Tom S.:	Good afternoon. I'm Tom Stephenson. I'm the provost here Swarthmore. And on behalf of president Rebecca Chopp, it's my pleasure to introduce this afternoon's speaker, Moishe Postone. Professor Postone is the Thomas E. Donnelly professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he is also affiliated with the Committee on Jewish Studies. His purpose is to nurture dialogue among the many disciplines, scholars, and students engaged in Jewish studies at that university. 
	Professor Postone's interests and contributions are wide ranging. He is widely recognized for his scholarly work on modern anti-Semitism, including how it relates to questions of history, memory, and identity in post-war Germany. He is also well known for his reinterpretation of Karl Marx's political and socioeconomic theories. But to at least one member of our community, Ben Postone of the Swarthmore class of 2015, he is arguably best known simply as dad.
	Professor Postone is co-editor with Eric Santner, chair of the department of Germanic studies at Chicago, of "Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the 20th Century." This work, which was published in 2003, is a collection of essays that considers the meaning of the Holocaust in 20th century history as well as its influence on historical practice. This work seeks to explore questions such as, "How should we understand the relationship of the Holocaust to the broader historical processes of the 20th century?" And, "How do we explain the bearing of the Holocaust on problems of representation, memory, memorialization, and historical practice?" 
	In addition to editing this volume, Professor Postone contributed the essay "The Holocaust and the Trajectory of the 20th Century." I've merely touched the surface of our guest's scholarship, which spans a wide range of disciplines. But the glue that holds this work together is a passionate commitment to intellectual rigor and reexamination, which should make him feel right at home here at Swarthmore. So please join me in offering a warm welcome to Professor Postone who will speak to us this afternoon on the topic "History and the Holocaust."
Moishe P.:	Thank you. It's a pleasure for me to be here. The title's "History and the Holocaust," but it actually should be, I was thinking on my way over here, "Theory, History, and the Holocaust." And what I'm going to try to do is present a theoretical reflection on the Holocaust, and at the same time I hope render plausible why I am using this theoretical reflection. 
	The Holocaust, the attempted extermination of European Jewry, persists as a claim on our moral imagination and an impasse to understanding. Hence, as the historian Michael Maras has noted, historians who deal with the Holocaust are confronted with two separable tasks. One is to commemorate, as an obligation to the dead and a warning to future generations. The other, to quote Maras, is to integrate the history of the Holocaust into the general stream of historical consciousness. I'd like to approach this double task by inquiring into the possible relation of the Holocaust to the overarching temporal patterns of the 20th century. 
	In so doing, I'd like to sync together what have been two very different discursive universes. On the one hand, the Holocaust has been viewed as an event of deep historical significance, a rupture in the fabric of civilization and of history. On the other hand, several major works of recent decades that tried to grasp the overarching historical structuring of the 20th century, such as Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, or Giovanni Arrighi's The Long 20th Century tend to marginalize the Holocaust. They either do not refer to it at all or do not consider it with reference to the temporal structuring they present.
	Marginalization of the Holocaust in general historical discourse was very evident for several decades following the second World War. Such marginalization, it could be argued, had multiple grounds. It was suggested among them strategies of denial or avoidance, structures of psychic repression, or an abstract universalistic position, which was particularly strong in left wing and Communist discourses that a focus on the murder of the Jews would be particularistic.
	Nevertheless, the difficulty of integrating discourse on the Holocaust and general historical discourse can't be explained solely with reference to such considerations, for it's ultimately a theoretical question. The basic question in this regard, in my view, is whether the Holocaust can also be grasped with reference to fundamental historical processes that have structured and restructured modern social life, or whether the Holocaust as terrible as it was must be regarded as an event that has great meaning for the victims and perhaps for the perpetrators and is of general moral importance, but has little significance on the level of deep historical structure.
	I'm going to argue, not surprisingly, that the Holocaust can and must be analyzed with reference to historical processes on a deep structural level, that it can be illuminated on this level of consideration, and that it in turn can illuminate aspects of the overarching temporal structure of our century. Attempting to mediate the Holocaust and fundamental historical processes necessarily entails attempting to clarify both the specificity of the Holocaust as well as the salient features of those historical processes. It thereby involves problematizing the relation of history and its victims in one determinate instance.
	Formulating the problematic in this way suggests, in other words, that the two historical tasks outlined by Maras are related. And it raises the question of whether and in what ways it's possible to think a future without betraying a past. One dimension of the problematic as I'm presenting it, the concern with the temporal structuring of the past century, responds to the massive global transformations of the past four decades. That may sound counterintuitive, but I'll eventually try to get there.
	This period that is the last four decades has been characterized by the unraveling of the post World War II state centered [inaudible 00:08:04] synthesis in the west, the collapse or fundamental transformation of party states and their command economies in the east, and the emergence of a neo-liberal capitalist global order. These developments in turn can be understood with reference to the overarching trajectory of state centric capitalism in the 20th century, from it's beginnings in World War I, the Russian revolution, and the interwar crisis of liberal capitalism through it's high point in the decades following World War II and it's decline after the early 1970s.
	What's significant about this trajectory is it's global character. It encompassed western capitalist countries and Communist countries, as well as colonized lands and decolonized countries. Although differences in historical development occurred, of course, they appear more as different inflections of a common pattern than as fundamentally different developments. These general developments occurred regardless of which parties were in power and were paralleled by the post war success and subsequent rapid decline of the Soviet Union and the far-going transformations of China.
	Such general developments in my view cannot adequately be explained in terms of particular state policies or local contingencies and point to the existence of general structural constraints on political, social, and economic decisions. They suggest the existence of dynamic forces not fully subject to political control, while at the same time calling into question linear notions of historical development, whether [Vabarian 00:10:00] or Marxist or liberal.
	Consideration of these overarching patterns suggests for me the central significance of the category of capital as a structure in social form. Not capital understood simply as a system of class domination and exploitation, although it is arguably that as well, but as a historically dynamic system that rests upon a historically specific system of abstract and impersonal imperatives and constraints. This is a theme I hope to return to later. 
	The question of whether the Holocaust can be historically grasped in ways that can be mediated with the general historical level I've outlined first requires clarifying the characterizing features of the Holocaust. The question is not one of degree of victimhood, as has frequently been misunderstood. The basic issue is not a quantitative one, whether in terms of number of people killed or that putative degree of their sufferings. There've been far too many historical instances of mass murder. Rather, the issue is one of qualitative specificity. Important aspects of the attempted extermination of European Jewry by the Nazis remain inexplicable so long as the Holocaust is simply subsumed under the general category of mass murder as the result of a murderous scapegoat strategy, for example, whose victims could've very well have been members of any other group.
	The Holocaust was characterized by its programmatic and totalizing character. The eradication of the Jews was to be total. All Jews, including children, were to be killed. Moreover, the extermination of the Jews was marked by the apparent lack of functionality. It seems not to have been a means to another end. The Jews were not exterminated for military security reasons, for example, nor as a consequence of demographic economic planning. Nor was it Nazi policy set toward the Jews similar to that policy of mass murder of Poles and Russians that aim to eliminate those members of the population around whom resistance might farm in order to exploit the rest more efficiently as [inaudible 00:12:40].
	Indeed, the Jews were not murdered for any extrinsic goal. The extermination of the Jews not only was to have been total, but apparently was it's own goal, extermination for the sake of extermination. A goal that acquired absolute priority, functionalist explanations of the Holocaust, accounts that seek to grasp it in terms of instrumental rationality, and conventional scapegoat theories can't begin to explain why, in the last years of the war, as the German forces were being routed by the Red Army, and it was mainly the Red Army. Equipment and personnel were diverted from possible military use to transport Jews to gas chambers from places as far away as the Greek island of Rhodes in the summer of 1944.
	Any adequate interpretation of the Holocaust must be capable of grasping the qualitative specificity of the extermination of European Jewry. This specificity, I'm going to suggest, must also be understood with reference to Nazism as a movement, which in terms of its own self-understanding represented a revolt against the status quo and an attempt to create a new order. Moreover, it must be grasped by means of categories that can mediate the Holocaust and the sorts of general historical developments that I've outlined above. So I'm putting a lot on the plate, on your plate.
	A wide range of explanatory approaches to the Holocaust appear in a critical light, reviewed with reference to the specificity of the Holocaust as well as the problematic of mediating the Holocaust and the sort of general historical framework I sketched out. From this standpoint, a number of approaches appear either too particularistic, including those that focus only on the specificity of German history, culture, and thought, or those that look only at the history of the Jews and grasp anti-Semitism as something that always already existed.
	Relatedly, the debates ... I don't know how many of you know any of the debates on the Holocaust, but the debate between the so-called functionalists and intentionalists interpretations of the Holocaust don't shed much light on either dimension of the problematic as I have formulated it. Intentionalists argue that the Holocaust was planned from the beginning. They posit a direct relation between Nazi ideology, planning and policies, and accord Hitler's worldview as central significance. Functionalist arguments, on the other hand, downplay the significance of ideology and claim that the nonlinear course of Nazi anti-Jewish policies indicates the absence of any premeditated, pre-established plan. Rather, for them, the Holocaust emerged contingently as a goal that resulted from, for example, a series of bureaucratic initiatives and responses to various problems generated by the war.
	Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of these positions, and I think each has both, neither is fully adequate to the level of consideration I'm attempting to introduce. On the one hand, functionalist positions while attempting to do justice to the twisted road of Nazi anti-Semitic policies after 1933 and to the complexity of decision-making process on the ground take for granted what has to be explained, as far as I'm concerned, that a program of complete extermination could even become thinkable. Intentionalist positions seek to address this issue, but end up reducing issues of ideology to those of intention and motivation. This is the case both among those who explain the Holocaust by focusing on Hitler's anti-Semitism as well as those who posit a quasi-antilogical, specifically German culture of anti-Semitism as Gould Hagler did.
	Not only does this debate recapitulate a classic modern antimony of real versus impersonal objective mechanism, but neither positions help clarify any possible relation between the Holocaust and larger historical developments. Instead, both treat the Holocaust in contingent terms. The one focusing on the contingencies of decision-making processes in the Nazi state under conditions of war, the other on the contingent worldview of a dictator or on the unique culture of a country. Such positions as the British-Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has noted, treat the Holocaust as comfortably uncharacteristic and sociologically inconsequential.
	There have, of course, also been many attempts to interpret Nazism in larger historical terms. For example, the wide variety of theories of fascism and of totalitarianism, as well as attempts to explain the Holocaust with reference to virulent anti-Bolshevism. However, as others such as [Showell 00:18:22] Friedlander have also pointed out, however useful such theories may be for some purposes, they don't adequately account for the planned extermination of European Jewry, which remains outside really of their analytic purview.
	The same may ultimately be said of theories that emphasize structures of bureaucratic authority, as well as the division of labor and hence responsibility that characterized the Nazi program of extermination. Such approaches help illuminate how that program was executed, but they don't explain the program itself.
	A different approach, one developed by Hannah Arendt at least in one of her works, and Horkheimer and Adorno, focused on anti-Semitism which they related to large scale historical transformations of European society. Although they understood those transformations in fundamentally different ways, their works share a common theme, that anti-Semitism grew as the Jews in their old social roles became historically superfluous. Whatever the problems with their specific approaches, and I don't think the category of historical superfluousness provides a basis for understanding a planned program of extermination, Arendt, Adorno, and Horkheimer correctly understood as far as I'm concerned that a focus on anti-Semitism directly addresses the issue of extermination. For that, I think one must focus on modern anti-Semitism's central element, the idea of the Jews as as world historical threat to life.
	Before elaborating, I'd like to note that turning once again to consideration of anti-Semitism doesn't necessarily mean returning to a position that regards the Holocaust only in terms of the specificity of German history. It does not also necessarily imply a linear, premeditated development of Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Nor does it mean that anti-Semitism alone directly explains the actions, motivations, and intentions of actors without further mediation. It does, however, seek to address the Nazi program of total extermination. Focusing on anti-Semitism in this way also impels us to rethink the meaning of ideology. As Dominick La Capra also has argued, we should distinguish ideology as a general framework of meaning from individual motivation and intentionality. Conflating the two underlies the, for me, unconvincing contention that anti-Semitism lodged dep within the psyche of German perpetrators was directly responsible for their actions.
	Such a conflation also however underlies the contrary argument, namely the claim that anti- Semitism was not of central importance because Nazi anti-Jewish policies were not implemented in a linear fashion, and many individual Germans appear not to have been motivated by a particularly powerful hatred of the Jews. Such positions fail to distinguish ideology as a general cultural framework, as a horizon of meaning from individual affect and motivation. In turning to a consideration of modern anti-Semitism, I'm reflecting upon an ideological form that became widespread in Europe after 1873, and I would suggest that the [inaudible 00:22:23] in Russia should be seen as part of this development rather than as quasi-medieval outbursts and reached its apex in Nazi Germany during the second World War after which it ebbed, at least for several decades.
	Now, in this talk I'm not going to discuss why this ideology was much more powerful in some European countries than in others. Rather I will try to sketch a analysis of what it was that became [inaudible 00:22:52] in Germany. By suggesting an analysis of modern anti-Semitism that indicates its intrinsic connection to national-socialism in terms that could also mediate an analysis of the Holocaust and large scale historical processes of the 20th century. 
	Okay. So modern anti-Semitism, which shouldn't be conflated with garden variety, every day anti-Jewish prejudice, is an ideology, a worldview that became widespread in Europe in the late 19th century. Now of course, its emergence presupposed earlier forms of anti-Semitism that had for centuries been integral to Christian western civilization. What's common to all forms of anti-Semitism is the degree of power attributed to the Jews. Yet it's not only the degree, but also the quality of power attributed to the Jews that distinguishes modern anti-Semitism. 
	Probably all forms of racism attribute potential power to the other. This power, however, is usually concrete, material, or sexual. It's the potential power of the oppressed, of the so-called untermenschen. The power attributed to Jews by modern anti-Semitism, however, is not concrete and physical; rather it is is intangible, abstract, universal, and global. This power is extremely difficult to check. It stands behind phenomena, but is not identical with them. It's hidden. It's conspiratorial. According to this worldview, the Jews constitute an immense powerful international conspiracy responsible for both Plutocratic capitalism and socialism, as well as for the rise of vulgar market culture and the decline of traditional values and institutions. The Jews were held responsible for economic crises and identified with the range of social restructuring and dislocations resulting from capitalist development, such as explosive urbanization and the transformation of the social landscape.
	Within this imaginary, and I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about this, the Jews were not so much considered an inferior race as an anti-race, responsible for historical processes that are profoundly dangerous and destructive to the wellbeing of other peoples, a threat to life itself. This ideology has been interpreted by many as profoundly anti-modern. After all, both Plutocracy and working class movements were concomitant of capitalist modernity. The problem with such interpretations, however, is that the modern would certainly include industrial capital, yet industrial capital was not an object of anti-Semitic attacks, even in a period of rapid industrialization.
	I'd like to suggest that more generally interpretations of national-socialism based on the notion of modernity are not fully adequate to their task. On the one hand as noted, many approaches have interpreted national-socialism as a revolt against modernity. On the other hand, more recent approaches have interpreted the Holocaust as rooted in the enlightenment, universalists' and rationalists' notion of humanity, or as an inherent possibility of modernity. This opposition is instructive, and it points to the difficulties in grasping national-socialism in terms of the concept of modernity either way. For Nazism rejected some elements of modernity and emphatically affirmed others, such as modern technology and industrial capital. An approach is required, then, that can make sense of the pattern of those aspects of modernity rejected by the Nazis and those accepted. And that can relate that pattern to modern exterminatory anti-Semitism. And that's my signal to sort of switch registers.
	I suggest, and I hope ... The next couple pages are going to be dense, so please bear with me. I suggest that a more rigorous analysis of central features of anti-Semitism and more generally of the relation of so-called modern and anti-modern elements of Nazism can be provided by an approach based on Marx's concept of fetishism. Unlike interpretations that focus on the term "modern," such an approach can provide the basis for an analysis of certain systematic forms of social misrecognition, for it entails a series of worked out distinctions between what is and what appears to be, between the historically specific social relations of capitalism and the way they appear to everyday experience.
	Within this theoretical framework, categories that Marx uses have words like commodity, capital, are not merely economic categories, but purport to simultaneously grasp forms of social relations and forms of thought. The concept of fetishism here refers to forms of thought that remain bound to the forms of appearance of social relations and hypostatizes or naturalizes those appearances. By relating modern anti-Semitism epistemologically to the categories of capitalism, what I'm going to try to do with such an approach is try to address the question of the deferential attitude of Nazism towards aspects of modernity on the one hand and also provide a point of departure for relating exterminatory anti-Semitism to the historical dynamic of the modern world on the other, in five pages.
	Within the framework within which I'm working, what distinguishes the basic social relations of capitalism with words like commodity, capital, as historically unique is that they are mediated by labor and its products. Hence, what Marx terms a commodity is not simply an object. But it is also a weird, an objectified form of social relations. Proceeding from this point of departure, the fundamental social relations of capitalism have a dualistic character. They are characterized by the opposition of an abstract general homogeneous dimension, which Marx calls value, including a system of abstract domination and compulsion which although social is impersonal and apparently objective, and a concrete particular material dimension. 
	Against this theoretical background, it's striking that the specific characteristics of the power attributed to the Jews by modern anti-Semitism, abstraction, intangibility, universality, mobility, are all characteristics of the abstract dimension of the social forms fundamentally characterizing capitalism. Moreover, this dimension, like the supposed power of the Jews, doesn't appear directly, but always in the form of the material carrier. Now, I'll begin addressing this similarity by noting that within the framework of the Marxian analysis that I'm outlining, although the social relations of capitalism in this analysis are dualistic, they're both simultaneously abstract and concrete, they appear as their abstract dimension alone. The concrete dimension like the products, like the labor, then appear to be simply thingly, simply material, outside of the social forms.
	So forms of anticapitalist thought that remain bound to one of these, to these forms of appearance tend to perceive capitalist modernity only in terms of its abstract dimension while positively embracing its concrete dimension. So for example, already in the early 19th century, money is considered the root of all evil as opposed to the purportedly natural dimension of labor and it's objects as if labor and it's objects were outside of that system. As industrial capitalism develops, the naturalization described by the notion of the fetish acquires new dimension. Capital is characterized by a ceaseless process of self-expansion, underlying increasingly large scale cycles of creation and destruction. Capital increasingly appears as pure process. It's concrete dimension changes accordingly. Individual labors become cellular components of the large, complex, dynamic system of people and machines, the goal of which is an open-ended process, production for the sake of production.
	The capital form of social relations has a blind, processual, quasi-organic character. This allows for social and historical processes to become increasingly understood in biological terms. That race theory is a phenomenon that begins in the 19th century and not earlier. It's not, as many people think, that it's really old. It's a 19th century form. So indirectly, I'm trying to address that, as well. At the same time, the dualism of the forms allows industrial production itself to appear as a material creative process separable from capital, which in turn is understood only in terms of its abstract dimension, rootless, parasitic finance capital. 
	The organic character of the whole plus its dualistic character allows for forms that understand themselves as revolt, resistance. They understand themselves as anticapitalist in which glorification of the purportedly premodern material nature blood, the soil, labor, community, goes hand in hand with an affirmation of modern elements such as industrial capital and technology. You also have that in forms of fundamentalism today. The notion of festishized anticapitalism then allows one to understand how these disparate modern and pre-modern forms, elements can be grasped in terms of an overarching commonality. They all appear to be concrete and healthy, organic, as opposed to the abstract. This helps explain why modern anti-Semitism which railed against many aspects of the modern world could affirm industrial capital and technology.
	This form of anticapitalism, and when I write it, I do it in quotation marks, is based ... But I'm not going to lecture that case. Is based on a one-sided attack on the abstract, on abstract law, abstract reason, or on another level, money and finance capital from the standpoint of the putatively healthy, rooted, and natural concrete. In biologized modern anti-Semitism, this fetishized opposition of the abstract and the concrete, the artificial and the natural, became conceptualized as the racial opposition of Jews and Aryans. According to this interpretation, the Jews were not seen merely as capitalists, nor were they identified only with money and the sphere of circulation, rather they were identified with capitalism itself.
	Capitalism, however, didn't appear to include technology and industry. Instead, capitalism appeared to be only its manifest abstract dimension, which in turn was held responsible for the economic, social, and cultural changes associated with the rapid development of modern industrial capitalism. The Jews then became the personifications of the intangible, destructive, immensely powerful international domination of capital. The overcoming of capitalism and its negative social effects became conceptualized as the overcoming of the Jews.
	I don't have time to discuss here why this popular fetishized form of anticapitalism focused on the Jews. If I had more time, I would try to elaborate. I do want to say that within the European context, this choice was by no means fortuitous. One could point to many factors, not least of which was the long history of anti-Semitism in Europe. For our purposes, let me briefly note that for a variety of economic, social, and political reasons, the quality of abstractness characteristic not only of the value dimension of capitalism, but also immediately of the bourgeois state and law became closely identified with the Jews. In the period when the concrete became glorified over the abstract against capitalism and the bourgeois state, this became a fatal association. The Jews were rootless, international, and abstract.
	The power and danger of modern anti-Semitism then results from its character as a comprehensive worldview. It explains the unsettling and destructive changes wrought by capitalism and gives voice to feelings of helplessness in the face of those changes. Modern anti-Semitism I suggest should be understood as a revolt against history as constituted by capitalism, misrecognized as a Jewish conspiracy. That conspiracy would have to be destroyed if the world were to be saved. In terms of its self-understanding, then, anti-Semitism has an emancipatory, even redemptive quality. This ideology was an absolutely necessary condition for the Holocaust, which should be understood as a perverse revolution, an attempt to save the world from the destructive tyranny of the abstract.
	A capitalist factory within a Marxian analysis is a site of value production which takes the form of the production of goods, of use values. The concrete is produced as the necessary carrier, bearer of the abstract. The Nazi extermination camps were not, as some would have it, a terrible version of such a factory, but should be seen as its grotesque, anticapitalist negation. Auschwitz was a factory to destroy value. That is, to destroy the personifications of the abstract. It's organization was that of the fiendish, inverted, industrial process, the aim of which was to liberate the concrete from the abstract.
	The first step was to dehumanize and reveal the Jews for what they really are, ciphers, numbered abstractions. The second step was then to eradicate this abstractness, trying in the process to wrest away the last remnants of concrete use value, clothes, gold, hair. Auschwitz, not the Nazi seizure of power, was the real German revolution, the attempted overthrow not merely of the political order but of the existing social formation. By this one deed, the world was to be made safe from the tyranny of the abstract. In the process, the Nazis liberated themselves from humanity.
	So the approach I've outlined understands a program of extermination with reference to ideology rather than to technology or a series of historical contingencies and tries to ground that ideology socially and historically. Such an approach, I suggest, helps elucidate the exterminatory project and its intrinsic ties to the so-called idealistic and revolutionary self-understanding of the Nazis. It indicates that precisely the nature of the crime of extermination and not only the choice of victims can be grounded in an analysis of modern anti-Semitism understood as a fetishized form of anticapitalism that emerged in the long, rocky transition from liberal to state centered capitalism. 
	Within this framework, the Jews became very determinate victims of history, different from those victims at whose cost history's constituted such as workers, or slaves, or those excluded or marginalized by history. Rather the Jews became objects of the displaced fury generated by the far reaching and pervasive effects of the historical dynamic of capitalism, the victims of a fetishized, perverse attempt to liberate humanity from the historical process. Now, I've analyzed that historical process, and I'm almost finished. I've analyzed that historical process elsewhere in terms of an ongoing present dominated by a past that exists in veiled form. Since the war, this domination frequently has resulted in a compulsive flight forward and/or a compulsive reenactment of the past. 
	A qualitatively different future, a project that would overcome rather than further both the domination of the present by the alienated past and the dualistic opposition of abstract and concrete that I've outlined is possible, I would argue, only on the basis of a determinate appropriation of history. Although outlined on a very abstract level of analysis, such an approach in my view provides an opening though which we can begin thinking a future without betraying the past. Thank you.