Tensions in Kiev

‘Tensions in Kiev: Mounting Frustration over the Lack of Military Successes Leads a Former Advisor to President Zelensky to Speak of a “System Question”‘ – by Reinhard Lauterbach, Junge Welt, 1 November 2023

Original German-language article here. Translation mine – MZ

Waiting in the trenches: Ukrainian soldiers on the front line in Donbass, 7 October 2023

It is highly unusual that senior officials of a country at war publicly accuse their own head of state of being out of touch with reality. What’s even more extraordinary is that they make such allegations to a foreign media outlet. The fact that this media source is based in the US implies that a game is being played, with the global press serving as the last means to apply pressure on the country’s own leadership.

It is quite obvious who might have an interest in this intrigue: in the short term, those elements within the establishment from whose circles Volodymyr Zelensky, according to Monday’s Time report, wants to choose a minister and a general as scapegoats in the next few weeks and sack them. Ukrainian media have long reported disagreements regarding the future strategy. It has been suggested that the military commander-in-chief, Valery Salushny, has been unsuccessful in persuading the president of the necessity to halt the offensive in the southern part of the country and switch to a defensive stance.

Anti-Postone, a year on – where we’re at and what we’re planning next

Anti-Postone, my English translation of Michael Sommer’s demolition job of Moishe Postone’s antisemitism theory, was published by Cosmonaut Press a little over a year ago. So I thought it might be time for an interim balance and a quick glance into the future.

First off, it was disappointing for me that so many left magazines and individuals who had already agreed to review the Anti-Postone flaked out. Apart from Paul Demarty’s typically insightful review in the Weekly Worker – home of two contributors to the booklet, Mike Macnair and myself – we only got a review from Nathaniel Flakin of the Trotskyist Left Voice journal (but only on FB and Goodreads) and another one by Deborah Maccoby for Jewish Voice of Labour. Both reviews were favourable, but the authors stressed that they had difficulties following parts of the political-economy argument based on Marx’s Capital Volume 1 and Grundrisse.

Young Green leaders for World War 3

In the 1980s, the German Green party demanded that “West Germany leave NATO”. Today, the same party speaks of “global responsibility” under the “protective shield of NATO”. Last year its think-tank, the Heinrich Böll Foundation, demanded that more tax money be spent on ‘defence’ and nuclear weapons, since it deems NATO the “core of the transatlantic relationship”. The Joe Biden administration is considered the best-case scenario by the Greens: according to the Böll Foundation, this government “knows that the US can only maintain its own role as a global power by closely cooperating with a Europe that is ready to act”.

‘Slime: Deutschland muss sterben’ by Daniel Ryser

It was good to read Slime: Deutschland muss sterben, a 2013 biography of Hamburg’s long-standing punk band Slime, who I liked a great deal in my teenage years. I knew all the records but very little about the band. They were camera-shy, and only a few blurry photos on the back cover of their first album gave me a vague idea of what they looked like. Turns out the guy standing behind the mic in the picture was actually their drummer, who had drunk himself to death a few years after the recording.

Atlanticist post-fascist

After a three-year break from the pages of the Weekly Worker, I’ve written an article on Giorgia Meloni. I argue that “Meloni’s coalition government represents a shift to the right – though mainly in terms of her forthcoming endeavour to align Italy more closely with the US-Anglosphere.” – politically, geo-strategically and culturally. You can read it here.

“The dumbest government in Europe”: Sahra Wagenknecht’s speech of 8 September 2022.

We live in troubled times, and much of Europe is bracing for a ‘hot autumn,’ and a potentially harsh winter. As Putin’s and Zelensky’s forces continue to slaughter each other in Ukraine – a war of attrition to the last Ukrainian and, it would increasingly seem, to the last Russian too – people are beginning to wonder whether Europe’s self-embargo for the sake of Ukraine’s ‘territorial integrity’, and the interest the US holds in the region, was really such a great idea. IIn Bulgaria, mass demonstrations and a vote of no confidence have already led to the removal of a pro-Western government, which has been replaced by a cabinet willing to negotiate with Gazprom. Similarly, tens of thousands are protesting in Prague, calling for the resignation of the Czech government. In Turin, people are openly burning their energy bills, and across Germany, Monday demonstrations against the impoverishment policies of the liberal ‘traffic-light coalition’ (SPD, FDP, and Greens) are gaining momentum. The liberals are reacting in the only way they know: they warn that far-right groups are also attending the protests, and therefore nobody else should. Better to freeze and starve!

‘Anti-Postone’ available now

You can now order my English translation of Michael Sommer’s Anti-Postone directly from Cosmonaut Books or from Amazon UK, Amazon US, Amazon Germany, Amazon Italy, and so on. You can also find it in selected left-wing bookshops, such as for instance Modo Infoshop and Punto Input in Bologna.

Michael Sommer’s text is a systematic demolition of the late Moishe Postone’s pretentious and useless antsemitism theory, which has influenced so many domesticated leftists, not least the movement known under the misleading moniker “Anti-Germans”. It really is a fantastic and very rewarding read, and if you want to get an idea of its contents, read my translator’s preface and Mike Macnair’s introduction to the English edition on the Cosmonaut website.

Here’s our promotional blurb for the book:

“Around the turn of the century, anti-fascism in Germany underwent a transformation. Instead of denouncing the prevailing social order as the natural breeding ground of fascist movements, the focus of the critique shifted onto regressive, unenlightened, or “abridged” forms of anti-capitalism. Asserting that capitalism is “abstract rule,” it set out to accuse its various adversaries of easily sliding into antisemitism, construed by anti-fascists as a “hatred of the abstract.”

The theory behind this new type of anti-fascism was originally devised by Moishe Postone in his seminal essay “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism.” However, as Michael Sommer convincingly demonstrates, Postone’s arguments are based on a misreading of Marx and are theoretically unsustainable. What is more, they have provided the groundwork for an “uncritical critique”, aiding in the degeneration of anti-fascism from a left-wing endeavor into an ideology that is fully affirmative of liberal capitalism.

This translation of Sommer’s German-language text of 2014 comes with an extensive new introduction by Mike Macnair that links these changes to more recent developments in the Anglophone world, as well as situating Postone’s theory in a broader historical context.”

By the way, prices for the book on Amazon seem to vary from week to week, ranging from a steep 20 EUR to a about 5 EUR. We’re just honest businessmen trying to offer you a fair deal, but some hidden hand causes our prices to fluctuate – I really don’t understand this abstract side of capitalism… (joke).

A patriotic task

It’s curious when historical writings are ‘adjusted’ in translation to reflect latter-day sentiments or the translator’s ideas about the author more closely.

In the English translation of Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet (1915) available at Marxists.org, we find a section in which Luxemburg laments that the German Social Democrats did not put up any resistance to the war. Had they done so, the “German proletariat would have remained the lighthouse keeper of socialist and of human emancipation. Truly this was a task not unworthy of the disciples of Marx, Engels and Lassalle”.

But in the German original, the last sentence reads: “Truly this was a patriotic task [ein patriotisches Werk] worthy of the disciples of Marx, Engels and Lassalle”.

Granted, this might be just a case of oversight – but it’s strange that the translator missed the p-word. It would certainly have jumped out at me.

What did Luxemburg mean by “patriotic”? Read in context, I would suggest she tried to turn the patriotic language that the SPD majority was using to justify its support for the war against said majority. But even so, her rhetorical device relies on the notion that there is an alternative patriotism – one which does not want the working classes to slaughter each other for the profit of a few, but wants to build a better country, conquered and ruled by the working class. After all, the proletariat must first “constitute itself the nation; it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word”.

This might be hard to swallow given the prevailing reception of Luxemburg as a kind of anti-national patron saint, but a positive approach towards one’s language, culture – and in this particular case revolutionary heritage – was nothing unusual among socialists at the time. It is quite distinct from nationalism, chauvinism, or supporting one’s ruling class against another.

A more nuanced reading would be preferable to textual revisionism. Of course, we might be dealing with an honest mistake here.

Manuel Kellner: ‘Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy’ translated

I have submitted my translation of Manuel Kellner’s study of Ernest Mandel’s political thought, Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy, which will be published with a preface by Michael Löwy by Brill – hopefully later this year.

Against Capitalism and Bureaucracy: Socialist Strategy in the Work of Ernest Mandel

Manuel Kellner

Translation by Maciej Zurowski

Table of Contents:

Preface

Introduction

1. Theory and Practice

1.1 Occupational ban and refusal of entry 1972

1.2 Captured by the Nazis

Order prevails in Munich: Ernst Toller and Ernst Niekisch in the Bavarian prison fortress

In February last year, I translated Ernst Niekisch’s account of his imprisonment with Ernst Toller in Niederschönfeld prison in 1920. My translation was originally published on the Verso blog and can now be read here:

This month 100 years ago, in February 1920, Ernst Toller and Ernst Niekisch became cell neighbours in the Bavarian prison fortress of Niederschönfeld. Both had occupied leading posts in the government of the ill-fated Bavarian Soviet Republic, a short-lived Munich-based experiment fuelled by news of the Hungarian revolution. In May 1919, the republic had been crushed by Freikorps units authorised by the Social-Democratic minister of defence Gustav Noske in a horrendous bloodbath that eclipsed even the suppression of the ‘Spartacist uprising’. Toller and Niekisch got off lightly: the former was to serve a five-year minimum sentence for high treason, while the latter was condemned to two years for complicity.

Ernst Jünger on Leon Trotsky

In September 2019, I translated a review of Leon Trotsky’s memoirs by the famous ‘revolutionary conservative’ author, Ernst Jünger, into English. The original review appeared in a 1930 issue of Ernst Niekisch’s Widerstand journal. My translation was first published on the Verso blog and can now be read here.

Joshua Clover: Riots and revolution

My German translation of Joshua Clover’s essay ‘Riots and revolution’ has just been published in Melodie & Rhythmus 1/2021. Click here for a teaser.

Joshua Clover’s book Riot. Strike. Riot was published by Verso in 2016.

Endgame by Michael Roberto

My German translation of Michael Joseph Roberto’s essay ‘Endgame’ has just been published in Melodie & Rhythmus 1/2021. It’s available from all newsagents in Germany – click here for a teaser.

Michael J Roberto’s most recent book is The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940.

Eduard Limonov, 1943-2020

Jacobin has just published my critical look back on Eduard Limonov’s life.

“The Russian provocateur Eduard Limonov venerated “talented misfits” and claimed to offer a galvanizing cause for hopeless youths. But his politics were built on Russian revanchism — a “National Bolshevism” combining fascist imagery with a claim to restore Soviet grandeur….”

Click here to read the full article in Jacobin.

A wanderer into the void

This is a ‘tripping stone’ (Stolperstein) memorial for Helmut ‘Helle’ Hirsch, who in the 1910s-30s grew up here in Seestraße 89. Located in a traditionally affluent neighbourhood in the west part of Stuttgart, the stone was laid in 2007.

Helmut Hirsch was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in 1916. At the age of 15 he joined the ‘Deutsche Jungenschaft vom 1. November 1929’, also known as dj. 1.11., an interesting group within the German neo-romanticist youth movement. Unlike many such bündisch groups, it embraced rather than rejected modernity and its aesthetics and felt an especially close kinship with the Bauhaus. In the spring of 1932, the group’s leader Eberhard Koebel – also known under the pen name tusk (‘the German’) and the author of the song ‘Über meiner Heimat Frühling‘ – temporarily joined the Communist Party, which caused many members to leave the dj. 1.11.