No, it’s not “the jews”.
This post was significantly harder to write than we initially assumed, especially since it was initially unclear to us exactly who the target audience should be. We assume that most of our readers are already opposed to antisemitism. Therefore, the text is designed to be understandable both for people who want to educate themselves about antisemitism and for those who might still be persuaded. It thus serves as a piece of information and agitation, as well as an aid for discussion. In some places, we explain connections that are already known to the average Marxist and which we would otherwise not elaborate on in our posts – however, for the presumably rather non-Marxist readership this post will attract, these explanations are helpful.
Schrödinger’s Jew
Marx’s relationship to Judaism is one that manifests itself among both bourgeois and fascist anti-communists, in completely contradictory ways, as supposed criticism of Marxism.
For bourgeois anti-communists, Marx was a bitter antisemite who assigned Judaism a special role within capitalism. According to the Jüdische Allgemeine, Marx was both “Jew [and] antisemite” at the same time. Reference is made here to Marx’s reply to his Young Hegelian ex-colleague Bruno Bauer, On the Jewish Question, with which Marx allegedly sowed the “intellectual foundation for naked antisemitic hatred.” NTV claims “Marx [was] an antisemite and racist” (additionally an “aggressive parasite”); “Marx’s passages about Jews sometimes read like original texts by Nazis.”
On the other side stands fascist anti-communism, which assigns Marx, as a descendant of his father’s rabbinical family, to the Jewish world conspiracy, which later allegedly expressed itself in the genocide of 60 million “White Christians” by “Jewish Bolshevism.”
Marx was indeed the grandson of a Jewish rabbi, but converted to Protestantism at the age of six together with his family, as Jews in 19th-century Prussia had only limited career opportunities. Marx himself remained an atheist throughout his life and was a resolute opponent of all religion, as he would later elaborate in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.
The historical revisionist (laughable) twelve-hour neo-Nazi film series Europa: The Last Battle begins with a montage of Marx’s family tree, intended to prove: The abolition of private property serves only the Jewish “central bank mafia,” Lenin and Co. were financed by “the Rothschilds” (one might think there was a conflict of interest here) and were thus only narrowly able to fight the German hope, Adolf Hitler. On the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront, a user writes: “[…] jewish Cultural Marxists rule the west, they want to destroy and replace our race, which is the only thing standing in the way of jewish domination. Marx was a jew and funded by jews, marxism = jewish new world order.” Learned something new again!
Well, which is it now? Of course, neither, although there is arguably more truth to the former. To deny that Marx, like the mass of his environment, was not at least an everyday antisemite would be wrong. The private correspondence between Marx and Engels bears witness to a whole series of reactionary, racist, chauvinist, and antisemitic descriptions of political and philosophical opponents.
The classic example is probably Marx’s designation of Ferdinand Lassalle as a “Jewish N*** [sic],” whose “combination of Judaism and Germanness with the n*gger-like [sic] basic substance” had produced the “strange product” of his political theory – “The importunity of the fellow is also ni*ger-like [sic].” Marx calls his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, son of a Cuban Creole, a “descendant of a gorilla,” claiming he has “the bad scar of the N*gro tribe [sic]: no sense of shame.”
In their conversations about India, Marx claims to determine that “Indian society has no history at all,” Engels is of the opinion that “the reconquest of the German-speaking left bank of the Rhine” from France is “a matter of national honor, the Germanization of renegade Holland and Belgium a political necessity for us,” and Wilhelm Hasselmann becomes an “ass fucker” due to his influence on the Gotha Program, presumably in a supposed partnership with Wilhelm Liebknecht, because both spoke out in favor of loosening homosexual laws.[1]
Some deny these facts by citing the “mainstream of his time” or claiming that Marx was only joking in private correspondence. Both may be true. Nevertheless: Marx was an asshole – that is clear. So much so that Engels (arguably the lesser asshole of the two) had to contradict him again and again.
However, the argument that bourgeois anti-communists try to construct from this is wrong. For Marxists, Marx as a person is largely irrelevant. Marx was not an extraordinary human being, on the contrary: humanly often rather repulsive.
The only decisive factor is that he recognized what existed objectively in society anyway. Darwin’s remarks on human evolution were permeated by racism and chauvinism, Isaac Newton was an egomaniacal tyrant, Konrad Lorenz and Werner Heisenberg were literally National Socialists – that changes nothing about evolution, the law of gravity, imprinting, or the uncertainty principle. The same applies to those who cite Marx’s Jewish origin as an argument against his findings – although there is quite a bit more wrong with this argument anyway, but more on that in a moment.
Antisemitism and Antijudaism
A materialist view of history assumes that ideologies – including hatred of Jews – do not arise in a vacuum. Rather, they are reflections of societal contradictions and often serve to stabilize existing power relations, eliminate economic competition, or divert social discontent onto a minority.
To understand this dynamic in the case of Jew-hatred, a fundamental distinction must first be made: Although antijudaism and antisemitism are frequently used synonymously, they describe distinct manifestations of hostility towards Jews, both historically and phenomenologically.
Pre-modern, religiously motivated antijudaism is based at its core on the accusation of “Christ-killing”; the decisive factor was that this stain was considered surmountable through baptism, so that a converted Jew could theoretically be fully accepted into the Christian community.
In contrast to this stands antisemitism, which emerged in the 19th century in the context of nation-state formation and capitalism, defining Jews no longer via religion, but via alleged biological or cultural essential characteristics. In this modern, racist-structural logic, “Jewishness” is constructed as an immutable, quasi-natural danger, rendering assimilation or conversion impossible.
Both forms cannot be clearly separated: Antisemitism is basically the secularization of antijudaism accompanying industrialization, whereby religious stereotypes were made secular. Today’s ideas of a monolithic Jewish block (“the Jews”), which supposedly acts according to its own laws and instincts, stem seamlessly from antijudaistic ideas such as ritual murder legends (“bloodlust”), the supposed misanthropy through the murder of Jesus, and the forced baptisms during the Inquisition in Spain, where the idea first arose that Jews were by nature “polluted” outside of their religion (cf. Marranos).
Brief Overview
While Jewish history in the first half of the Middle Ages was still largely peaceful – both in the Islamic world, where religious diversity enabled stable conditions, and in Christian Europe, where the Church largely prevented violence against Jews – the situation changed fundamentally from the 11th century onwards.
With the economic upswing of Western Europe after the year 1000, princes and bishops needed people who could mobilize capital, organize trade, and revitalize new cities. Many Jewish merchants, socialized in Islamic areas, were already connected to old trade networks that reached from al-Andalus via North Africa to the Middle East.
From the environment of the Córdoba court elite around Hasdai ibn Shaprut, from families like the Ibn Yahya, the trade circles in Narbonne or Bari, came merchants who were multilingual, mastered writing and bookkeeping, and had experience in long-distance trade and money changing.
In a time when only a small part of the population of Western and Northern Europe could read, calculate, and issue contracts, such skills were highly rare and extremely valuable for young cities. Individual rulers also recognized this early on. Bishop Rüdiger of Speyer, with the approval of Henry IV, specifically attracted Jewish merchants in 1084, promising them safety, freedom of trade, and their own jurisdiction – expressly to make his city economically competitive (the Edict of Potsdam would achieve something similar regarding the Huguenots a few centuries later).
The Rhenish Salians granted similar privileges, as did the Norman rulers in Italy early on. Jews offered advantages: They were mobile, had far-reaching trade contacts, could transfer capital, and thus filled exactly the economic gap that gaped in the newly emerging northern European cities.
The Jewish newcomers differed religiously, culturally, and linguistically; they arrived specifically and visibly as urban merchants in predominantly agrarian, homogeneous societies; and they stood under the special protection of the authorities. Mistrust, fear of competition, and religiously charged enemy images arose.
The agrarian crises of the 11th century, the expansionist drive of the Italian trading metropolises and the Church led in the same century to the First Crusade of Urban II, which internally influenced the treatment of non-Christians. In Worms, Mainz, and Cologne, pogroms occurred against the Jewish migrant workers; the expansion towards Jerusalem was carried inwardly through violence against Jews.
The northern European medieval Jew was from now on fundamentally subordinate to the king due to antijudaism and thus subject to the king regarding his possessions (servi regis). For money lending, which the Church completely forbade for Christians in the 12th century, the Jews thus presented themselves doubly: Since in many places they were not allowed to own land, they could not lose plots of land serving as collateral for loans, even if Christian debtors became insolvent. Instead, these lands fell to the king or Christian courtiers who bought up the Jews’ debts – Visualized: A Jewish moneylender lends money to a Christian merchant; if the merchant cannot pay back, his land does not fall to the Jew, but to the king or his courtiers, because the Jew was not allowed to own land.
Both the prohibition of owning assets and the role as a servant (servus) were justified by the fact that the Jew, through the murder of Jesus, should only serve the authorities, never again himself. Pope Innocent III concluded from this in 1205: The Jew is the servant of the Christian.
For securing rule during a crisis, this was a dream: The Jews lent money to the population (peasants, craftsmen, lower nobility) and absorbed capital via interest. Since their assets belonged de facto to the crown due to their status as servi (servants), the ruler merely had to squeeze this capital sponge over his own treasury when in need of finance.
When resentment over the debt burden rose in the population, the Jews were expropriated, expelled, or pogroms were tolerated. This happened even though Jews never played the dominant role in major financial institutions often attributed to them, even in times of strongest exclusion. But since the Church forbade Christians from taking interest, yet European economies imperatively needed credit, the disenfranchised Jew, to whom other professions were de facto barred, was degraded to this functionalized subject. The anger of the lower classes was thus directed not against the Christian feudal lord who levied the taxes and created the framework conditions, but against the immediate creditor, the Jew. The ruling class could thus enrich itself and simultaneously present itself as the protector of the people against “usury.”
With the rise of the bourgeoisie and the cities, the nobility gradually lost its economic monopoly. In the cities, the young Christian bourgeoisie and its guilds increasingly viewed the Jews as annoying competition. The centuries-long restriction of Jews to the money economy meant that they now possessed networks and know-how that were essential for the competitiveness of the increasingly market-oriented guilds.
The limited ability to own land and the constant risk of their assets being confiscated by their lords prompted many Jews to invest their profits from money lending into movable capital such as precious metals. With the Industrial Revolution and later the rise of the service society, land ownership, formerly the domain of the old nobility, lost importance, while finance capital, legal expertise, international trade, and scientific innovation – areas into which Jews had been pushed – gained importance.
The Jewish population was already disproportionately urbanized at this point. While the Christian population in the 18th and 19th centuries still lived largely in the countryside, Jews already lived in the cities – the centers of the new economy. Through their (expulsion-related) diaspora networks, they already possessed international trade relations and mastered the mechanisms of the credit system, which suddenly became indispensable for industrialization.
A concrete example of this dynamic is offered by the emergence of the American film industry. When Jewish immigrants came to the USA in the early 20th century, the established, prestigious industries on the East Coast – like steel, coal, or the large banking houses – were firmly in the hands of the Protestant elite (WASPs) and often closed to Jews through informal cartels. The only way out for the immigrants was into new, high-risk fields that were then socially little respected. The Kintopp (cinema) was considered cheap fairground entertainment. Since there were no established structures that excluded them, Jewish entrepreneurs (like the founders of Universal, Paramount, or MGM) built this industry from the ground up. When film became the global leading medium, they suddenly sat at the lever of a cultural superpower.
For the guilds of capitalism standing in the starting blocks, the “money Jews,” who had established themselves as the administrative authority of the rapidly developing productive forces, represented the petty bourgeoisie’s fear of modernization. The exclusion of Jewish merchants from the guilds was thus a protectionist measure by the Christian petty bourgeoisie to protect itself from competition.
In the 18th century, at the time of the emergence of secularized nation-states, the Jewish bourgeoisie fought for emancipation; both in human and economic terms, Jews achieved civic emancipation in all Western and Central European states by 1874. In the context of this dispute over Jewish emancipation, which was opposed in particular by the representation of the Christian bourgeoisie (worried about competition) (which revolved precisely around economic leveling in view of the end of feudal society), Marx wrote his reply to Bruno Bauer’s antisemitic writing The Jewish Question. In Marx’s reply (On the Jewish Question), he wrote:
“The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in general, of religious man, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In its own form, in the manner peculiar to its nature, the state as a state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion […] Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law.”
That sounds, as is usual with Marx, more complex than intended; Marx argued, contrary to Bauer’s idea that the emancipation of the Jew was impossible (Zionism later arose on the same idea), that in this more progressive form of state (the nation-state), what matters is the separation of the state from religion, not the religious from the state.
Developing capitalism brought with it crises and an invisible power of money. For many people, the abstract working of capital (stock exchange, interest, financial flows) was incomprehensible and threatening. Antisemitism offered a shortened, false critique here. Capitalism was ideologically separated into two spheres: The “creative capital”: factories, machines, “German labor” and the “rapacious capital”: interest, stock exchange, banks. The “rapacious,” abstract finance capital was attributed to the Jews.
August Bebel therefore called antisemitism the “socialism of fools.” For the ruling class (the bourgeoisie and the conservative nobility), this antisemitism was useful: It diverted the anger of the workers and the middle class threatened with decline away from the structural problems of capitalism and class society and projected it onto a minority. Instead of fighting capitalism as a system, one fought the “Jewish capitalist.”
With the defeat of German imperialism against its imperialist competition in the First World War, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression of 1929, the class contradiction appeared more clearly than ever. The petty bourgeoisie, in particular, got into a hopeless situation: Crushed by the monopoly concentration of capital and bankrupt, even descent into the proletariat was denied to it, as the latter was already affected by massive unemployment. In this predicament, the petty bourgeoisie relied on antisemitism to avert the impending destruction of itself and concentrate it on a specific group, the Jews.
When German capital found itself in both an external crisis due to the Treaty of Versailles and an internal crisis due to the strengthening labor movement, it gratefully accepted the antisemitic advance of the petty bourgeoisie. It decided to turn directly to the NSDAP, which was close to bankruptcy, as it saw in it the best chances for protecting its interests and used it to mobilize the petty bourgeoisie for its purposes.
In order to counter the revolutionary workers and their forms of organization, the NSDAP relied on equating Judaism and Marxism to discredit the latter as a Jewish movement. Even if one were to acknowledge this as an argument, it was of course not true; in 1927, around 0.7% of KPD party members were Jewish, among the 62 communist Reichstag deputies just three.[2]
The labor movement, divided until the National Socialist seizure of power, dealt with the “Jewish Bolshevism” accusation in different ways. The ultra-left (using the example of Ruth Fischer) thought they should mistakenly approach fashionable antisemitism in their rhetoric.[3] Others thought the topic was not of particular importance, still others, like Clara Zetkin, recognized it early on, like Bebel, as a radically simplified critique of capital, which gained its danger precisely from its simplicity. Stalin, whose own relationship to antisemitism was later often opaque, wrote aptly in Pravda in 1936:
“Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous to the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle.”[4]
Ultimately, capital triumphed over the labor movement and plunged Germany once again into an imperialist war against its imperialist competition and against the Soviet Union. With the propagated struggle against Judaism, National Socialism was able to bundle the social discontent produced by the Treaty of Versailles, the crisis of Weimar capital, as well as poverty and misery, and divert it ideologically. This was combined with a deliberately used socialist rhetoric with which the NSDAP was able to win over parts of the labor movement. Hitler openly presented this tactic to the economic elites as early as 1932 in his speech before the Industry Club of Düsseldorf.[5] German capital, which saw its salvation from the labor movement in Hitler, got what it wanted – at least until 1939.
The second imperialist world war and the Shoah followed, as did the targeted murder of around five million Slavs, Sinti and Roma, queer people, trade unionists, communists, people with disabilities, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and resisting workers. This complex represents arguably the best-documented genocide in history. The predatory raid of German capital, in which the concrete practice of the Shoah did not correspond to the immediate economic interests of capital, cost a total of between 80 and 100 million people their lives.
Narratives that the numbers of the Shoah are exaggerated, with reference to wooden doors in concentration camps, swimming pools (for the guards), or a Red Cross document that was able to identify barely 280,000 corpses (in six camps) shortly after the liberation of the concentration camps[6], are false:
Internal SS reports with concrete numbers, such as the Höfle Telegram, which lists 1,274,166 dead in four camps by 1942, the Korherr Report, which provided statistics for Himmler, or the Jäger Report with exact execution lists of the Einsatzgruppen; demographic analyses, where the comparison of censuses and tax lists from 1939 and 1945 shows a difference of around six million people that cannot be explained by flight or natural mortality; perpetrator confessions, such as Eichmann’s or Höß’s; material evidence such as mass graves, the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria, as well as the mountains of personal legacies of the victims such as shoes, glasses, or hair; and finally the identification by name, with Yad Vashem having verified over 4.8 million individual victims by name and biography to date. To go further into why denial of the Shoah is insane seems unnecessary – if needed, please read here.
Although we are aware that those who deny the Shoah are not interested in counter-arguments or concrete evidence. Shoah denial is the result of a contradictory epistemological break, more on that below.
It should be noted that the exceptional remembrance of the horrors of the Shoah for the bourgeois state, especially for Germany, is intended to underscore the supposed demarcation of fascist Germany from the Federal Republic. Functionally, in the sense of profit calculation, the Federal Republic does not differ essentially from the Third Reich. The lesson the bourgeois state has drawn from the Shoah is not that there should be no more genocides, but that these should serve a fine cause.
Putting Faith in Israel
Today we find ourselves again in a world characterized by sharpened contradictions. American capital, which was allowed to play hegemon for around thirty years, faces the awakened dragon China. European, American, and Russian capital face each other in open conflict in Ukraine. The imperialist centers see their dominance of global trade threatened like never before; the result is rearmament, cuts, and political decay.
With the genocide in Sudan, the people’s war in Burma, the Daesh advance in West Africa, and Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestine, Yemen, and Lebanon, the “New Media”-socialized subject faces horrors that it cannot explain with the status quo of the last 80 years.
This is especially true in the case of Israel, which was conveyed to the Western subject as the only democracy in the Middle East, and otherwise the best friend of peace-loving people. This idea has been broken by two and a half years of omnipresent genocide. In the sense of the topic of this post, this break with Israel shall be the object of this consideration:
The answers to the questions arising from this break with everyday knowledge are obvious; a bourgeois nation-state measures itself in competition with its peers, not by service to the people in its territory. To secure this competitiveness, a state does everything to secure its national as well as transnational capital. Israel – or rather the support of Israel – offers itself ideally for this: as interest representation in the Middle East, for a long time (and still, albeit changed) surrounded by competing states that endangered Western capital interests. So it is true that Israel is the best friend of the American and European nations – only I am not the nation. Those are not my interests being represented there.
But to draw this consequence also requires a break with identification with the nation, with the bourgeois state, with capitalism. A break with that which is God-given, without alternative, status quo. To pull through this break also means questioning much that one has already adopted.
It is much easier to simply believe Israel: Israel claims to be the state of the Jews – even though not even half of the Jews in the world live in Israel. This equation of the State of Israel and Judaism is also adopted by its supporting states – standing by Israel’s side is then not simply in the interest of national capital interests, but a duty from historical lessons, the reason of state. Now one combines the capitalistically socialized subject and Israel’s self-designation as a Jewish state – it is much simpler to draw the conclusion that Israel is right; the Jew is to blame.
From this conclusion that the Jew is to blame, numerous subsequent conclusions can be drawn; especially combined with Israel’s geopolitical role. Montages then circulate on TikTok and Co. of Western politicians wearing kippahs touching the Western Wall in Jerusalem, as proof that they are subordinate to “the Jews.” Although similar recordings of the same politicians showing respect before other national landmarks (the Brandenburg Gate, the Acropolis[7], the Taj Mahal[8]) are skillfully ignored.
Western support for the State of Israel then seems quite absurd to a bourgeois understanding of the world that might understand cooperation with idealistic ideas: Such a small state, far away from one’s own nation, possesses a special foreign policy role that justifies around 300 billion US dollars (inflation-adjusted) of American support since 1951[9] – this is then explained by the bourgeois historical narrative with some “historical responsibility” or “shared values”[10], and by the fascist-bourgeois historical narrative with the superiority of “the Jews.”
Yet, to say it again, the connection to Israel is of extreme advantage for a bourgeois nation-state; as a simultaneously military outpost of the West in the Middle East, a security policy laboratory, and an ideological anchor. Israel supplies battle-tested weapon and surveillance technologies, police and military know-how, and strategic connection of the region to the United States. US President Joe Biden said surprisingly clearly in this sense: “[Support for Israel] is the best investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”[11] – we sign that off as is.
These investments follow a double logic: They stabilize American hegemony in the region and simultaneously function as an indirect subsidy of the incredibly powerful American arms industry, since around 75% of US military aid to Israel is tied to the purchase of American weapons.[12] Israel’s political influence on the US Congress, for example via AIPAC, is a prerequisite for its own survival for a client state. AIPAC consequently does not act outside, but inside those parliamentary mechanisms that are routinely used in the US system to enforce capital-shaped interests. That is simply the functional logic of imperial rule: Israel functions as a regional order power, the USA supplies capital, protection, and political safeguarding – a relationship that lasts as long as it pays off for American capital. Of course, Israel also uses this special role to secure its own interests; whether one can better speak of mutual dependence in this relationship is debatable – the power relationship is clear.
And naturally, Israeli involvement in the most diverse global (more or less dubious) courses of action is also an expression of this logic, for example in the sense of Epstein, whereby we would urgently like to refer to this article of ours.
In this respect, the idea that the Left also likes to sketch, that the United States is controlled by Israel, is wrong. Israel is a “stationary aircraft carrier” of American and European capital, its existence absolutely dependent on US American support, which brought massive strategic advantages to every American interest in the region.
Israel is no anomaly here – since the victory of the communists in the Chinese Civil War, the “Republic of China” (Taiwan) has functioned in a similar role as an interest representation of Western capital in the region around China. Taiwan receives hundreds of millions annually in military and monetary support funds for its rearmament and, with FAPA and other lobby groups, possesses similar interest representation as Israel in the United States[13]. Our argument seems to be clear; Hoklo Han Chinese rule the world.
To combine hostility towards Jews with anti-Zionist solidarity is of course doubly ironic, where even the most reactionary groups of Palestinian resistance, like Hamas[14], repeatedly explicitly point out the separation between Judaism and Zionism. In its charter (2017), Hamas affirms “that its conflict is with the Zionist project not with the Jews because of their religion.”[15]
Equally, there are masses of Jews who direct themselves against the Zionist project. Whereby the idea that a Jew must first “prove” themselves through an anti-Zionist stance is just as idiotic; because “the Jew” does not exist. There is no homogeneous Jewish group, just as there are basically no homogeneous societal identities. Equating Zionism with Judaism by assigning Israel’s crimes to “the Jews” legitimizes Zionism with its own propaganda. It should also be noted that the absolute mass of Zionists are not Jewish themselves, but Evangelical and Catholic Christians.[16]
A Jewish subject does not differ in their environment-conditioned socialization from other subjects; in this respect, it is hardly surprising that Zionist ideas are widespread among Jews. However, these are by no means naturally given, but can be understood sociologically as the result of historical-material conditions: as a consequence of the real political persecution of the last millennium as well as an effect of hegemonic discourses in which bourgeois media repeatedly produce and normalize an equation of Judaism and Zionism. This discursive attribution becomes effective as symbolic violence and can be internalized by the affected subjects and finally reproduced as their own form of identity.
On Jewish Supremacy
When we announced this post, a supposed reader wrote to us; “Not all Jews, but always a jew,” meaning the people who make decisions carrying consequences are always Jews.
It is true that the proportion of Jewish persons in certain top economic or political positions is not proportional to their share of the world population. Jews make up around 0.2% of the population worldwide, which corresponds to about 15.7 million people. The often implicit idea that this small group “controls” global power structures, however, becomes absurd even mathematically: It would mean that individual persons would have to occupy numerous key positions simultaneously.
A purely global percentage calculation falls short. In the United States, for instance, Jews make up around 1.5% of the population; here their share in political and economic elites is correspondingly more visible than on a global scale. In large parts of the Global South, however – Asia (except Israel), Africa (except South Africa), and Latin America (except Argentina) – Jews are numerically hardly represented and factually play no role in state or economic power positions. In Asia (without Israel), for example, around 35,000 Jews face a non-Jewish population of about 4.7 billion people.
Specifically – and significantly, this is ignored by the “The Jews are the problem” narratives – cited examples come almost exclusively from Western centers. In the USA, about 6.2% of members of Congress are Jewish, around 1.7% of the world’s wealthy (HNWIs) are counted as Jewish[17], and currently there are two Jewish heads of state or government (Claudia Sheinbaum and Volodymyr Zelenskyy) – nevertheless disproportionate values (as is the representation of Irish, Indians, Mormons, Episcopalians).
Bourgeois social scientists (like Richard Lynn, Satoshi Kanazawa) explain this over-proportionality mainly with cultural values, which, as in Lynn’s case, even cross over into racial theory categories; Jewish families supposedly place more value on education and hard work, and therefore land in top positions more frequently – Weber’s Protestant ethic revised. Culturally analyzed, this may be true, although cultural prioritization of education results from the material conditions of Jewish history.
A far more consistent answer is provided by a materialist view, as given above. The over-representation in top positions is the result of a historical “head start” in areas (finance, law, media, science) that rose from marginal phenomena to the central pillars of the modern global economy through the development of productive forces.
A parallel to this dynamic can be found among Diaspora Chinese in Southeast Asia and Indian minorities in East Africa. The most precise counterpart is formed by the so-called “Bamboo Network” in Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand. Similar to the Jews in Europe, Chinese migrants there were a politically powerless minority for centuries, often denied access to state offices or traditional land ownership. To survive, they inevitably had to fill the gaps left open by agrarian societies: intermediary trade, money lending, and logistics. They functioned as an economic buffer between the European colonial masters and the local population. This historical necessity led to ethnic Chinese today, although they represent only a small minority of the population in Indonesia or Malaysia, controlling a disproportionate share of private capital and corporate management (although, of course, the absolute mass of Chinese in Malaysia are working people here too). Thus, widespread anti-Chinese resentment arises in Malaysia, comparable to the ideological development of European antisemitism, which expresses itself in the radicalization of the interpretation of Islam among parts of the population (strengthening of the “We” against the non-Islamic, Chinese (or Indian) “Other”).[18]
That these resources (financial knowledge, medical expertise, technical networks) have become more valuable in the modern, globalized world economy than land ownership or local political posts is simply owed to the development of productive forces.
Now, even assuming this explained insight, it follows on the part of the Groypers and Co. that now that “the Jews” are at the top (which is incorrect as explained), a removal of these Jews from these top positions would change something. The openly fascist streamer Nick Fuentes, for example, claims the supposed dominance of “the Jews” is the central problem due to their allegedly greedy nature; if non-Jews took these posts instead, the “problem” (the symptoms of capitalist contradictions) would be solved.
This “argument” is almost funny: It represents the direct counterpart to left-liberal identity politics, which claims that the mere presence of women or minorities in leadership positions brings about positive social change contrary to the profit maximization tendency. Both arguments, which stand ideologically opposed but rest on the same idealistic foundation, assume that the capitalist mode of calculation – i.e., surplus value production and capital accumulation – depends on the respective actor.
Imagine, for instance, if the Jewish-born Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) were replaced by a non-Jew – and then? The rules of competition would remain unchanged. The duty of capital is always and everywhere – within market logic – to trump the competition, continuous profit maximization, and the accumulation of capital; the identity of capital or its personified carriers is irrelevant to its function.
Attributing this mechanism to the alleged “greed” (or other characteristics) of individual selective actors, in turn, follows the bourgeois logic of “good” and “bad” capitalists. A capitalist may be personally ever so friendly or ever so “greedy” – that changes nothing about the fact that he must follow profit maximization if he does not want to perish against the competition.
Thus, the Groypers attribute the deterioration of food quality in the United States not to the obvious profit logic of capitalist food production, but to the supposed influence of Jewish businessmen who are allegedly behind it. The production of affect-oriented popular cultural mass formats like Love Island or Marvel movies is attributed to an alleged Jewish plan to dumb down non-Jews. Every global expression of imperialist competition, as well as every assassination or attack, is blamed on “the Jews,” who are constructed simultaneously as omnipotent and as subhuman.
Phenomena, symptoms of the duty to maximize profit and thus of capitalism, are torn from their social context, viewed in isolation, and searched for Jewish protagonists who then function as the guilty parties. Exactly this shows Bebel’s “socialism of fools.”
The absolute mass of Jews are working people who have the same class standpoint and resulting aspirations as their non-Jewish counterparts. The identity of a working person, which derives primarily from their position in the production process, is not relevant contrary to their societal role. Engels wrote in 1890 in the Arbeiterzeitung:
“In addition, antisemitism falsifies the whole situation. It does not even know the Jews it cries down. Otherwise, it would know that here in England and in America, thanks to the Eastern European antisemites, and in Turkey, thanks to the Spanish Inquisition, there are thousands upon thousands of Jewish proletarians; and indeed these Jewish workers are the worst exploited and the most miserable of all. We have had three strikes by Jewish workers here in England in the last twelve months, and are we expected to engage in antisemitism as a struggle against capital?”[19]
From the fact that the absolute mass of global wealth is held in the hands of Christians (55%), followed by non-religious persons (34.8%), followed by Muslims (5.8%), Hindus (3.3%), and Jews standing only in fifth place with 1.1%[20], the consequence for an identity politician would surely have to be to first remove all Christians from their rule? But that doesn’t seem right either.
[1] https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/unzensiertes-von-marx-und-engels-100.html
[2] https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Utopie_kreativ/173/173_Kessler.pdf
[3] Cf.: “You call out against Jewish capital, gentlemen?« Her answer was: »Whoever calls out against Jewish capital, gentlemen, is already a class warrior, even if he doesn’t know it. You are against Jewish capital and want to fight down the stock exchange jobbers. Rightly so. Trample the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp post, stomp on them. But, gentlemen, where do you stand on the big capitalists, the Stinnes, Klöckner…?” https://www.rosalux.de/fileadmin/rls_uploads/pdfs/Utopie_kreativ/173/173_Kessler.pdf
[4] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1931/01/12.htm
[5] https://www.ns-archiv.de/personen/hitler/reden/1932/industrieclub-duesseldorf.php
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/16agdsd/comment/jz7gcu7/
[7] https://greekcitytimes.com/2022/09/30/putin-to-marlon-brando-acropolis/
[8] https://www.news18.com/photogallery/world/top-world-leaders-who-visited-the-taj-mahal-in-pictures-2505541.html
[9]https://home.watson.brown.edu/sites/default/files/Research/Research%20Briefs/2024/Costs%20of%20War_US%20Support%20Since%20Oct%207%20FINAL.pdf
[10] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2HZs-v0PR44
[11] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2HZs-v0PR44
[12] https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/511675.usa-und-israel-eintr%C3%A4gliches-gesch%C3%A4ft.html
[13] https://kops.uni-konstanz.de/server/api/core/bitstreams/99f8d8b0-06f2-4062-a5c9-abdb0757952c/content
[14] Hamas and Islamic Jihad are terrorist organizations, which we reject in word and deed.
[15] https://www.kritiknetz.de/images/stories/texte/charta%20der%20hamas.pdf
[16] https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/511675.usa-und-israel-eintr%C3%A4gliches-gesch%C3%A4ft.html
[17] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/christians-hold-largest-percentage-of-global-wealth-report/articleshow/45886471.cms
[18] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111%2F1467-923X.13145
[19] https://www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/marx-engels/1890/04/19-ansem.htm
[20] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/company/corporate-trends/christians-hold-largest-percentage-of-global-wealth-report/articleshow/45886471.cms
