably biologically or culturally determined, where the left instead takes social positions of power and powerlessness as the ultimate arbiters of interests and so (by its belief in the possibility of human transformation through changing one's condition, by treating the final problem as power and not people) holds out the prospect of genuinely universal salvation inconceivable to the anti-Semitic mind. [...] They thus foreclose the possibility of universal emancipation from oppression by thinking some are permanently damned by their deformities and/or by limiting political aspiration to cultural purification, seeking to change the colour of our chains rather than breaking the chains altogether. [...]
Finally, anti-Semitism, like all conspiracy theorising, is ultimately about providing comfortable reassurance. It tells the anti-Semite that the problems in her society do not really run very deep, that they are only the work of some small cancer to be zapped while leaving a healthy body intact. It is a mechanism for defending the fundamental rudiments of the existing social order as they come under strain. Far from merely peripheral fanaticism, anti-Semitism on this reading has always held a central place in the everyday political thought of the West: rescuing the image of civilisation by identifying its problems as really alien to it.
[...] Treating anti-Semitism simply as racism pulls analysts into a search for bigots frothing with hatred for Jews, which significantly _under_estimates [...] the preponderance of anti-Semitic was of thinking across the political spectrum, while also wrongly supposing that its danger lies exclusively in targeting Jews. It is instead a whole vision of politics, a desperately conservative vision that nonetheless finds some adherents on the Left and plenty among liberals. Think of the current American panic about Russian conspiracies, through which liberals dodge the conclusion that votes for Donald Trump suggest some fundamental malady in their social order by instead pinning the blame on Kremlin hackers: a structure of thinking just like the anti-Semitic frame. And amid fears about the rise of China, anti-Asian racism might easily morph into a total social theory, an ethnically constituted conservative articulation of anti-elitism: again, just like anti-Semitism.
damn
[...] Anti-Zionists should learn the story of the Holocaust as the summit of aeons of persecution not to rescue them from their anti-Zionism but for a host of other reasons, combatting anti-Semitism among them. It is important to understand the basis of paranoia, the avalanche of brutality from which violence seemed the only escape to very many Jews. It is important to know that Zionists do not kill Palestinians because they were born with an inhuman blood lust. [...]
[...] in an active site of colonial violence, the dispossession of a people is an ongoing process, and yet calling Israel a racist endeavour is to be outlawed as itself racist. These are times to remind oneself that slavery was once bourgeois common-sense, that the world prayed for twelve children in a Thai cave this summer while hundreds of children drowned barely noticed in the Mediterranean. This saga was has been a study in the selective blindness that makes hierarchy possible everywhere. Some of us are sustained by the thought of days when illusions and delusions now ubiquitous will be scorned just as easily s the opulence of pharaohs and the myths of their magicians. [...]
damn, talk about detonator sentences
[...] Keynes then underscored the lack of democratic oversight of the future, as capitalists’ investment decisions instead shaped the world and led to the disastrous inequalities and wars of his age. Problems including underconsumption had their root in the uneven distribution of wealth and power synonymous with the existence of a permanent capitalist class of owners and rentiers, whose wealth derives (as Marx might have put it) from their ability to command labor power through their control over wealth-producing wealth. From ownership stems an ability to charge others for the conditions of their existence — to hold power over them by charging them long into the future.
nicely put
Keynes’s second anxiety was that scarce capital produces a class of rentiers who invest in ownership rather than productivity. McDonnell uses this insight to argue for rent controls and tenants’ rights to dramatically alter the balance of power in housing; he seeks limits on the debt that credit card companies can extract and the abolition of higher education fees. All this means abolishing Maurizio Lazzarato’s “indebted man” as a subject-position of our times: disempowered, afraid of the future, alien to the confidence of struggle. McDonnell ended 2017 with a warning about escalating personal debt. Household debt is first of all a symbol of the failure to secure rising productivity and pay, but it is also a class question, since it generates individual and corporate creditors whose accumulation relies not on producing use values, not even on producing exchange values, but only on perpetuating a generally deleterious status quo in which life’s goods — housing, education, money itself — are kept as scarce and pricey as possible. And so the futurist development of the productive forces and the achievement of abundance require confronting this social class. A focus on rents completes McDonnellism by locating its class politics. Rentiers are the enemy of the future, those who profit from present stagnation. Thus class is expressed in part as age, where older voters are more likely to be property owners and the young are burdened with debts, so that Britain’s new age-based political binaries do not represent the death of class politics as is sometimes supposed.