[lbo-talk] Antifa Critique of German "Left Party"

Angelus Novus fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 22 23:29:06 PDT 2005


Hi John,


>>
Oh please. The argument here is that unless you take the ultraleft's position that the state ought to be abolished -- rather than, say, struggling to make the government more responsive to people's needs -- then Nazism is "immanent" in your thinking. <<

I don't see any support for this interpretation of the Phase 2 article. What they are arguing is that a specific authoritarian conception of the state as an organ which should stand above particualr interests and represent the interests of the "Volk" is more or less compatible with Nazi positions.


>>Ultraleftist, abstentionist babble.<<

Again, I don't know what leads you to this conclusion. I would be interested to have you expand upon this, above all since employment of a term like "ultraleft" is subjective and depends entirely on the perspective of the person making the allegation.


>>So anyone who attacks finance capital is really just attacking the Jews?
Please.<<

No, but a "verkürzte Kapitalismuskritik" of this kind shares more than a cosmetic similarity with classical anti-semitic politics. Doug Henwood riffs on this a bit in the last chapters of Wall Street.


>>All that this proves is that demented sectarians in Germany lend a certain
Teutonic philosophical ponderousness to their ridiculous polemics<<

If you are saying that the German Left is more philosophically inclined than it's American counterpart, I would agree, and find this somewhat refreshing. Leaving side the fact that there are two mass distribution leftist dailys (the Stalinist Junge Welt and the Eurocommunist, PDS-near Neues Deutschland), there are also the mass distributed Antifa/radical leftist weekly Jungle World, and numerous fairly well distributed glossies corresponding to various positions on the radical left.

There is the post-Structuralist/post-Operaismo quarterly Fantomas.

There is the Antifa/Critical Theory oriented Phase 2, from which this article is taken.

The classical operaismo/council communist quarterly Wildcat.

The journal Arranca!, put out by the Autonomist groups felS, with a perspective roughly similar to Fantomas.

The academic Marxist Prokla, associated with Elmar Altvater.

the stamokap publication Sozialismus, which is equivalent to the Monthly Review.

And of course numerous publications corresponding to the various classical Marxist sects.

That kind of theoretical serious is only to be welcomed, when one looks at the sad publication landscape of the North American left, i.e. the equally left-liberal, populist-progressive Nation, In These Times, and Progressive. Theory just isn't taken seriously on the other side of the Atlantic. Even the few marginalized anarchist publications there are tend to be either boring recapitulations of 19th century anarchism, left-populist anti-imperialism of the Chomskyist variety, or primitivist (a political tendency that doesn't exist on the German left).

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