At 02:15 PM 9/29/97 -0700, Romain Kroes wrote: >I agree with that conclusion : unless men find a way to put an end to >capitalism, the survival of society and humanity remains in question. >Nazism, as long as we're informed of history, was the first acting out >against civilization. The law was no more the law (and precisely the Law >was intoduced in our christian culture by the jews, especially in >Germany), and all things were permitted, all frustrations and impulses >could be exhausted. So that a crowd of uncultured men efficiently served >the nazism. So I'm convinced, though I be marxist, that marxism can not >explain the "holocaust", unless marxist thought integrate the freudian >thought, that is to say abandon the rousseauist one. I'm not sure that >capitalism is "irrational", but the whole of capitalism defender >arguments, nowadays, is entirely irrational. "Inflation", "market >economy" and so on are only metaphysics, and that's notabily the reason >why the so called "economic science" remains everything but a real >science. Whatever it be, today's capitalism, by promoting egoism and >"laisser faire", is a daily aggression against culture and civilization. >In that sense, it's going to give birth to the next avatar of nazism, >which one we'll be anable to recognize according to the Primo Levi's >prediction, the last one for the last step of history. But don't forget, >too, that Marx believed in the extinguishing of the State, and so >laboured himself, in this case, under the bourgeoisie's ideology ... Actually, there is something like a more-or-less marxist explanation of the Holocaust in the US literature, although written by a person who chose to identfy himself as a conservative Republican (for publicity purpose, I suspect). Yet, his explanation falls along mostly-Weberian and to some degree Marxian lines. His argument can be summarized as follows: There was a surplus population between the two world wars in Europe, which each of countries tried to solve by nationalistic means; i.e. denying citizenship rights to various ethnic groups. The Nazis took a different approach, they used the formal-rational organization aka bureaucracy to physically exterminate the "surplus population" and appropriate their "economic value" in the process. Thus they did what other European countries wanted to do, yet they could not openly do without jettisoning the democratic pretences. That explains why most of European governments watched Nazi race policies (before WWII, of course) without protesting too much. Therefore, the question of the Holocaust is that of how effcient the apparatus of the state and the technology at its disposal can be in organizing people to pursue the elite's goals, even if those goals include the destruction of the pople who are to be organized. The Holocaust shows that it can be very efficient -- and that experience can be repreduced by any large scale bureaucratic organization. From that point of view, the Holocaust is the ultimate expression of the formal economic rationality of capitalism - or Maht Ohne Moral (Power without Morality, or Efficiency without Social Obligations as bourgeois economists would say it today). For anyone interested in more details, the reference is: Richard L. Rubenstein, _The Cunning of History_, 1975. wojtek sokolowski institute for policy studies johns hopkins university baltimore, md 21218 [EMAIL PROTECTED] voice: (410) 516-4056 fax: (410) 516-8233 POLITICS IS THE SHADOW CAST ON SOCIETY BY BIG BUSINESS. AND AS LONG AS THIS IS SO, THE ATTENUATI0N OF THE SHADOW WILL NOT CHANGE THE SUBSTANCE. - John Dewey
