Again, thanks to Louis for his learned presentation. This is a VERY important question. I'll bring in a small number of points: * the idea of a "people-class" encouraging social antagonism (in this case, the Jews) fits with the pluralist view that when "social cleavages" (class vs. class, ethnicity vs. ethnicity, etc.) coincide, it causes more severe conflict than when they don't. (People such as Seymour Martin Lipset and Ralf Dahrendorf got this from their youthful flirtation with Marxism. It's a version of the "divide and rule" theory.) That says something about how we can avoid reducing everyting to class or falling into the PoMo thing about everything being very complicated with everything interacting with everything else -- so we can't really say anything. The "economic" category (class) and the "sociological" category (ethnicity) both play a role, but it's not just a matter of unclear "overdetermination." * on the issue of the Holocaust, we should pay attention to Barrington Moore's somewhat Marxist analysis. In short, he pointed to and emphasized the persistence of the social relations of junker-style agriculture in Germany even in the 20th century. To my mind, this means that we can have a _different_ kind of total irrationality in the US, where society is almost entirely capitalist, than in inter-War Germany. The anti-Vietnam war, with its massive strategic bombing and resultant civilian deaths, is a different animal in a lot of ways than the Nazi genocide. Exactly what the bases are for those differences are needs more discussion. * the Nazi decision to exterminate the Jews (and other "undesirables") seems something that can't be reduced to capitalism. Under capitalism, the state has "relative autonomy." Hitler and his cronies were able to do a lot of things that went against the individual and class interests of the capitalists, often not only in the long run but the short. I have no doubt that many capitalists supported the Nazis, but to what extent was it a choice of the "lesser of two evils," where the other "evil" was the German CP? in pen-l solidarity, Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/fall%201997/ECON/jdevine.html Econ. Dept., Loyola Marymount Univ. 7900 Loyola Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90045-8410 USA 310/338-2948 (daytime, during workweek); FAX: 310/338-1950 Economic theories "have become little more than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus, calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security fo everlasting triumph." -- adapted from Percy Bysshe Shelley.
