#postone

[Fascism] offers to its followers not the prospect of returning to the idyll of a pre-modern society [..], but rather of advancing towards a new order, one consonant with the dynamism of the modern world, yet able to purge it of the social, political, economic and spiritual malaise which liberal and socialist versions of modernisation have purportedly brought about.

In Marx's analysis, social domination in capitalism does not, on its most fundamental level, consist in the domination of people by other people, but in the domination of people by abstract social structures that people themselves constitute. Marx sought to grasp this form of abstract, structural domination­ — which encompasses, and extends beyond, class domination — with his categories of the commodity and capital. This abstract domination not only determines the goal of production in capitalism, according to Marx, but its material form as well. Within the framework of Marx's analysis, the form of social domination that characterizes capitalism is not ultimately a function of private property, of the ownership by the capitalists of the surplus product and the means of pro­duction; rather, it is grounded in the value form of wealth itself, a form of social wealth that confronts living labor (the workers) as a structurally alien and dom­inant power.

Particular aspects of the extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis remain inexplicable so long as anti-Semitism is treated as a specific example of a scapegoat strategy whose victims could very well have been members of any other group. The Holocaust was characterized by a sense of ideological mission, by a relative lack of emotion and immediate hate (as opposed to pogroms, for example), and, most importantly, by its apparent lack of functionality. The extermination of the Jews seems not to have been a means to another end. They were not exterminated for military reasons or in the course of a violent process of land acquisition (as was the case with the American Indians and the Tasmanians). Nor did Nazi policy toward the Jews resemble their policy toward the Poles and the Russians which aimed to eradicate those segments of the population around whom resistance might crystallize in order to exploit the rest more easily as helots. Indeed, the Jews were not exterminated for any manifest “extrinsic” goal. The extermination of the Jews was not only to have been total, but was its own goal—extermination for the sake of extermination—a goal that acquired absolute priority.

It is noteworthy that, compared to the situation after the collapse of liberal capitalism in the late 1920s, the worldwide crises and dislocations associated with this newest transformation of capitalism have precipitated little critical analysis undertaken from a position that points to the possible overcoming of capitalism. This can be interpreted as an expression of theoretical uncertainty. The crisis of state-interventionist capitalism indicates that capitalism continues to develop with a quasi-autonomous dynamic. This development therefore demands a critical reconsideration of those theories which had interpreted the displacement of the market by the state as signifying the effective end of economic crises. However, the underlying nature of capitalism, of the dynamic process that, once again, manifestly has asserted itself, is not clear. It no longer is convincing to claim that "socialism" represents the answer to the problems of capitalism, when what is meant is simply the introduction of central planning and state (or even public) ownership.

What is common to all forms of anti-Semitism is the degree of power attributed to the Jews: the power to kill God, to unleash the Bubonic Plague, and, more recently, to introduce capitalism and socialism. Anti-Semitic thought is strongly Manichaean, with the Jews playing the role of the children of darkness. It is not only the degree, but also the quality of power attributed to the Jews that distinguishes anti-Semitism from other forms of racism.

The debate between Cartesianism and Newtonianism is that for Descartes, everything had to touch everything else. With Newton, there’s action at a distance. Similarly, for Foucault, everything is always touching everything else. You have people deciding on the disciplines, and the disciplines are molding the people. There are breaks, but they’re unmotivated. It’s brilliant description… I guess by my language I’m already giving away what I think. My question is: why are the disciplines suddenly a plausible way of organizing things? For control, sure, but there’s been social control before. It didn’t have that form. Why does it take on that form? It doesn’t begin, in his own account, in one place and then diffuse outward. But it begins roughly in the same historical period, in Hamburg, in Amsterdam, in Paris, England, then Philadelphia… what’s going on? Who’s educating the educators? It’s pretty easy to tie it to a kind of Marxian tradition, but that’s not Foucauldianism. The way in which he introduces capitalism is, I think, beside the point because it doesn’t occur to him that the mode of rationalization he describes itself has to do with capitalism. In Foucault, you’ve got property, you’ve got these warehouses, so the question of the relation of crime to society changes. They’re not invalid points. But the idea that operating everything according to an increasingly mathematical metric, that that has a great deal to do with capitalism as a quantitative form, isn’t there.

To the degree we choose to use 'indeterminacy' as a critical social category, then, it should be as a goal of social and political action rather than as an ontological characteristic of social life. (The latter is how it tends to be presented in poststructuralist thought, which can be regarded as a reified response to a reified understanding of historical necessity.) Positions that ontologize historical indeterminacy emphasize that freedom and contingency are related. However, they overlook the constraints on contingency exerted by capital as a structuring form of social life and are, for this reason, ultimately inadequate as critical theories of the present. Within the framework I am presenting, the notion of historical indeterminacy can be reapportioned as that which becomes possible when the constraints exerted by capital are overcome. Social democracy would then refer to attempts to ameliorate inequality within the framework of the necessity imposed structurally by capital. Although indeterminate, a postcapitalist social form of life could arise only as a historically determinate possibility generated by the internal tensions of capital, not as a 'tiger's leap' out of history.