The infantile “Jewish question” narrative, & the clarity that can only come from embracing class struggle

In our task of drawing the masses away from the far right, communists have a lot of good arguments that we can use. Many of these arguments come from how the proponents of the “Jewish question” narrative have failed to overcome capital’s contradictions, whereas communists have delivered enormous material gains for the masses. We can point to how Nazi Germany was the greatest failure in history, with its momentary economic “success” having depended on foreign capitalist backing, while Marxism-Leninism is responsible for unparalleled growth both in the 20th and 21st centuries. We can point to how today’s American far right exists in a terminally online space, while the communists have been the ones working to serve our country’s people on a practical level.

There are innumerable lies about history which we can expose the Hitlerites for telling, and the communists who’ve taken on that task have been able to score wins in the sphere of debate. The fact that the far right has actively rejected on-the-ground organizing, while communists are only getting more organizationally serious, also helps us discredit the Hitlerites. Demonstrating that our enemies lack credibility isn’t the entirety of our task, though; it’s an important part of our task, but to truly win this narrative war, we will need to refute the core of the JQ’s argument. All of Hitlerism’s hypocrisy and failures are symptomatic of this deeper flaw in its thinking; a flaw that, if we sufficiently bring it to the public’s attention, will cripple Hitlerism’s ability to gain traction.

This flaw is the error of believing that our economic system’s evils stem not from the system itself, but from a racial contradiction. This error mirrors the error that radical liberals make; both the far right and the radlibs reduce the problem to a racial one, putting forth an analysis that’s infantile in nature. When JQers argue that the problem is “the Jews,” they’re using the same rhetorical tactic that liberals use when they act like the problem is simply “white people,” and perform embarrassing white self-hatred rituals. It’s fundamentally unserious, and most Americans recognize that this kind of thinking is unserious; that’s why anti-wokeness has been able to gain so much traction among the American people.

The far right’s goal is to sell the JQ to the same people who’ve rejected left-wing race essentialism, because it’s those people who are already most aligned with the right. But if we can show why the JQ argument is just as absurd as radlib thinking, we’ll be able to win many more people towards our position. We’ll be able to bring the most disillusioned among the masses into the class struggle, and thereby provide them with the only path that will let them assert their material interests.

To carry out this counter-propaganda mission, we need to take example from Marx, who critiqued the logic of the JQ in a way that’s more effective than any argument which liberals have to offer. Liberal anti-communists take Marx’ statement that money is “the god” of the Jews out of context; when you honestly look at what his argument was, it becomes clear that he wasn’t encouraging prejudice against Jewish people by saying this. The statement was an observation about how money has become the god of every person who’s been influenced by bourgeois society, whether they’re Jewish or not. This universal intent behind Marx’ comment comes through in his conclusion that “Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value.”

This idea informs the thesis of his essay On the Jewish Question, this being that in order to truly end the capitalist contradictions which anti-Jewish sentiments blame Jews for, we will need to abolish private property itself. Wrote Marx:

The critique of the Jewish question is the answer to the Jewish question. The summary, therefore, is as follows: We must emancipate ourselves before we can emancipate others. The most rigid form of the opposition between the Jew and the Christian is the religious opposition. How is an opposition resolved? By making it impossible. How is religious opposition made impossible? By abolishing religion. As soon as Jew and Christian recognize that their respective religions are no more than different stages in the development of the human mind, different snake skins cast off by history, and that man is the snake who sloughed them, the relation of Jew and Christian is no longer religious but is only a critical, scientific, and human relation. Science, then, constitutes their unity. But, contradictions in science are resolved by science itself…

The decomposition of man into Jew and citizen, Protestant and citizen, religious man and citizen, is neither a deception directed against citizenhood, nor is it a circumvention of political emancipation, it is political emancipation itself, the political method of emancipating oneself from religion. Of course, in periods when the political state as such is born violently out of civil society, when political liberation is the form in which men strive to achieve their liberation, the state can and must go as far as the abolition of religion, the destruction of religion. But it can do so only in the same way that it proceeds to the abolition of private property, to the maximum, to confiscation, to progressive taxation, just as it goes as far as the abolition of life, the guillotine.

Marx was saying that even if you can find evidence which proves a disproportionate number of Jews are involved in the capitalist lifestyle, the real issue won’t be solved until capitalism itself is defeated. Until the workers overthrow the bourgeois state, and implement proletarian democracy.

When communists advocate for this in a serious way, bourgeois liberals vilify us by calling us “class reductionists”; this is because we don’t affirm their classist worldview in which the white workers simply need to check their privilege, and stop asking for so much. The JQers are goofy in the same way that such liberal racial attitudes are goofy, and to be able to directly defend their position, the JQers would have to adopt the same arguments that radlibs use. They would have to embody the stereotypes about left-wing activists, and apply the “class reductionist” label to communists; which is not an effective way to argue against us, because we’re not ashamed to be called class reductionists. We view that label as a badge of honor when radlibs direct it towards us, and we’ll react the same way when JQers inevitably use an equivalent rhetorical tactic against us.

Another group that parallels the JQers, and that centers itself around an identity-based crusade, is the Zionists themselves—the ones responsible for the most antisemitic force in today’s world, that being the “Israeli” colonial project. The Zionists who are honest about what they believe truly want people to embrace the JQ worldview, because saying that Jews have supreme control feeds into their racial supremacist power fantasy. That's what former senator Norm Coleman was doing when he warmed a crowd up for Netanyahu by declaring: “the masters of the universe are Jews!”

When one truly understands how economic power works, they see that this statement does not vindicate Hitler’s arguments; instead it vindicates Marx. When Marx identified the pathology that capitalism creates, where people come to make money into their god, he recognized the problem as coming from the societal structure itself. From the material forces that drive people to worship nihilism, and forsake anything constructive in favor of exploiting and subjugating others. Zionism is the logical conclusion of this mindset, with its adherents coming to not even view money as god, but view themselves as god.

The argument of the JQers depends on the same logic that’s used by the Zionists, and by the race reductionist radlibs. By reinforcing the view that history is fundamentally driven by race, rather than by class struggle, the JQers make themselves into assets for the Zionists they claim to oppose.

It’s common knowledge in pro-Palestine circles that Zionism and anti-Jewish sentiments are co-dependent, but when you look at Marx’s critique of the JQ, it becomes clear just how true this is. Marx exposed both the nihilistic, proto-Zionist mindset that would lead people to believe Palestinians don’t deserve to exist; and the infantile mindset of those who believe Jews themselves are the problem. Through this analysis, we can isolate the JQers, and rally the masses behind the proletarian cause.

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