Marx converted antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking anti-capitalism
Evidence
It was indeed Karl Marx, the father of scientific socialism (i.e., socialism that set itself an aim of overcoming and leaving behind, rather than arresting the capitalist development; which acknowledged the irrevocability of capitalist transformation and accepted its progressive nature; and which promised to start building a new, better society at the point to which capitalist progress brought universal human progress), who turned the anti-capitalist antisemitism from backward-looking into forward-looking. Having done so, he made it potentially usable for the anti-capitalist opposition at a time when the last illusion that capitalism was a temporary disease which could be cured or exorcised would have been dashed and rejected. Marx accepted the elective affinity between the ‘spirit of Judaism’ and that of capitalism; both were prominent for promoting self-interest, haggling, the money-chase. Both had to be pushed out of the way if human cohabitation was to be placed on a safer and saner basis. Capitalism and Judaism shared their fate. They triumphed together, and they will perish together. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 149
Categorization
- DEFINE: Defines ‘scientific socialism’ as accepting the irreversibility of capitalism versus petty-bourgeois resistance, and shows how a forward-looking frame kept the Jew-capital conflation alive.
- XREF: Uses Weber’s ‘elective affinity’ — already a keyword in the reader’s colonialism/hegemony vocabulary. — connects to: Marx’s anti-Jewry rhetoric was not full-fledged antisemitism; Petty-bourgeois resentment of free trade made Jews a ready scapegoat for industrial capitalism; Jewish banking ties to state loans turned class resentment into political antisemitism (+3 more)