Translated here from "La Gauche Communiste", no.13, our party organ in the French language. We have retained the introduction, which deals with the Klaus Barbie trial. It is still just as relevant today though based on a particular contemporaneous events. The bourgeoisie is constantly seeking to portray nazism as the very anti-thesis of democracy; the merest whiff of nazism and ‘the experts’ are rolled out onto to the current affairs programmes to give us a lesson in how lucky we are to have such a lovely Government. Even very recently there has been the case of a rightwing historian found rummaging through Goebbels diaries in the Russian archives, and then there was the recent "was he, wasn’t he" a nazi concentration camp commandant trial’. And there are bound to be more. The analysis in the introduction below then serves to counter all those arguments for a democratic capitalism which are wheeled out on each of these tiresome and predictable occasions.
On the occasion of the trial of Klaus Barbie, about which the Mass media has been assaulting our ears recently, it is appropriate to republish an article that appeared in 1960 in our organ of the period: "Communist Program" (no.11) entitled: "Auschwitz or the Great Alibi".
There is no doubt that this is a quite extraordinary trial. Clearly we are witnessing our great Bourgeois nation putting Nazism on trial. It summons up the dead, the survivors, the torture and the horrors of this “apocalyptic" period, in order to wave the flag of Democracy! A Democracy which is Pure, in love with culture and with rights, and dignified far above the hideous, terrifying monstrosity which “was" nazism; That is, it is declaring openly to its poor, its unemployed, its wage-earners, to that part of the nation worst affected by the economic crisis and the "cleansing" measures of the ruling class, that democracy is still infinitely superior to Nazism; in short, if everybody remains nice and calm, one can come out of things without too many dead bodies! We have understood you well messieurs les Bourgeois. And yet your demonstration would have been very ordinary if you hadn’t delighted in certain additional subtleties to make us lose our bearings. There is in this society based on "rights", and on tons of texts, laws, decrees, and anti-laws to reverse the laws and decrees, a labyrinth of words and intrigue in which only lawyers know their way; the master jugglers might even be able to obtain - according to Verges, counsel for the defence for the torturer Barbie - the liberation of their client from the French prisons! The unsophisticated electors, Jewish or not, would put a good countenance on it all!
Another subtlety of this trial, that certain dogmatic Marxist carcasses have had the misfortune to fall for, is that apparently it is still necessary to show, in response to certain "masters of polemics", that a vineleaf is clearly a vineleaf, that a "death“ camp is clearly an extermination camp, that the concentration camps were not a collective hallucination of the Jewish people! And thus we have the desolate, morbid, even grotesque spectacle of an endless succession of poignant witnesses, heartbreaking opposite a serene Barbie, smiling, without remorse or regret, ever the victor, and who these last few days hasn’t even honored this "wailing wall" with his presence.
It gets even better: the rightwing Bourgeois, to avoid desperately awkward contradictions, distinguishes between war crimes and crimes against humanity, with only crimes against humanity judged worthy enough to be weighed in the scales of Bourgeois justice, the others being consigned to oblivion…. The Bourgeois do the reckoning thus: on the one side there are the dead killed in the cause of war, through machine gun fire and torture, and on the other side those killed with an ideological aim, (extermination of a race in the aim of purification, for example), in short, "a gratuitous act" in their mercantile system; a death at Auschwitz has more value for the moral democratic Bourgeois than a death from terror, starvation, or illness in the trenches of 1914-18, and is valued above a tortured Algerian or the tens of millions of civil and military victims who perished in that hecatomb of humanity - the first world war! It appears that when Bourgeois "rights" and morality need to be put in order, it merely depends on a bit of deft juggling.
Last but not least we have a subtlety which throws a little light on the "virtuous" souls of our good democrats, the nazi giantkillers. Me find it in the latter’s response to Barbies defence: which opposed the nazi crimes denounced and condemned by the Bourgeois “right", to those not acknowledged, and not condemned by our sublime justice: like the numerous well known collaborations between France and Barbie, the massacres of Mi-Lay for which the USA is still answerable, the massacre of children at Deir Yassine by Israel, the "missing" in the Algerian war, the genocide of North American Indians, the treatment of blacks, etc. Orthodox democracy replies that there is no difference between a war crime and a crime against humanity, and that it is against "tortures" because it defends the "rights of man". So, just like the pacifists, who denounce all wars wherever they may be, but when the chips are down are to be found rejoining the camp of the defenders of their threatened "fatherland" and defending their democratic privileges and wealth, we find the democrats characterising Nazism in this astounding rejoinder: Yes, the Algerian war was a horrible period…, but at least in France there was a chance to protest, to create a “commission for the protection of liberties" (the dead Algerians must be turning in their graves) whereas nazism didn’t offer this opportunity! So what inconveniences our "progressive" intellectuals is not torture or horror, but being prevented from expressing themselves, even if their writings do change nothing, It is difficult to believe ones ears!
But there is more; according to them, the nazis brought back torture to Europe. This great German people, renowned as sensible, cultivated and philosophical, permitted a putrid abscess to appear within the heart of a democratic, evolved, civilized Europe that knew of torture only through hearsay from the coloured peoples, the colonies, from the old days (the massacres of proletarians in the last century - the Paris Commune etc… and those of the civil wars of the years 20 and 36, are forgotten). They thus find themselves have to face up to, even on their own democratic terrain, with an uncomfortable, thorny problem, insoluble using Bourgeois calculations. In the end, these people just can’t conceive that Democracy, the Bourgeois society founded on rights, could ever produce this systematic horror as a matter of course, from within itself, they can only see it as peripheral. No, it is a hiccup, a historical freak caused by a genetic defect in Germans, as with the Jews! The democrats hide their faces, refusing to recognize that nazism is one of their offspring - and not a bastard either! They refuse to recognize that horror, torture, and war existed before, during and after nazism in all democratic societies, and in all societies based on exploitation of man by man and in all class societies, and that with Capitalism, the horror is characterized at all levels by a hallucinatory and apocalyptic industrialism.
But what was the German nation hoping to achieve by exterminating the handicapped, homosexuals, gypsies, slaves, Communists and Jews, if it wasn’t simply because of the terrible economic crisis that had raged in Germany since the 20’s? The article we are publishing below analyses this clearly. Let us then leave it to speak for itself.
The leftist press has just demonstrated once again that racism, and especially anti-semitism, is somehow the great alibi of the anti-fascist: It is their cause célèbre and always their last refuge in discussions. Who can withstand the evocation of the extermination camps and the death furnaces? Who doesn’t bow their head before the six million assassinated Jews? Who doesn’t shudder before the sadism of the nazis? Nevertheless, it is one of the anti-fascists’ most scandalous mystifications, as we propose here to demonstrate.
A recent leaflet of the M.R.A.P. (Movement against Racism, Anti-semitism and for Peace) attributed to nazism the blame for the death of 50 million human beings, of whom 6 million were Jews. This position, identical to the "fascist warmongers" slogan of self-styled communists, is typically Bourgeois. In refusing to see that capitalism itself is the cause of the crises and cataclysms that periodically ravage the globe, the bourgeois ideologues and reformists have always pretended instead to explain that by each other’s wickedness. One can see here the fundamental similarity of the ideologies (if one dares say it) of fascism and anti-fascism. Both proclaim that it is thoughts, ideas, the will of human groupings which determine social phenomena. Against these ideologies, which we call bourgeois because both defend capitalism, against all these faded "idealists", of today and tomorrow, Marxism has demonstrated that it is, on the contrary, social relations which determine the movement of ideas. This is the keystone of Marxism, and in order to see to what a degree pseudo-Marxists have disowned it, it is sufficient to point out that as far as they are concerned, everything comes about through ideas: colonialism, imperialism, capitalism itself, are nothing more than mental states. And to cap it all, the evils that humanity suffer are due to evil doers: misery mongers, oppression mongers, war mongers etc. Marxism has demonstrated that on the contrary misery, oppression, wars of destruction, far from being anomalies caused through deliberately malevolent wills, are part of the "normal" functioning of capitalism. This is particularly so in the epoque of wars of Imperialism, a theme we will develop further because of the important way in which it bears on our subject: the question of destruction.
Even though our Bourgeois or reformists recognize that Imperialist wars are caused though conflicts of interests, they fall well short of arriving at an understanding of capitalism. One can see it in their total lack of understanding of the basic causes of destruction. For them, the aim of war is to obtain victory, and the destruction of the adversary’s installations and people are merely the means for the attainment of this end. This is believed to the extent that some innocents predict a war won through dosing the enemy with some kind of sleeping draught! We have shown that the reverse is true; that destruction is the principal aim of the war. The Imperialist rivalries, which are the immediate cause of wars, are themselves only the consequence of ever increasing over-production. Capitalist production is effectively impelled into War because of the fall in the rate of profit and the crisis born of the necessity of continually increasing production whilst remaining unable to dispose of the products. War is the Capitalist solution to the crisis; the massive destruction of people remedies the periodic "overpopulation“ which goes hand in hand with overproduction. You would have to be an illuminated petit-bourgeois to believe that imperialist conflicts could be regulated as easily as in a game of cards or in a roundtable, and that this enormous destructiveness and the death of tens of millions of men are through the obstinacy of some, and the evil and greed of others.
Marx in 1844 was already reproaching the Bourgeois economists who considered greed as being innate, explaining it by showing why the greedy were obliged to be greedy. Also from 1844, Marxism demonstrated the causes of “overpopulation": «The demand for men necessarily governs the production of men, as of any commodity. If supply increases over demand a number of workers become paupers or die of starvation», wrote Marx in “zur Kritik…”. Engels wrote in "Umrisse…": «The population is only too large where the productive power as a whole is too large", and “…(we have seen) that private property has turned man into a commodity whose production and destruction also depend solely on demand; how the system of competition has thus slaughtered, and daily continues to slaughter, millions of men».
The last war, far from weakening Marxism and demonstrating that it has “had its day" has exactly confirmed our expectations.
It was necessary to recall these points, before taking up the matter of the extermination of the Jews, so as to draw attention to the fact that it took place not at any old time, but precisely at the time of an acute crisis and within an imperialist war. It is accordingly within the context of this gigantic destructive undertaking that it is possible to explain it. The problem can then be cleared up not by trying to explain the "destructive nihilism" of the nazis, but rather why the destruction concentrated itself largely on the Jews. On this point also, nazis and anti-fascists are agreed: It is racism; a hatred of Jews and a ferocious and uncontrollable "passion" that caused the death of the Jews. But, as Marxists, we know that social passions don’t have a life of their own, that nothing is more determined than these big movements of collective hatred. He will see that the study of anti-semitism within the imperialist epoch confirms this.
We emphasize that we are talking of Anti-semitism in the Imperialist epoch, for whilst idealists of all shades, from nazis to “Jewish” theoreticians, claim that the hatred of Jews has been the same at all times and in all places, we know it to be nothing of the sort. The anti-semitism of recent times is totally different from that during Feudalism. We won’t go into the history of Jews here, which Marxism has already entirely explained. But we can say we know why feudal society preserved the Jews as such; we know that whilst the strong Bourgeoisies; i.e. those that had been able to make an early political revolution (England, U.S.A., France) had virtually entirely assimilated their Jews, the weaker Bourgeoisies hadn’t been able to do this. We haven’t explained here the survival of the "Jews", but the anti-semitism of the imperialist epoch. And it will not be so difficult to explain if instead of occupying ourselves with the nature of Jews or anti-semites, we look at the place of Jews in society.
As a result of their previous history, the Jews find themselves today mainly in the middle and petit-bourgeoisie. A class condemned by the irresistible concentration of capital. It is this which shows us what is at the source of anti-semitism. Engels said: «(it is..) nothing other than a reaction of social feudal strata, doomed to disappear, against modern society with its essential composition of capitalists and wage-earners. It therefore serves only reactionary objectives disguised under a socialist mask».
Germany between the wars illustrated this phenomena in a particularly acute form. Shattered by the war and the revolutionary thrust of 1918-28, and menaced at all times by the proletariat, German capitalism suffered deeply from the world crisis after the war. Whereas the stronger victorious bourgeoisies (U.S.A., France, Britain) emerged relatively unscathed and easily got over the "readaption to the peace economy" crisis, German Capitalism was overtaken by a total depression. And it was probably the small and petit-bourgeoisie that suffered most of all, as in all crises which lead to the proletarianisation of the middle classes and to a concentration of capital enabled by the elimination of a proportion of small and medium sized businesses. But in this instance, it was such that the ruined, bankrupted, dispossessed, and liquidated petit-bourgeoisie couldn’t even descend into the proletariat, who were themselves affected badly by unemployment (7 million unemployed at the worst point of the crisis); they therefore fell directly into a state of pauperism, condemned to die of starvation when their reserves were gone. It is in reaction to this terrible menace that the petit-bourgeois is invented “anti-semitism”. Not so much, as metaphysicians would have it, to explain the misfortunes that hit them, but rather to preserve themselves by concentrating on one of its groups. Against the terrible economic depression, against the many and varied destructions that made the existence of each of its members uncertain, the petit-bourgeoisie reacted by sacrificing one of its groupings, hoping thereby to save and assure the existence of the others. Anti-semitism originated no more from a "Machiavellian plan" than from "perverse ideas": it resulted directly from the constraints of the economy. The hatred of Jews, far from being the a priori reason for their destruction, represented only the desire to delimit and concentrate the destruction on them.
It eventually came about that even the workers succumbed to racism; when menaced by massive unemployment the proletariat tend to concentrate on certain groups: Italians, Poles or “coons”, "wogs", Arabs, etc. But these tendencies occurred only at the worst moments of demoralization, and tended not to last long. From the moment when they enter the struggle, the proletariat sees clearly and concretely who the enemy is. But, whilst the proletariat is a homogeneous class that has a historical perspective and mission, the petit-bourgeoisie by contrast is a condemned class, and as a result it is condemned never to understand power, and is incapable of struggle; all it can do is merely flounder about blindly, crushed from both sides. Racism isn’t an aberration of the spirit, it is and will be the petit-bourgeois reaction to the pressure of big capital. The choice of “race", that’s to say, the group on which the destruction is concentrated, depends on the circumstances of course. In Germany, the Jews were the only ones to “fit the bill“: They were almost exclusively petit-bourgeois, and within the petit-bourgeoisie itself they were the only group sufficiently identifiable. It was on them alone that the petit-bourgeoisie could concentrate the catastrophe. It was particularly important that identification present no difficulty, and to have the means to define exactly who would be destroyed and who would be spared. Thus logic would be finally well and truly thrown out of the window with the allowance made for grandfathers who had been baptised; thereby flagrantly contradicting the theories of race and blood and serving to demonstrate the incoherence of these theories. As usual though, Democrats, who content themselves with demonstrating the absurdity and ignominy of racism, miss the point.
Tormented by capital, the German petit-bourgeoisie had thrown the Jews to the wolves to ease its burden. This was certainly not done in a conscious way, but this was what lay behind its hatred of the Jews and of the satisfaction it derived from the closing down and pillaging of Jewish shops. It could be said that Big capital from its point of view was delighted with this stroke of luck: it was able to liquidate a part of the petit-bourgeoisie with the petit-bourgeoisie’s permission; even better, this same petit-bourgoisie took charge of the liquidation. But this "personalized" image is not the best way of presenting capital, for it is important to point out that capitalism, no more than the petit-bourgeois, was not aware what it was doing. It was suffering economic constraints and followed passively the line of least resistance.
We haven’t said anything about the German proletariat because it didn’t intervene directly in this affair. It had been beaten and, take note, the liquidation of the Jews wouldn’t be possible until after its defeat. But the social forces that had led to this liquidation existed before the defeat of the proletariat. Its had only allowed these forces to "realise" this liquidation by leaving Capital’s hands free.
It was at this point that the economic liquidation commenced: expropriation in all its forms, eviction from the liberal professions, from administration etc. Little by little, Jews were deprived of all means of existence, having to live on any reserve they had managed to save. During the whole of this period up to the latter part of the war, the politics of the nazis towards the Jews hung on two words: Juden raus! Jews out! Every means was found to ease Jewish emigration. But if the nazis intended only to throw out the Jews whom they didn’t know what to do with, and if the Jews for their part only wanted to leave Germany, nobody else would allow them to enter. And this isn’t really so astonishing if one considers that nobody could let them enter: there just weren’t any countries capable of absorbing and providing a living to millions of ruined petit-bourgeois, only a tiny fraction had been able to leave. The greater part remained, unfortunately for them and unfortunately for the nazis. Suspended in mid-air as it were.
The imperialist war was to aggravate the situation both qualitatively and quantitatively. Quantitatively, because German capital, obliged to reduce the petty-bourgeoisie so as to concentrate European capital in its hands, had extended the liquidation of Jews to the whole of central Europe. Anti-semitism had proved its worth; it need only continue. It found an echo, moreover, in the indigenous anti-semitism of central Europe, which was more complex, being an unpleasant mixture of feudal and petit-bourgeois anti-semitism which we won’t go into here. At the same time the situation was aggravated qualitatively. Conditions of life were made harder by the war and the Jewish reserves fell: they were condemned to die of starvation before long. In “normal" times, when it only affects a few, capitalism can leave those people rejected from the production process to perish alone. But in the middle of a war, when it involved millions, this was impossible. Such "disorder” would have paralysed it. It was therefore necessary for capitalism to organize their death.
It didn’t kill them straightaway though. To begin with, it took them out of circulation, it regrouped and concentrated them. And it worked them to death. Killing men through work is one of capitalism’s oldest tricks. Marx wrote in 1844: «To meet with success, industrial competition requires numerous armies that can be concentrated in one place and copiously decimated».
It was required of course that these people defray their expenses whilst they were still alive, and of their ensuing deaths. And that they produce surplus-value for as long as possible. For capitalism couldn’t execute the men it had condemned - unless it could profit from the very execution itself.
But people are very tough. Even when reduced to skeletons, they weren’t dying fast enough. It was necessary to massacre those who couldn’t work, and then those for whom there was no more need, because the avatars of war had rendered their labour useless.
German capitalism was uncomfortable however with assassination pure and simple, not on humanitarian grounds certainly, but because it got nothing out of it. From this was born the mission of Joel Brand, to which we refer because of the light it sheds on the answerability of global capitalism as a whole (see "L’Histoire de Joel Brand" by A.Weissberg, éditions du Seuil). Joel Brand was one of the leaders of a semi-clandestine organization of Hungarian Jews. This organization was trying to save Jaws by every possible means: hiding places, illegal immigration, as also by corruption of the S.S. The S.S. Judenkommando tolerated these organizations which they tried more or less to use as “auxiliaries“ in the sorting out and gathering operations.
In April 1944, Joel Brand was summoned to the JudenKommando in Budapest to meet Eichmann, who was head of the Jewish section of the S.S. Eichmann, with the approval of Himmler, charged him with the following mission: to go to the Anglo-Americans to negotiate the sale of a million Jews. The S.S. asked in exchange 10,000 lorries, but were ready to bargain, as much on the nature as on the quantity of the merchandise. They proposed as well the freeing of 100,000 Jews on the official acceptance of the agreement to show good faith. It was a serious business.
Unfortunately, if the supply existed, the demand didn’t. Not only the Jews, but the S.S. had been taken in by the humanitarian propaganda of the allies! The allies didn’t want these millions of Jews! Not for 10,000 lorries, not for 5,000 not even for none at all. We can’t enter into details about the misadventures of Joel Brand here. He left through Turkey and languished in the English prisons of the near-east. With the allies refusing "to take the affair seriously", doing everything to stifle and discredit him. Finally in Cairo, Joel Brand met Lord Moyne, the British minister for the near east. He entreated him to obtain, at least a written agreement for the release: which would at least save 100,000 lives: «..and what would the final total be? Eichmann spoke of a million. How can you imagine such a thing, Mister Brand. What can I do with this million Jews? Where can I put them? Who will receive them ?». «If the Earth hasn’t any more room for us, there remains only for us to be exterminated» came the desperate reply from Brand.
The S.S. had been slow to comprehend: they themselves believed in western ideas! After the failure of Joel Brand’s mission and in the midst of the exterminations, they tried again to sell the Jews to the Joint (the Jewish American organisation), even depositing an "account” of 1700 Jews in Switzerland. But apart from that, the matter was never brought to a conclusion.
Joel Brand had almost grasped the situation. He had understood what the situation was, but not why it was so. It wasn’t the Earth that didn’t have anymore room, but Capitalist society. And for their part, not because they were Jews, but because rejected from the process of production, useless to production.
Lord Moyne was later assassinated by two Jewish terrorists, and J. Brand learned later that he had often sympathized with the tragic destiny of the Jews. "His politics were dictated to him by the inhuman London administration". But Brand, who we here refer to for the last time, hadn’t understood that this administration is merely the administration of capital, and that it is capital which is inhuman. And capital didn’t know what to do with these people. It didn’t even know what to do with the rare survivors, those "displaced persons” whom nobody knew where to put.
The surviving Jews succeeded in finally making room for themselves. Through force, and by profiting from the International conjuncture, the state of Israel was formed. But even this had been possible only by "displacing” the indigenous population: hundreds of thousands of refugee Arabs from then on would drag out their useless (to Capital!) existence in the resettlement camps.
We have seen how capitalism condemned millions of men to death by expelling them from production. We have seen how it massacred them, in such a way as to extract from them as much surplus value as possible. It is left to us to see how it still exploited them after their death, how it exploited their death itself.
First of all, there are the imperialists of the allied camp, who used the deaths to justify their war, and following their victory to justify the infamous treatment they inflicted on the Germans. Such as the swooping on the camps and the corpses, walking around everywhere with horrible photos and proclaiming "see what bastards the Boche are! We certainly had good reason to fight them! And how justified we are now to give them a taste of pain!". When one reflects, on the countless crimes of Imperialism; when it is considered for example that even at the moment (1945) when people like Thorez [the PCF leader] were singing their victory over fascism, 45,000 Algerians (fascist provocateurs!) fell under the blows of repression; when it is considered that it is Global capitalism which is responsible for the massacres, the shameless cynicism of such hypocritical satisfaction makes one feel truly disgusted.
Meanwhile all our good democratic anti-fascists hurled themselves on the corpses of the Jews. And ever since they have waved them under the noses of the proletariat. To make it aware of the infamy of Capitalism? Why no, quite the contrary: to make it appreciate, by way of contrast, true democracy, true progress, and the well-being it enjoys within Capitalist society! The horrors of capitalist death are supposed to make the proletariat forget the horrors of capitalist life, and the fact that the both are inextricably linked! The experiments of the S.S. doctors are supposed to make the proletariat forget that capitalism experiments on a large scale with carcinogens, the effects of alcohol on heredity, with the radio-activity of the "democratic" bombs. If the lampshades of human skin are put on display, it is in order to make us forget that capitalism has transformed living man into lampshades. The mountains of hair, gold teeth, and bodies of men, become merchandise, are supposed to make us forget that capitalism has made living man into merchandise. It is the work, even the life of man, which capitalism has transformed into merchandise. It is this which is the source of all evils. Using the corpses of the victims of capital to try to bury this truth, to make the corpses serve to protect capital. Surely this must be the most infamous exploitation of all.