hello all! first let me preface this by asking you to ignore any "rambly-ness", it is late and i'm exhausted (this will probably go through many edits). now to the point, back in 2000 a modern marxist "think tank" called the internationalist perspective published a paper entitled capitalism and genocide. the paper attempts (and succeeds) to explain the genocides of the late 20th century (namely the extermination of the jews) in the context of class struggle and the law of value permeating all sectors of human existence. not only is this paper amazingly compelling but it simplifies some complex ideas down to the layman's level thus before proceeding i highly suggest you read it.
in case you did not follow my advice allow me to summarize it and then state what i think it lacks. to begin with, the paper starts by extrapolating on georg lukacs' idea of the "reification" (basically the spreading of the law of value into all sectors of life) by saying that now not only have science and technology become quantifiable instruments of control and power, but human existence is subjected to the whims of capital and is used to further the cause of big capital. the author(s) then bring up h.g. adler's concept of an "administered man", a man that is treated solely as a thing to be used towards and end. the outcome of the aforementioned is what hannah arendt calls "a desk killer", a killer who works within the bureaucratic system "...who could zealously administer a system
of mass murder while displaying no particular hatred for his victims,
no great ideological passion for his project..."
these three things "...can
be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in
which everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so
much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to be manipulated at
will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a
world in which they can become so many waste products to be discarded
or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground zero
at Hiroshima."
then, the concept of bio power and the obsolescence of man are added. these two respectively basically mean that one part of a society is considered a threat to the whole and therefore must be alienated (more on this later) and that man is being overcome by machines, being a dead weigh of sorts to big capital.
now, while this paper is great at explaining the possibility and ultimately fundamental necessity of mass murder (read the paper to fully see why), it speaks about real events in the abstract. the problem with this is that it never shows how all this unfolded within the context of nazi germany and that is what i will attempt to do.
by this point i'm assuming you've read the paper but if not, just go read from "While the reification..." onward, i'll try to explain this the best i can but some foreknowledge is needed. in the wake of world war 1 the allies coerced germany into signing what is called "the treaty of versailles". this treaty, among other things, forced germany to pay massive amounts of money to the allied forces which in turn plunged the german economy into a depression. during this time inflation ran rampant, people were living in extreme poverty, it is the marxist class struggle at it's finest. then...wham! a bright faced, brilliant speaker named adolf hitler comes along. he, to use language from capitalism and genocide, pointed out the cause of these woes as being "the other", the outside group, the jewish people. during times of extreme crises leaders will resort to maintaining control over the masses that if assembled could overthrow them by means of what antonio gramsci terms as hegemony, the leadership of the people mobilized for a goal. what leaders do during times like this is subvert the masses and cause them to focus their energy's away from the root cause of the problem (capitalism) and towards a biological instinct, a fear of the other. then, the leaders, namely hitler, convince the majority to strive for a "pure community", a world free from the other. by the state cooping any hope of change and focusing the negative energies of the people away from the root and towards the other, big capital successfully maintains its survival which is contingent on domination and hegemony. in the words of the internationalist perspective:
One way in which this ideological hegemony of capital is established over broad strata of the population, including sectors of the working class, is by channeling the disatisfaction and discontent of the mass of the population with the monstrous impact of capitalism upon their lives (subjection to the machine, reduction to the status of a "thing", at the point of production, insecurity and poverty as features of daily life, the overall social process of atomization and massification, etc.), away from any struggle to establish a human Gemeinwesen, communism. Capitalist hegemony entails the ability to divert that very disatisfaction into the quest for a "pure community", based on hatred and rage directed not at capital, but at the Other, at alterity itself, at those marginal social groups which are designated a danger to the life of the nation, and its population.thus it goes, the tale of big capital redirecting the people's attention away from the root of the problem towards what is deemed "the other".
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