Doug wrote:
> Good points, but I've noticed myself that there's an affinity between
> critiques of finance and a history of right populism, which has roots in > a provincial petty bourgeois dislike of the big and rootless.
Yes of course, and the assocation of Jews with finance is a long-standing Antisemitic trope, no question.
But the discourse in the left in Germany has become so degraded that it has become a matter of course to deal with the accusation of Antisemitism anytime some truncated anticapitalism is exhibited, even if no targeting of Jews is involved.
Not only does that trivialize real Antisemitism, it's disgusting because it actually **perpetuates** Antisemitic stereotypes.
I have gained quite a bit from Postone's Marxological work, and his essay on Antisemitism contains some real insights (despite not living up to its own grandiose ambitions of deriving Antisemitism from the commodity-form, which Hanloser correctly denounces as foolish), but his influence has poisoned the wells of discourse here to the point where every emergent social movement is policed for any signs of an incomplete understanding of capitalist totality, and then slapped with the "Antisemitism" accusation if it fails to live up.
And the thing is, not only are the social movements in places like Greece and Spain vital, but if anything, I think a healthy dose of personalization of capitalism, directed against Germany and the EU, is a good thing. If protestors were to start hurling invective at Jean-Claude Trichet and Angela Merkel, that would be a partial insight, not a delusional processing of mysterious abstract social relations.
At this point, I'm wondering if the Neoliberal slander of "Antisemitism" directed at any social movement against capital isn't intended to promote the very thing it supposedly wishes to combat, as a sort of subtle hint to try and push movements in that direction.