Leaving aside the questions of how Lefists should approach the state, or critiques of the value form as the primary form of social mediation in capitalism, and the implications for theories of "finance" versus "productive capital," I think there is the immediate practical question of Lafontaine's open racism.
If an allegedly "left" presidential candidate in the United States started ranting about Mexicans taking jobs and driving down wages for American workers, or demanded the revocation of citizenship for anyone who has not mastered the English language, or demanded a sort of "American cultural renewal" in the face of "European cultural imperialism," how would most people on this list react? With outrage, I would imagine.
So why is this acceptable when engaged in by allegedly "left" politicians outside of the U.S.?
I think this has partially to do with the fact that American leftists live inside of the "belly of the beast," and hence are prone to view other imperialist nations like Germany with indifference at best, at worst, a naive sense that Europe is a sort of global "lesser of two evils" compared to the U.S.
Most Leftists in Germany outside of the reformist spectrum take seriously Karl Liebknecht's admonition that "the main enemy is at home," and act accordingly. The vile policy of carving up Yugoslavia under Hans-Dietrich Genscher, and the Kosovo war under Red-Green, should have long since shattered any illusions of the German-led EU as a "humane" alternative to the U.S.
And with this post I've reached by three-post limit, so I'll sign off for the day. :-)
Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote: 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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