As the masses become more alienated from post-Covid society, the default is for them to gravitate towards the “Jewish question.” I’m talking not just about in my own country the United States, but much of the rest of the world, as the social factors that lead to this development have been exported through global Americanization. These factors are things that Marxists must truly understand in order to respond towards the JQ properly; otherwise we’ll trap ourselves in a bubble that’s detached from the state of the people.
The JQ is where the masses are at; it’s not just right-wing individuals who’ve been coming to this line of thinking, the framework’s prevalence is reflected by just how common it now is for commentators to use jokes or references that come from the framework. It’s your friends, family, and neighbors who are engaging with this content, and in all likelihood they are not coming from a place of real prejudice when they resonate with these ideas. So if we aren’t seeing a horrifying “rise of antisemitism,” like the Israeli agents say, then what’s truly happening in our discourse?
What’s happening is that the relationship the working masses have with their social environment—and with the managerial institutions which facilitate this environment on the local level—has broken down so severely that they’re embracing the same thinking which defined popular consciousness during much earlier productive stages. I’m talking about before feudalism had been fully replaced by capitalism, when it made more sense to the masses that Jews could be exerting control through small-scale managerial institutions. This was how Engels explained the popular focus on Jews among exploited people in this stage of development, despite the auxiliary role that Jewish capital truly held within the larger monopoly-financial system:
Even in England, Rothschild is a man of modest means when set, for example, against the Duke of Westminster. Even in our own Rhineland from which, with the help of the French, we drove the aristocracy 95 years ago and where we have established modern industry, one may look in vain for Jews.
Hence anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that. The very fact of its existence in a region is proof that there is not yet enough capital there. Capital and wage-labour are today indivisible. The stronger capital and hence the wage-earning class becomes, the closer will be the demise of capitalist domination. So what I would wish for us Germans, amongst whom I also count the Viennese, is that the capitalist economy should develop at a truly spanking pace rather than slowly decline into stagnation.
It was when the German economy declined in this way that the JQ became more prevalent than ever, and finance capital funded the Nazis so that they could weaponize the JQ against the working class. Today, with the perpetual decline that the working class has been experiencing over the last generation, we’re seeing this process repeat in a different way. Actual “antisemitism” doesn’t pose a threat to anyone under our conditions, and Jews aren’t at risk of becoming a persecuted minority. The actual holocaust that could come from the JQ now is an extended genocide against the Palestinians, whose cause for liberation is frustrated by the popularization of an ahistorical view on what’s behind Israel. There is a real danger of a violent Nazi movement in America and elsewhere, but this comes from capital’s psyops spinning out beyond the system’s control.
When the feds boost JQ content, the purpose of this is to create “proof” of overwhelming Jew-hatred that the Zionists can use as vindication, as well as to confuse the workers out of organizing for their class. And to combat the thinking that makes the JQ psyop feasible, we must provide the masses with an alternative explanation for why their social environment has turned against them. For why they’ve been confronted with a living nightmare where money is fake, there’s no hope for a prosperous future under the present system, and purpose has been stolen from them.
Who are Marxists saying is guilty of our era’s systemic crimes? We are not saying that no one is guilty, and all of modern history is just the outcome of an amorphous “capital.” For the Marxists who are actually serious about challenging the liberal order, and who get constantly attacked by the algorithms, it’s clear that an independent intelligence is at play within our society’s systems of control. And the Jewish wing of this system is only one part of it, though Zionism has shown that Engels may not have seen how big its role would become.
In On the Jewish Question, Marx recognized that Jewish religious institutions objectively have a function tied to capital, with one of his statements being that money serves as the god of Jews. He put this in the context of the class struggle, though, by pointing out that money is the god of bourgeois society as a whole. So if Judaism is not exceptional in its connection to capital, then the only way to emancipate Judaism from this condition and solve the “Jewish question” is through victory for the working class. When the working masses have been forced into a position that resembles serfs, like they increasingly are now, the JQ appears logical, because the individual has been secluded from the state; the individual hasn’t been raised up to the level of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, like happens in the higher developmental stages.
In his explanation about what’s really behind the role which organized Judaism has, Marx explained this principle of the serf’s relationship to the ruling institutions:
Political emancipation is, at the same time, the dissolution of the old society on which the state alienated from the people, the sovereign power, is based. What was the character of the old society? It can be described in one word – feudalism. The character of the old civil society was directly political – that is to say, the elements of civil life, for example, property, or the family, or the mode of labor, were raised to the level of elements of political life in the form of seigniory, estates, and corporations. In this form, they determined the relation of the individual to the state as a whole – i.e., his political relation, that is, his relation of separation and exclusion from the other components of society. For that organization of national life did not raise property or labor to the level of social elements; on the contrary, it completed their separation from the state as a whole and constituted them as discrete societies within society.
Thus, the vital functions and conditions of life of civil society remained, nevertheless, political, although political in the feudal sense – that is to say, they secluded the individual from the state as a whole and they converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as they converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation. As a result of this organization, the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state, are likewise bound to appear as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people
The more isolated the state becomes from the people, the more it abandons the masses and becomes a tool for police domination, the more traction the JQ will have the potential to gain. The JQ is based in the perception that the state’s power comes not from a practical need for the dominant class to enforce its rule, but from a constructed myth that keeps the state in place through sheer artificiality. This was the perception of Proudhon, the anarchist thinker who believed that a Jewish conspiracy is what’s behind all of the contradictions within civilization.
Proudhon’s ideology is the logical conclusion of the primitive, lumpenized kinds of anti-capitalist revolts, where alienated individuals inflict damage onto the immediate local symbols of the establishment. This ultra-left impulse to target only the small-scale managerial element, while forsaking an organized struggle against capital’s actual centers of power, is what’s behind the historic pipeline from anarchism to fascism. And as we build working-class power in this time of intensified alienation, we’ll increasingly find ourselves facing enemies who overlap across ultra-left and far right spheres. The far right has the potential to capture a major section of the masses, while the ultra-leftists will find a strong footing within a particular petty-bourgeois section of the most alienated. Get ready for the JQ, or politics that follow the model of the JQ, to show up in unexpected places.
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