CommonTern

Thanks. I think I read that Red Sails article a while ago but found it hard to understand. I will try to reread that section.

The confusion I have is about how this conspiratorial thinking needs to target a “marked” (for example, racialized) group of outsiders (as I understand it, this group doesn’t have to be Jewish people but often is). I think there is an elemental form of this reasoning you can see when defenders of capitalism blame “corporatism” or “crony capitalism” for capitalism's woes. For those to exist, “corporatists” and “crony capitalists” and perhaps “speculators” or “usurers” — as the Nazis liked to call them — also need to exist, but in this basic form it hasn’t crystallized into a defined group of people. How does that group of people end up being Jewish people?

When Marxists talk about other forms of discrimination we can always pinpoint an economic relation that generates it like colonialism or the gendered division of labor. What, then, is the material basis of 21st-century antisemitism? The destruction of Europe’s Jewish community and the creation of a Jewish settler colony seem to me like the main contributors today, but how specifically do they contribute? Is it that Israel helps reify Jews’ status as “non-European”?

The logic of antisemitism, far from being banished with the Nazis, became completely naturalized in the West. […] The tragic cycle begins to appear eternal: innocent, well-meaning, hard-working folks are, time and again, viciously tricked by the scapegoating of a new rogue in the gallery — Indigenous, Black, Spanish, Jewish, Soviet, Vietnamese, Cuban, Serbian, Muslim, Libyan, Syrian, Korean, Venezuelan, Russian, Chinese.

Is it correct to understand that antisemitism itself is one possible manifestation of the logic of antisemitism and the logic should not be viewed as exclusive to Jewish people?

I’ve just skimmed this so far but this looks very helpful. I am always frustrated by the “bourgeoisie just needed a scapegoat” answer because it does not explain why the European bourgeoisie picked Jewish people as a scapegoat, what continuity there is between early and modern antisemitism, what material conditions it arises from, how it relates to anticommunism, whether a similar discourse can be weaponized against other groups, the role of Zionism, Jewish status as a nation, why Jews were racialized, conflict between bourgeois and proletarian or Eastern and Western European Jewish communities, restrictions on jobs and land ownership, contemporary antisemitism, and so on.

Do you have a link?