In his 1980 Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to “Holocaust,” Moishe Postone challenged the Left to think more clearly about the place of anti-Semitism in the mass psychology of Nazism. Postone saw his project as a political one: in his assessment, the Left of the late seventies and early eighties was failing to come to terms with the centrality of anti-Semitism to the Nazi project of an anti-capitalism of the Right. The Left, he cautioned, ought not think it has “the monopoly on anti-capitalism or, conversely, that all forms of anti-capitalism are, at least potentially, progressive.” In order to ground the left project in a commitment to dialectical materialism, Postone set out to show how anti-Semitism was at the heart of Nazi anti-capitalism.

In Postone’s reading of the Nazi imaginary, the Jew represented a concretization of the abstract elements of capitalism. Jews, with their supposed conspiratorial capacities to pull the strings of communists and economic liberals alike, were understood as personifications of the intangible, international domination of capital, and thus as the principal opposition to German autarky. Ridding the world of Jews was, for the Nazis, the heart of an anti-capitalist project that would open the door to ethnic German domination and expansion. Capitalism, in the Nazi reading, would be overcome by German autarky by advancing capitalism’s concrete elements (e.g., the ethnically German workers and the industrial products of the nation’s labor) while simultaneously ridding the world of the personifications of capitalism’s mode of abstracting labor into profit—world Jewry. For the Nazi, the Jew became a fetish, in the Marxist sense of the term—a concrete representation of the abstract elements of the contradictions in capitalism. The fantasied solution to suffering under capitalism was to eliminate that fetish.

Postone’s intent here was to warn the Left a) to look more closely at the great historical horror of the Holocaust and to understand anti-Semitism as the uncompromising motivation behind the Nazi project, and b) to maintain focus on the need for truly dialectical understandings of capitalism as opposed to a “foreshortened anti-capitalism that seeks to immediately negate the abstract and glorify the concrete.” This habit of mind that privileges the concrete over the abstract, Postone believed, represented a dangerous trend in left politics but also in other areas of thought as well, including in psychological theories that might begin to privilege emotions (the concrete manifestations of mental life) over thought (an abstract feature of mental life).

Postone’s invitation to look more closely at Nazism was an important one, and his ideas about the place of the Jew in the psychic lives of the Nazi masses is compellingly argued. However, he seems to have followed his own cautionary advice only too well. While his depictions of the place of anti-Semetism within the Nazi worldview feels accurate, a number of things that Postone holds to be “concrete” truths about the Holocaust have been recently shown by historian Adam Tooze to reflect a kind of impressionistic and associational thinking that misreads important aspects of the Holocaust as an abstracted industrial process.

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