The Antisemitism Behind Conspiracy Theories
Let's talk about structural antisemitism and why the "new world order" is just capitalism doing its thing.
Subscribers and readers! I’m back from my much needed mental health break, bright and ready to resume the regular posting schedule.
Today I’m going to talk about world order conspiracies and the structural antisemitism they are rooted in, all very much based on my reading of Moishe Postone’s 1979 text “Nationalsozialismus und Antisemitismus: Ein theoretischer Versuch” and related interviews, supported by a few quotes from Sebastian Schuller’s paper “World Conspiracy Literature and Antisemitism”.
A few weeks ago, a radical feminist page shared a meme that inspired me to write about this topic. The meme asserted that it is the behaviour of brainwashed sheeple to criticise the Elons and Jeffs of the world, while not paying any attention to who really is calling the shots: the Rothschilds, the Freemasons and “the syndicates controlling world affairs”.
After being informed that the meme is spreading antisemitic ideology, the page admins corrected themselves, but only to point out that it does not matter to them whether or not any of these powerful groups have Jewish individuals in them – the groups mentioned in the meme still call the shots, which makes it a factual and relevant thing to post regardless. According to their defense, the meme wasn’t about “hating Jewish people”, it was about acknowledging that there is a problem of “a small group of elites controlling the world” – the world including the systems within it, such as capitalism.
To explain why this is not a useful analysis of our time, we need to take a look at the past, since it is not a coincidence that the image of the “puppet master” creating the opposing forces of capitalism and socialism as a fun little show to keep people distracted from the real agents of power used to be explicitly attributed to the Jews and more subtly implies this connection to this day. We need to understand what “antisemitism” actually refers to and how it is distinguished from other forms of racism in order to understand why “I don’t hate Jewish people” as a defense misses the point.
In no way do I believe that the people who posted the meme are anything other than questionably informed anti-capitalist feminists in any way. This isn’t a cancel post intended to accuse memers of being Nazis. I think there are many people like them out there that are unaware that the most common conspiracies are structurally antisemitic, which means that spreading them contributes to keeping the ideology alive, when what we should be spreading, if anything, is true class consciousness.
It is especially pernicious that these theories do not usually explicitly mention the world conspiracy as being a Jewish one nowadays, since it is for good reason no longer accepted in polite society to blame the Jews for parasitic capitalism and other undesirable socio-economic developments. A conspiracy enthusiast of today tends to reach this level of understanding only after digging themselves so deeply into their new perception of the world that by this point, they are often too willing to accept that the root of all evil is really ((them)), and hey, maybe killing millions of people wasn’t the polite way of handling the issue, but..
To prevent more people from falling into this rabbit hole, I am going to briefly explain what people mean when they refer to conspiracies as being inseparable from their antisemitic roots. Unlike other forms of discrimination, antisemitism, in its attempt to explain the world and the global economy, can be considered what Moishe Postone calls a “shortened critique of capitalism”. Instead of a modern, progressive critique of the system, the ideology of antisemitism aims to bring society back to what it perceives to be better, healthier times. Return to monke, instead of boarding the rocket. Nonetheless, any simple critical explanation of capitalism is going to attract uninformed leftists, which is why so many people who should be fighting on our side find themselves distracted by world order conspiracies.
What people are missing when they defend their belief in the new world order by emphasising that they do not hate Jewish people is that antisemitism as an ideology is not necessarily connected to any particular individuals who may or may not be Jewish. It is about how Jewishness is perceived in a broader sense. Whereas other forms of racism portray people of a certain ethnicity to be less intelligent and evolved, some type of subhuman animal that needs to be kept in check or excluded entirely in order to prevent them from bringing the superiors of society down to their uncultured level, antisemitism understands the dominant culture to be the oppressed underdog that needs to liberate itself from an unimaginable higher power, a power of a quality that real human beings could never attain.
The Jews weren’t primarily considered worse or inferior as people, they were instead perceived as robotic rationality machines that existed solely to rip the existing global order from its roots and destroy perfectly good cultures to impose an agenda that is unnatural and damaging to people and their communities, but will bring the sneaky, greedy elites plenty of profits. Even if no particular Jew in the world today was actively doing anything to bring forth the ever so scary globalism, the cancer of Jewishness would still be pervasive within all cells of modern society.
Antisemitism is about cleansing the system from the modern developments of abstraction within labour, capital, and society that is thought to have been brought in through the infiltration of the Jew. It aims to return to the natural and tangible, blood and soil, simple forms of manual labour and clear hierarchies among people, in order to sustain a “healthy” community. It is a means to stop and revert the progression of history. According to antisemitic ideology, the Jews have no human nature, no emotions, no true culture, they were simply originators, carriers and spreaders of an oppressive system originating during the time of industrial acceleration, poisoning societies for their own benefit. They embodied modernity through their ways of living, working, and relating. The rational point of view that came along with these modern habits, one that was starting to catch on at the time of industrialisation, ran counter to the worldview and the goals of the fascists, who believed in the value of contained and separate cultures that were not to be mixed, diluted, or made to do things that contradicted their biological nature.
Postone explains the emancipatory aspect of regressive anti-capitalist critique in an interview with Krisis:
The way in which antisemitism is distinguished, and should be distinguished, from racism, has to do with the sort of imaginary of power, attributed to the Jews, Zionism, and Israel, which is at the heart of antisemitism. The Jews are seen as constituting an immensely powerful, abstract, intangible global form of power that dominates the world. There is nothing similar to this idea at the heart of other forms of racism. Racism rarely, to the best of my knowledge, constitutes a whole system that seeks to explain the world; whereas antisemitism is a primitive critique of the world of capitalist modernity. The reason I regard it as being particularly dangerous for the Left is precisely because antisemitism has a pseudo-emancipatory dimension that other forms of racism rarely have. (1)
Threatened by progress and technological development, by a world that might live well without them and their imaginaries of a healthy culture and community, fascists pointed their finger at the Jews as the secret force behind the destruction of tradition in favour of enlightenment for a reason. They became the personification of global capitalism not only due to their historical association with handling money, charging interest, and trading, which was considered immoral in Christian worldviews, but for Jewish people was often the only way to make an income – the Jewish people’s modern way of living within cultures they did not originate from, and from there taking on abstract forms of labour that were connected to positions of influence made them appear as invaders, here to bring cold rationality and needless complexity to a world that used to be perfectly clear and simple in its tasks, hierarchies and habits.
Surrounded by Germans who tied their identity and their sense of belonging to a community tightly to their location of origin, Jews were perceived to be “homeless” – without a place for their blood and soil to be grounded and contained within, the Jews appeared inherently disconnected from nature, and in the eyes of fascist ideologues, disconnected from the experience of being part of a community and being human as a whole. Much more than today, the idea of nationality used to refer to people of a shared ethnicity and culture living in a shared geographical space. The Jewish people were among the first to bring in the idea of nationality as an abstract political category, a marker on a passport, instead of a trait that ties a person to a specific location in the world from which they, and the 800 generations before them, originated. They could be citizens of France without being French people, for example, while still having access to equal rights according to the principles of civil society. This was one of the many forms of progress that scared the fascists, as they felt that they were being colonised from within by an foreign force that had what they perceived to be a nefarious agenda of abstraction, radically destroying the existing social and economic order, forcing an unnatural way of life upon humans. Just like parasites, they were thought to be injecting themselves into all organic, “healthy” cultures in order to exert their influence and enforce their “globalist” vision.
Especially when the material forces of rapid industrialisation transformed society and made new ways of working and interacting emerge, and Jewish people found themselves highly represented and accepted in those newer fields, the Nazis saw themselves validated in their perception – if the Jews are so well integrated in the universities, the fine arts and journalism, then these spheres must have been established by them, for them – if they do not belong anywhere else, them finding their place within civil society must mean that they have shaped it according to their own needs in order to create a pedestal from which they can control the world, its systems, and its societies. With journalism comes media influence, and with the universities comes influence over the minds of young people. The puppet masters in action.
One might think that the Nazis would have had a problem with industrialised production as a whole, as it took people out of their natural environments and their small circles to toil away for the profits of someone else within a tightly controlled environment. But as long as it had workers create tangible items, it seemed compatible enough with maintaining a connection with one’s true nature to sustain the people within the community using products of manual labour, while the more abstract forms of handling money involved in finance capital, such as banking and trading, appeared to be a particularly foreign force, separate from and inaccessible to regular people, silently exerting its power over the community from above, which explains the propaganda image of a Kraken having the whole world in its grasp – an image that lives on within conspiracies to this day.
Rather than capitalism as a mode of production, the modernity, rationality and abstraction that came along with it were the main threats the fascists laid their focus on. Abstraction needed a concrete face in the eyes of people who were unable to comprehend complicated global systems, and by now it should be apparent why the Jews were used to fulfil this purpose.
Modernity is understood as a distortion for which concrete entities are responsible; thus, capitalism is not seen as a self-contained system, but as a machination following a certain plan of dark agencies. This discourse of regressive anti-capitalism that underlies antisemitism, as Postone shows, therefore not only rejects the existing, capitalist world order as unnatural deviation from a harmonious pre-modern society, but also seeks to exterminate the originators of this plan. (2)
It satisfies people‘s common need for easy solutions to accept and perpetuate ideologies that scapegoat individuals for all of our struggles and suffering. Just like feely-lefty “anti-capitalists” like to give us the impression that if we get rid of Bezos and Musk and maybe even guillotine all the other billionaires along with them, our goal will be accomplished and we can happily redistribute wealth and live in a form of proto-socialist utopia, antisemitic conspiracists do the same by pointing the metaphorical gun at Rothschild and Soros as bringers of all finance-capitalist discontent, them being the ones who are truly “running” things, a few people at the top pulling the strings.
It does not depend on any Jewish reality but on a metonymical reduction and naturalization of social relations, which constructs the figure of ‘the Jew’ as an internal enemy and a personalization of capitalist social relations and the capitalist abstraction of social life; antisemitism therefore has to be understood as effect and affect of the capitalist formation. The figure of ‘the Jew’ stands in as a metonymy for abstract social relations. Seeking to abolish it means to exterminate the corporeal reality of its originators. (3)
Both the feely-leftist and the antisemitic critiques of capitalism simplify the issue by blaming individuals, while neglecting to consider that the economic system requires us to participate in it every day in order to survive, which makes it perfectly capable of sustaining itself without Elon and Jeff, or in the case of antisemites, without the NWO using the media as a means of brainwashing. There are no spearheads of all evil that we need to get rid of so that capital will finally be abolished and the people free to live according to their utopian vision. Real life is unfortunately not an action film.
The progressive, emancipatory position, as exemplified by Marxism, is not simply to negate this abstraction but to realize that the abstract reality of capitalism already contains the moment of its sublation.
In contrast, the regressive anti-capitalism of antisemitism consists in a simple negation of the abstraction of the capitalist lifeworld. Inspired by a desire to return to the bonds of a pre-modern, hierarchical society, abstraction is understood as an invasive force disturbing the idyll of the imagined pre-modern (e)utopia. In consequence, antisemitism understands the commodified lifeworld of the capitalist formation not as a historical structure but as a monolithic force that cannot be explained but needs to be retraced to an originator.
For this reason, antisemitism is always ‘structural:’ It is not bound to Jews, but defined by its metonymical structure. Therefore, it can replace ‘Jews’ with terms like ‘the elite,’ ‘the East Coast’ (referring to New York as financial capital) or even ‘the state of Israel,’ as long as it integrates these ‘entities’ in its metonymical reduction of the capitalist lifeworld (Ibid.) (4)
With this context in mind, it should be easier to understand why theories about a small group of individuals controlling society and even creating opposing forces such as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie for show to distract from their own power are still structurally antisemitic and should be avoided in favour of a more accurate materialist analysis, even when Jewish people are in no way mentioned.
As Schuller correctly asserts in his thesis, a Marxist analysis of history can help us understand that there is no new world order being worked out by an elite circle of individuals who have unlimited power over the rest of the global population. There is only capitalism, which “already contains the moment of its sublation”.
I don’t think I need to tell readers of this blog that exterminating the Jews isn’t going to solve anything, but beheading all billionaires isn’t going to solve anything either – as one of their heads floats along the sea right past the yacht they used to own before it became the guillotine party boat, another near-billionaire is already sitting on the bench waiting to take that person’s place in the economic hierarchy.
We do live in a society, and that society is constantly evolving through the progression of history, driven by the development of material forces. At this moment in time, the central opposition is between the capitalist class and the working class. These are not cultural or ethnic categories, they are economic ones. One either profits from other people’s labour or is dependent on selling one’s labour for someone else’s profit to survive. This central conflict needs to be resolved in order for us as people to move past capitalism into a system that serves our needs in an optimal way, this resolution however can only take place if we as workers band together and use our majority and our labour power to our advantage by fighting for our interests.
As the planet starts to melt away at an accelerated pace, it is becoming apparent that we do not have time for misleading ideologies that distract from the main issue of class conflict, especially when those ideologies only serve to pit workers against one another and ultimately weaken our collective power. Let’s educate ourselves on historical materialism, end the Rothschild meme-scrolling, and start organising with our comrades of all demographies and backgrounds to make socialism a reality.
Or in the words of Egg Head, one of my favourite Disco Elysium characters:
NO WAR BUT CLASS WAR! NO NATION BUT TRANCE NATION!
THE WORKER MUST MOVE YOUR ASS!
