Understanding the Nazi Genocide Marxism after Auschwitz
Enzo Traverso Translated by Peter Drucker
Auschwitz was a preeminently modern genocide. If racial hatred was its first cause, its execution required rationality typical of modern capitalism.
In this book, Enzo Traverso sustains a dialogue with writings on the Shoah from Hannah Arendt to Daniel Goldhagen by drawing on the critical and heretical Marxism of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School, which grasped late capitalism's pent-up capacity for destructive upheavals exacerbated by bureaucratic organization and advanced technology.
After Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the gulag, the old warning slogan - socialism or barbarism - formulated by European Marxists at the beginning of twentieth century needs to be seriously revised. The choice we face today is no longer between the progress of civilization and a fall into ancient savagery, but between socialism conceived as a new civilization and the destruction of humankind. For Traverso, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is an image of what should impel us to rebel: not a sense of inevitable victory, but an ethical imperative.
Enzo Traverso , France's leading writer on Holocaust studies on the left, is an Italian who teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the University of Amiens. He is also the author of The Marxist Question (1993, Humanities Press) and Jews and Germany (1995, University of Nebraska Press).
176 pp pages, 5 1/4" x 8 1/2", July 1999 cloth, 0 7453 1358 2, $59.95
paper, 0 7453 1353 1, $22.50 Published by Pluto Press
-- Michael Pugliese
"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without listening to each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other, understanding that we would be flattered and praised in return. Other times we abused and shouted at each other, as if we were in a madhouse." -Tolstoy