Michael Smith:
> Still, it's an interesting and thought-provoking essay about a specific
> historical moment and specific historical phenomena. I fail to see how
> it demonstrates any "constitutive" quality to anti-Semitism for all
> capitalism everywhere, though.
Just this past week there was a thread on lbo-talk where a couple of people were defending the knuckleheaded distinction between "good" productive capital and "bad" finance capital.
The anti-Semitic utopia of a commodity production without money was Proudhon's. It is no coincidence that the fathers of classical anarchism, Proudhon and Bakunin, were vicious anti-Semites. Anarchism is the ideology of a dying artisan class that wishes to maintain commodity production while abolishing usury. The social base of fascism and classical anarchism is identitical: a middle-class in crisis fearing proletarianization.
Marx's monetary theory of value is aimed squarely at the heart of such reactionary petty bourgeois utopias.
For Marx, money and credit are the driving instance of a capitalist economy. I.I. Rubin understood this. Hans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt understand it. Michael Heinrich understands it. Doug Henwood understands it.
Just wait until the teabagger thugs meet the 9/11 truthers and you'll see the kind of purchase the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis will have on the fascist imagination. Then the rhetoric of a pure, virtuous productive American yeomanry exploited by sinister Zionist lobbies and Central Bankers will no longer be ignorable.
Any left worth its salt has to nip that sort of thing in the bud within its own ranks.