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Michele Battini. Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism. Translated by Noor Mazhar and Isabella Vergnano. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. 336 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-17038-3.

Reviewed by Blair Taylor (Sarah Lawrence College)

Published on H-Nationalism (June, 2018)

Commissioned by Cristian Cercel (Ruhr University Bochum)



While antisemitism has long been a thriving topic of academic inquiry in the United States, prior to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally in August 2016, it received relatively little political attention, especially by the Left. Thus, the haunting chants of “Jews will not replace us” from tiki-torch wielding young white men seemed to catch many off guard, a threat punctuated by the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer. Indeed, the rise of the so-called Alt-Right has rekindled a public conversation about antisemitism and fascism usually reserved for academic specialists. Meanwhile on the other side of the Atlantic, the UK Labour Party has been wracked by a series of scandals that has put a spotlight on Left antisemitism. This transformed political context seems tailor-made for Michele Battini’s well-timed book Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism. It offers not only an erudite inquiry into the history and logic of antisemitism vis-à-vis economy but also an important contemporary resource for understanding the dramatic return of a central historical problematic that is currently animating both the Right and the Left.

Battini’s book sets out to chart the transformation of premodern forms of Christian anti-Judaism into modern antisemitism, a metamorphosis he argues is tightly linked not only to the emergence of capitalism but also to its various political and intellectual critics. His central aim is to construct a political genealogy of a specifically anti-Jewish anticapitalist discourse that identifies Jews with the problems of capitalist modernity. This task is carried out via careful textual analysis of historical documents produced by key thinkers of this tradition. He identifies Louis de Bonald’s 1806 text, Sur les Juifs, as an important but overlooked moment in which earlier primarily religious anti-Judaic resentment is rearticulated into a new framework that redirects social anger toward Jews by linking the social dislocations caused by emancipated markets to Jewish legal emancipation.

Bonald claimed that political emancipation had unleashed Jewish power previously checked by legal discrimination, allowing it to expand and dominate all other social arenas of power, especially the state, economy, and media. In his account, “thanks to the democratic guarantees they had obtained, the Jews could now with impunity conspire to use their economic power to conquer political power” (p. 2). Emancipation dissolved the previous strategic alliance between Jewish leaders and Christian power, having the effect of “identif[ying] the European Jews with the new society based on the universalism of rights.” The emergent bourgeoisie and others skillfully used this antisemitic worldview to channel social anger from above and below away from themselves and onto Jews. Thus, Jews were positioned as “the only social group that seemed to have benefited from the market society and to represent the state that had imposed emancipation” (p. 180).

In this manner, Bonald modernized older forms of antisemitism by adapting the critique of usury to the new conditions wrought by the French Revolution, namely, political emancipation, the demise of the old order, and the expansion of capitalism. Antisemitism therefore became central to the general political reaction against constitutionalism, liberalism, the Enlightenment, and market society, blaming “the Jew” for the supposed ills of modernity. The result was a “new anti-Jewish paradigm” able to unite intransigent Catholics, reactionary monarchists, peasants, utopian socialists, and revolutionary anarchists by channeling hostility toward the new market economy toward the group long understood to personify finance and usury, Jews.

While the arch-reactionary Bonald would provide the basic theoretical mold, Battini persuasively argues it was anticapitalism in general and socialism in particular that helped modernize traditional Christian antisemitism into anti-Jewish anticapitalism. This is carried out by examining the common threads uniting the writings of Alphonse Toussenel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Édouard Drumont in France, and Paolo Orano and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Battini draws out a common argument that posits Jews as the architects and beneficiaries of the negative effects of capitalism, often portrayed as parasites upon an otherwise healthy and productive national or class community.

Battini interestingly notes that the romantic anticapitalism of anarchists like Proudhon and utopian socialists such as Charles Fourier seemed more susceptible to antisemitic interpretation than Marxism’s systemic analysis of capitalism in terms of not only finance and property but also labor. This theme is explored in an insightful commentary on Karl Marx’s “On the Jewish Question,” which argues against a common interpretation fixated on the text’s use of stereotypically antisemitic language but misses its deeper argument about the limits of liberal democracy, carried out via a critique of Bruno Bauer’s “universalist” position that Jews must suppress their particularity in the public sphere.[1] This attention to political splits within the socialist movement illustrates how divergent theoretical convictions translated into movements that were more or less prone to antisemitic content. This is not to say Battini lets Marx off the hook; following Hannah Arendt, he notes the limits of the assimilationist-universalist assumptions held by Marx and much of the socialist movement. He describes how Arendt built on the earlier argument articulated by Johann Gottfried Herder, wherein the “Jewish question would be resolved not through a forced elimination of religious difference but through its historical recognition and the political decision to overcome the past, starting a new course” (pp. 67-68). Battini highlights how this faux universalism would later inform various antisemitic incidents in the Soviet bloc, from the Slansky trial to the expulsion of student radicals in Poland as “Zionists” in the wake of the 1968 uprisings.

Indeed, Arendt is a frequent theoretical interlocutor throughout the book, and one can detect traces of her valorization of politics over economy in Battini’s central focus on the politico-juridical theme of legal emancipation. As the book’s subtitle is Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism, I was somewhat surprised by the attention devoted to antisemitism centered on the state and political sphere. Much of his treatment focuses on “anti-Jewish anticapitalist propaganda against legal emancipation,” which directs attention to conspiracy theories about the state as much as about capitalism (p. 178). Although these two spheres are intimately linked, especially in the mind of antisemitic conspiracists, at times it feels as if the topic of capitalism is approached only indirectly.

Although Battini is an intellectual historian, guided by the themes of the antisemitic thinkers under consideration, his occasional forays into political philosophy need greater theoretical clarification. The central role his narrative assigns to political emancipation at times has the effect of blurring rather than distinguishing antisemitic critiques of modernity in general from those specifically focused on capitalist political economy. This underscores a related theoretical lacuna. Although Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer are cited early, there is surprisingly little engagement with more recent Marxian theorists of antisemitism and capitalism. Thinkers like Moishe Postone and Werner Bonefeld, two of the foremost scholars of the relationship between anticapitalism and antisemitism, are notably absent. More than a puzzling bibliographic oversight, it represents a missed opportunity for productive engagement that could complement Battini’s classically Arendtian overemphasis on the political at the expense of the economic.

Battini deftly traces the genealogy of anti-Jewish anticapitalism over time and across space, yet at times his relentless focus on this one ideological tendency occludes its relationship to other forms of antisemitism. In sticking so closely to his thesis and subject material, he has relatively little to say about how anti-Jewish anticapitalism related to the racial antisemitism of Nazi antisemitism and other modalities. How did these divergent logics of antisemitism clash and combine, and why? And how has economic antisemitism evolved since National Socialism? Although he briefly discusses how “Israel and the United States are coupled in one symbolic representation, as colonial and capitalist power,” Battini overlooks how the fusion of anti-imperialism and anticapitalism during the New Left would become a central political and theoretical opening for later manifestations of Left antisemitism (p. 209). It is precisely these later developments that Postone especially has insightfully analyzed.[2]

Lastly, on a purely formal level, the book suffers not only from numerous small but distracting editing mistakes but also from an often too-literal translation from Italian into English that results in an overabundance of nouns, articles, and prepositions that hinder fluid reading. These minor formal issues are unfortunate as they make it more difficult to access the wealth of valuable research Battini has painstakingly assembled.

Although originally published in 2010, before the highwater mark of the global Right populist wave, the book feels especially timely in the era of resurgent white nationalism. The producerist and ethno-exclusivist economic discourse offered by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon has galvanized the Far Right and thrust antisemitism back into public discourse. It also draws heavily on precisely the antisemitic anticapitalist tradition under consideration in the book. Bannon’s description of the “crisis of capitalism,” famously articulated in a speech at the Vatican in 2014, draws on the tradition of Catholic social antisemitism detailed by Battini. Indeed, his analysis of the relationship of emancipation and antisemitism in the late eighteenth century helps us understand current Right populist narratives that blame political and economic problems on newly emancipated groups like blacks, LGBTQIA+, and immigrants in addition to the perennial target of Jews. As Nancy Fraser has noted, the “progressive neoliberalism” that was hegemonic until quite recently formally emancipated a variety of subaltern groups while simultaneously liberating the most destructive forces of capitalism, creating a social dynamic ripe for the scapegoating political discourse of Right populism.[3] It is for this reason that in “The Jews and Europe” (1939) Horkheimer commented that “whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.”[4]

It is precisely this relationship that Battini’s meticulous historical reconstruction illuminates. His genealogical exploration of anti-Jewish anticapitalist political discourse marks an important contribution to the scholarly literature on both antisemitism and capitalism. This would be an important academic feat in its own right; yet the book has the additional and unfortunate honor of remaining all-too-relevant today.

Notes

[1]. For example, antisemitism scholar Robert Wistrich frequently identifies Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” as the poisoned fruit that all later Left antisemitisms emanate from in From Ambivalence to Betrayal: The Left, the Jews, and Israel (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

[2]. Moishe Postone, “History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 93-110.

[3]. Nancy Fraser, “The End of Progressive Neoliberalism,” Dissent, January 2, 2017, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser.

[4]. Max Horkheimer, “The Jews and Europe,” trans. Mark Ritter, in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas Mackay Kellner (New York: Routledge, 1989), 78.

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Citation: Blair Taylor. Review of Battini, Michele, Socialism of Fools: Capitalism and Modern Anti-Semitism. H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews. June, 2018.

URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49683