Anti-Semitism & capitalist crisis

Far from being a product of the development of the productive forces, Zionism is precisely the consequence of the complete halt of this development, the result of the petrifaction of capitalism

Note: The bulk of the material on the history of the Jews stems from the book by Abram Leon "The Jewish Question". Murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz at the age of 28, Leon was one of the great socialist leaders of Europe of the 1930s and 40s. Of Jewish descent himself, he spent a year in Palestine as a child and in his young adulthood joined "Hashomer Hatzair", the radical Jewish Zionist youth organization. He soon broke with Zionism entirely and joined the Trotskyist movement. Just at the end of WW II, as the collapse of Nazism was imminent, the anti-Nazi underground stepped up its struggle and became less cautious. As a result Leon was captured by the Nazis and transported to Auschwitz where he was killed. Having written "The Jewish Question" when he was only 24 years old, Abram Leon demonstrated exceptional brilliance in addition to his extreme courage and dedication.

Today, the same issue poses itself in a way unexpected by Leon's generation - in the form of the racist State of Israel and all the crisis and disaster that state means for workers the whole world over. This ultimately includes the working class of Israel itself. In this developing world crisis, Abram Leon's works deserve to be widely read, just as Abram Leon, himself, deserves to be remembered and honored by the world workers' movement. 

Anti-Semites and Zionists Agree

Among other things, one thing on which the Zionists and the anti-Semites agree is that Jews are somehow different - either by reasons of genetics or of some special quality of their religion and culture Jews, are special. This can mean especially "good" or especially "evil", but special all the same. The reality is that, just as for any group of peoples, the Jewish people developed under certain material, objective conditions and these conditions shaped their historic position and role, and this in turn shaped both Jewish "culture" (to the extent that such a culture exist separate from the surrounding cultures) as well as relations between the Jewish community and the gentile (non-Jewish) community.

Jewish Diaspora

Even before the Jewish nation in Jerusalem was defeated by Rome, the ancient Jews had tended to disperse all around the Mediterranean due to the fact that the geography of their region made it impossible for them to support themselves in that one relatively small area. The conquest by the Romans merely deepened that dispersal, known as the Jewish "diaspora". Thus immigrant Jewish communities developed throughout the Mediterranean region. Already that was probably the region most given to trade in that early era, and it was natural that these immigrants would develop as traders.

Thus it was that with the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of feudalism, the Jews found themselves in a similar role - not only as traders but also centered in what little commerce existed under feudalism. As Leon puts it, "Above all the Jews constitute historically a social group with a specific economic function. They are a class, or more precisely, a people-class." But feudal society rested mainly on production of "use values", not "exchange values." This means that most production was for the use of the producer, not for exchange for other goods. Leon quotes Otto Bauer: "Circulation of merchandise, circulation of money-capital, and money economy in general are fundamentally alien to this form of society (feudalism)." So it was that the particular role that Jews tended to play under feudalism was "alien" to society in general.

Jews in Feudal Europe

However, the feudal nobility and the royalty needed the Jews for several reasons. Due to their dispersal, in this period of feudalism the Jews provided the link with the East from which various luxury items (such as spices) were obtained. In addition, the Jews loaned them money for their luxury goods as well as providing a tax base for the royalty and the nobility. Around the eleventh century, the increase in trade led to the rise of a merchant class that arose from the (gentile) artisans, and this led to a clash between the gentile and the Jewish traders. This clash represented the clash between trade based on production of use values (the old form of production) and that based on production for exchange values. It was exactly this clash that led to the first truly widespread persecution of the Jews of Europe. As Leon points out, this also affected the masses of the Arab world. "The Crusades, which were also an expression of the will of the city merchants to carve a road to the Orient, furnished them with the occasion for violent persecutions and bloody massacres of the Jews," Leon writes. "From this period on, the situation of the Jews in the cities of Western Europe is definitely compromised."

Rise of Commerce and Trade

As the European nobility became increasingly involved in commerce, the role of the Jewish money lenders to that nobility disappeared. In its place, they became the money lenders to the artisans and the poor - the pawn brokers and second-hand clothes peddlers. As such, in many ways the poor came to hate the Jews as their most immediate "oppressors". This was fed, of course, by the true ruling class. An enormous social crisis engulfed all of Western Europe with the spread of the "Black Death" - the plague. As in any such crisis, there is a tendency to turn on some social layer that is already oppressed and looked down upon, and in Western Europe this meant the Jews. It was exactly in this period that the burning of Jews became widespread, first in Germany. But these burnings first took the form of the burning of the Jews' loan records!

As capitalism started to develop in Western Europe, so did a proletariat, a working class, but it arose from the artisans of an earlier period. The blacksmith, for instance, became the metal worker in heavy industry. And how did this affect the Jews? In the "natural economy" as Leon calls it (the production for use), the peasant produced almost all his and her personal needs, with a few exceptions such as the products of the blacksmith. However, in the Jewish communities, dominated as they were by merchants and money lenders, production of clothes was done by specialists - by tailors. The (gentile) blacksmith tended to become the metal worker of heavy industry while the tailor tended to become the worker in textile. Thus it was that the Jewish working class tended to be much more workers in light industry and tended to be less integrated into the proletariat as a whole.

Rise of Anti-Semitism

Simultaneous with this, as commerce developed in Western Europe, and as a gentile merchant class arose, Jews tended to emigrate to Eastern Europe, where trade (and later capitalism itself) was less developed. And there, towards the end of the 19th century the process was repeated and the wide scale pogroms were organized.

It is in this context that Leon explains the rise of Jewish nationalism. "On the one hand, capitalism favored the economic assimilation of Judaism and consequently its cultural assimilation; on the other hand, by uprooting the Jewish masses, concentrating them in cities, provoking the rise of anti-Semitism, it stimulated the development of Jewish nationalism. The 'renaissance of the Jewish nation,' the formation of a modern Jewish culture, elaboration of the Yiddish language, Zionism, all these accompany the processes of emigration and of the concentration of Jewish masses in the cities and go hand in hand with the development of modern anti-Semitism."

Ever since the rise of modern capitalism, oppressed peoples have tended to turn to anti-capitalism in seeking to resolve their special oppression. This meant turning to the working class and to socialism, and this was just as true for the Jewish people as for all others. Unfortunately for them, this road was blocked due to the role of the reformist Social Democrats as well as that of Stalinism. It was exactly this that led to the disaster for European Jews as well, ultimately, for the the crisis in the Middle East and the disaster for the Palestinian people to this very day. In addition to their special oppression, the general capitalist crisis of the 1930s led to massive unemployment of Jewish youth in Europe. With all other avenues blocked, and with no revolutionary road readily apparent, thousands of them emigrated to Palestine. This was encouraged by British imperialism, who rested on the Jewish immigrants to hold down the Arab masses there.

Zionism

In Palestine, the Zionist project focused on building a Jewish homeland. The Zionist leaders realized that extremely low wages would make it impossible to attract many Jewish workers, and Jewish wages could not be raised while Arab wages were held down. However, their purpose was to attract increasing numbers of Jewish workers and thereby push the Arabs out of one field of employment after another. This explains the role of the Histadrut - the original Zionist labor federation that was both a union and an employment agency/employer. In this contradictory role, the Histadrut sought when necessary to organize Arab workers, but strictly to ensure that these workers played no independent role, that they were controlled by the (Jewish) Histadrut. At other times, the Histadrut actively campaigned to replace Arab workers with Jewish workers. Thus it was that Arab workers resisted both British colonialism and their partner, Zionism, together.

Petty Bourgeois Nationalism

The working class resistance to special oppression tends to link nationalism with the class struggle and therefore with socialism. However, for the "middle classes", a different process tends to take place. An extended quote from Leon is worthwhile here. Writing about the capitalist crisis of the 1930s and the parallel rise of fascism as well as Zionism, he explains:

"The primarily commercial and artisan character of Judaism, heritage of a long historical past, makes it Enemy Number One of the petty bourgeoisie on the domestic market (because it was exactly this petty bourgeoisie that was ruined in that era). It is therefore the petty bourgeois character of Judaism which makes it so odious to the petty bourgeoisie….

"(The petty bourgeoisie) has a strong, though vague, consciousness of being ruined and despoiled by Big Business. But its hybrid character, its inter-class position, does not permit it to understand the true structure of society nor the real character of Big Business. It is incapable of understanding the true tendencies of social evolution, for it has a presentiment that this evolution cannot help but be fatal for it. It wants to be anti-capitalist without ceasing to be capitalist. It wants to destroy the 'bad' character of capitalism, that is to say, the tendencies which are ruining it, while preserving 'good' character of capitalism which permits it to live and get rich. But since there does not exist a capitalism which has the 'good' tendencies without also possessing the 'bad,' the petty bourgeoisie is forced to dream it up. It is no accident that the petty bourgeoisie has invented 'super-capitalism,' the 'bad' deviation of capitalism, its evil spirit…. The attempt of Nazi theoreticians to distinguish between 'national productive capital' and 'Jewish parasitic capital' is probably the last attempt of this kind."

It is exactly for this reason that the Nazis built their strongest base amongst the ruined petty bourgeoisie of Germany.

And as for Zionism, Leon explains: "In reality, Zionist ideology, like all (such) ideologies, is only the distorted reflection of the interests of a class. It is the ideology of the Jewish petty bourgeoisie, suffocating between feudalism in ruins and capitalism in decay…. Far from being a product of the development of the productive forces, Zionism is precisely the consequence of the complete halt of this development, the result of the petrifaction of capitalism."

However, a similar point can be made about Zionism, which puts forward the idea of one Jewish people united across class lines and in effect glorifies a different capitalism as "good" -- Jewish capitalism. (And in fact, is it really any different from the Islamic nationalist forces who in effect put forward the same opposition to a class view and glorify Islamic capitalism?)

Conclusion

Today we cannot escape the consequences of these earlier developments. We see them in terms of the threat of war on Iran. We see them in terms of Israeli involvement throughout the Arab world. We see them in terms of the mounting crisis of the Palestinian people themselves. And none of these threats and disasters can be resolved without understanding their roots, including the roots of anti-Semitism. (It has to be stressed that Zionists have grossly distorted the real meaning of anti-Semitism by claiming that all criticism of the crimes of the State of Israel amount to anti-Semitism. In so doing, they tend increase real anti-Semitism while hiding their own crimes. Anti-Semitism has absolutely no relation to condemning the crimes of the State of Israel.)

To paraphrase the Bible, the unresolved crises of antiquity are visited upon modern day society. Nothing could be closer to the truth regarding the historic role of the Jewish people and their relationship to the rest of society. And it is exactly the understanding of this history, coupled with the will to act on that understanding, that can put an end to the nightmare that capitalism means for the great majority throughout the world.