“German capitalism did not need Auschwitz: but it needed the Nazis, who
needed Auschwitz.”
So said Peter Sedgwick in ‘The Problem of Fascism’ (1970), one of the
best short articles on the subject. Sedgwick’s major claim to fame are
his brilliant translations of Victor Serge’s best known political
writings, both Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Year One of the Russian
Revolution. One of my most vivid memories from the late sixties is
seeing Peter making a formidable intervention at an Oxford Labour Club
meeting some time in 1967, one of the first political meetings I ever
attended at university. I was so impressed by what I heard that that was
probably the night I ‘joined the Left’. (It’s possible the issue that
evening was Labour’s pro-American stance during the Vietnam War.)
He was 49 when he was found dead near his home at Shipley in Yorkshire
in 1983, in what a friend Dave Widgery later described as ‘a still
unexplained drowning incident’. Widgery (who was even younger, just 45,
when he died in 1992) wrote, ‘The politics of Serge and Sedgwick were of
Bolshevism at its most libertarian, and Marxism at its most warmhearted
and witty …When Peter died he was working on the Serge-Trotsky
correspondence. He dressed like a Basque beatnik, wrote footnotes to his
own footnotes, typed (like Serge) in single, uncorrected spacing on
flimsy paper…Sedgwick was one of the few New Left who stayed moving
leftwards in the Sixties, serving as an active and valued member of the
International Socialists until his resignation in 1977’.
The brilliant historian of fascism Tim Mason (who committed suicide in
Rome in 1990, after battling years of severe depression) had written in
his own obituary of Sedgwick— ‘at a time when the air of the New Left
was heavy, thundery, laden with abstract nouns which were locked in
desperately earnest conflict with each other, he went on writing with
his characteristic calm reasonableness, factual precision, and, most
exceptional of all, with light wit and humour. He combined firmness of
intellectual and political purpose with a gentle manner and a dedication
to lucidity and rational persuasion in his writing’.
Sedgwick’s prose was powerful and scintillating. Mason and Sedgwick were
both British Marxists ‘who could really move between cultures’. Mason
retired from an Oxford fellowship at the age of 40 to follow his new
(Italian) partner to Rome. He saw Thatcherism as the precursor of a
coming British fascism. One of his central theses about German fascism
was what he called ‘The Primacy of Politics’. It was first mooted in the
German left-wing journal Das Argument as early as 1966. In his review of
the book in which that seminal essay was reprinted for wider circulation
Sedgwick summed up its essential argument. ‘His case is that National
Socialist Germany exhibits a peculiar ‘primacy of politics’ in which
ideological goals determine the performance of the economic sphere so
radically that the whole system cuts loose from any rationality of
self-reproduction’. ‘It is useful to look at Nazi Germany as a
capitalist economy in which the capitalists as such are demoted and
subordinated. The principal unit of ‘capital’ is not the firm or the
cartel but the nation.’ In other words, the accumulation of capital is
suddenly subordinated to a moment external to its own rationality.
‘[T]here is so much in Hitler’s behaviour…that defies any but a narrowly
ideological analysis. Courses of action were chosen not because they
made any kind of economic (or even military) sense but because the
belief-system of the leadership demanded these measures…And, of course,
the extermination of the Jews (gassing scarce, Polish metal workers just
when they were needed most, commandeering a transport system already
unable to meet military demands…) defies reason no less than conscience.
The ‘primacy’ of Nazi politics is exerted not only against economics but
against politics (i.e., policy-making) itself. Hitler’s orders to
destroy Germany before the advance of the Allies in 1945 follow
perfectly from the intellectual position of the ‘master race’, for if
this race is itself mastered the only possible conclusion is that it was
unworthy of the ideal, and deserves obliteration before the conqueror.
But it makes no other kind of sense, political or industrial, capitalist
or nationalist.’
In a remarkable twist, Sedgwick then extends the ‘primacy of politics’
to imperialism as a whole. ‘All the same, one wonders how far he (Mason)
is assuming that the ‘primacy of politics’ is abnormal in cases of
national expansionism. It is as though we were asked to believe that
imperialism normally has economic motives, influencing political
decisions directly through business pressure groups, but that Nazi
Germany is an exception. The lingering influence of the
Hobson-Hilferding-Lenin theory of ‘imperialism-as-capitalism’ may
perhaps be detected here. But it has now been satisfactorily established
that, e.g. the colonial annexations of the European powers in Africa
over 1870-1914 had little or nothing to do with the economic impetus of
‘the export of capital’… Similarly, Noam Chomsky has recently argued
that the determination (until recently) of the United States to hang on
to Vietnam can be associated with a political imperative (to leave
elbow-room for Japan in Asia as a junior partner) rather than any
economic importance of the region for Wall Street. What is striking
about the Hitler regime is not ‘the primacy of politics’ per se but the
specific fragmentation and retreat of private capital as an organised
force in the society.’
And finally, we have a turn to psychology as the last remaining source
of gruesome rationality. (At the time he reviewed Mason’s essay
Sedgwick, a psychologist by profession, is said by Steven Lukes to have
held jobs as ‘a tutor at a psychiatric prison and research psychologist
at an Oxford hospital studying brain-damaged patients’.) So he writes
towards the end, ‘The utility of even a revised Marxist analysis breaks
down, however, in the face of the gas-chambers. The most dedicated and
developed social theory that human civilisation has attained has nothing
to contribute towards our understanding of Nazism’s politics of race
murder. The very use of expressions like ‘barbarism’ and ‘medieval’ by
Marxists at this point testifies to the replacement of analysis by
horror. It is little wonder that so many on the Left have resorted to
psychological explanation as the first available alternative to the
Marxist vacuum’. This was a view that Mason himself would have agreed with.
(It’s hard to find photos of Peter on the net; this one shows him with
his wife Edie and their kids in Wales in the early sixties.)
The MIA has a fairly comprehensive list of his articles:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/index.htm
<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marxists.org%2Farchive%2Fsedgwick%2Findex.htm%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR2MWBNtTtJdJpyx2kQOxvbXXCWy5exTVY3UcbCtWX8Jvl7YsDO37JOV5XY&h=AT1nHs2zp9OFxi4xLlYoy8VsEXhV_lLYIDBhl6SmF5v9Yl4Q02N6iA0Q6ba-ALfdoHSv_951Z6R4qqcdr-blOfotcvV8TayhYk66zPcVYChGjw5vciienKY7eY_j07F67z_C-AA&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT3ZKtAUOJaygyBfK6gnV4eD6eaIapTQ5K4VyLrAQiF9i3yc0Steig__mJOIfuy2y0CMkStMuGadssnmUNMbWN1r-Wdkb3KLisKiX_w9rV59bep7_TbtaKCNM0VS-BV36AEX644tNjYP_xodxu061HbuIidHNqeBWahemVGqJkjYqEhTyTLNiRYBrp6xs7XZOiWM7Idw7uINlV95G4eh4jI>
The fascism review can be read here:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1970/02/fascism.htm<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.marxists.org%2Farchive%2Fsedgwick%2F1970%2F02%2Ffascism.htm%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR0LG33fNnQ2MGV-BOgzFsAkKhQ2Z2CtJqz-_1tYY8ed3rzlqFFD7MRVe-Y&h=AT1IZnmM4ZGGD6_lygqBIp4085tUqWc48_FPAVg2GKHhmEmRrbEWaiuxZAWm421rEi6o87jJHkN3kqcAfXdrHzBC4H7Y4UdxlTTJjjgVdQv2I8ro2qRTLolzjyTFhq80Sp28fN4&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT3ZKtAUOJaygyBfK6gnV4eD6eaIapTQ5K4VyLrAQiF9i3yc0Steig__mJOIfuy2y0CMkStMuGadssnmUNMbWN1r-Wdkb3KLisKiX_w9rV59bep7_TbtaKCNM0VS-BV36AEX644tNjYP_xodxu061HbuIidHNqeBWahemVGqJkjYqEhTyTLNiRYBrp6xs7XZOiWM7Idw7uINlV95G4eh4jI>
And here is Dave Renton’s fascinating blog about him:
https://livesrunning.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/peter-sedgwick-the-dissidents-dissident/<https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Flivesrunning.wordpress.com%2F2013%2F06%2F14%2Fpeter-sedgwick-the-dissidents-dissident%2F%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR3okrjUmUqOkjeHeHiJG9R4Jj4cqtrNK5x6jSH2r5_wEyEYXz8Xr5ewFOs&h=AT3dVvsnXbQ9qOMLKYUY8lfupv9bKYV_xCpkdHoNllpAPoaTN4-pVg3GHJr-qvBd9FU6J8AyyGS8H9kb9J3cF4Y7jTWvT-q-TSxe3NrVSe3bDdpmgWVZ7Rydp6yzlM8dD200Zp4&__tn__=-UK-R&c[0]=AT3ZKtAUOJaygyBfK6gnV4eD6eaIapTQ5K4VyLrAQiF9i3yc0Steig__mJOIfuy2y0CMkStMuGadssnmUNMbWN1r-Wdkb3KLisKiX_w9rV59bep7_TbtaKCNM0VS-BV36AEX644tNjYP_xodxu061HbuIidHNqeBWahemVGqJkjYqEhTyTLNiRYBrp6xs7XZOiWM7Idw7uINlV95G4eh4jI>
May be an image of one or more people, people standing and outdoors
<https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=10159036229985489&set=a.352264660488&__cft__[0]=AZUwaJdxxSkChTrW_CjdO881SSG9CUh3tmZ52-Z069Zvb7ErI-CUYQ3hHTych5QXyVo0uipo1p0sCqbcIN-WAf9tVt8mSQyn0zCyMt7miaMai9FW_ShPbONwgrCmu8-5x-AoqglB9v1g_WqpYEowR8i-nLMPYQ1QAKboU1QzenEE5C_ij7cJ3pj6fOTkfN4FDL8&__tn__=EH-R>
87Swanson Tudor, Cedric Beidatschand85 others
26 Comments
21 Shares
Like
Comment
Share
Comme
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#6796): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6796
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80953698/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
